All Aboard the Floating Dumpster: Trash Ships Ahoy

Hyperion is a novel by Dan Simmons often used to weed out the weak. It takes place in the future, as earthlings have ruined earth and are colonizing other planets. Hyperion is such a planet, but it has sentient natives with inscrutable customs and a local.... Demon. Creature. Unholy semimythic figure. It's called the Shrike.

Most people assume it isn't real.

Spoiler

One of the six speaking characters tries to fuck it while it has disguised itself as a woman. Then it suddenly transforms back into its true(?) form as a humanoid mass of black metal spikes and palpable hatred. That was the reference.

Hyperion is one of my favorite books, it's incredibly well written and upped the bar when it came to my standards both for sci fi and slow reveal horror. Its told mostly in six different character stories, all of which are terrible to tell. AI discussion. Sentient sea creatures. Hard science space travel. Downfall of Christianity. New and exotic kinks. This and more have been testing the limits of what readers can mentally handle for decades.

 

well, i know what i'm looking for next time i make it to the library.

 

The... Er... Sex scene mentioned changed me. The end of it is a beautifully, exquisitely written ten seconds of planetary destruction and despair. Its one of the moments I look up to when comes to making people involuntary whisper 'oh, DUDE' in delighted horror. It's really cool you guys I still don't understand half of everything in that novel.

 

oldgang OT5 and jonesicles and brudy and pericky and perickidy and, to a certain extent, rickidy, from scooby-doo: mystery incorporated. and more but pericky especially takes the cake, holy shit

Spoiler: spoilers, torture, various abuse

ricky rescues pericles, who is on the older side of an already-lengthened lifespan, as a kid, and nurses him back to health; pericles proceeds to be extremely possessive of him for the next decade, including not wanting to share him with his girlfriend cassidy, is heavily implied to have had Something going on with him in his late teens, anonymously blackmails him into faking his own death/disappearance and leaving his life behind as a high school senior in exchange for part of a supernatural treasure, breaks out of prison twenty years later to manipulate a fucked-up, bitter, broken, amoral ricky into handing over the reigns to the company he built in the intervening years, proceeds to utterly run it into the ground to serve his own ends, murders cassidy and hides the evidence from ricky while he increasingly panics upon realizing something must have happened to her, injects a bioweapon torture device into ricky's spine when he tries to stand up to him and takes pretty-clearly-at-least-a-little-sexual sadistic glee in pressing the button over and over and over while ricky writhes on the ground and calls him 'master' while begging him to stop, uses this to force ricky to take part in (intended) mass slaughter of prisoners that he had just refused to after decades of not holding any moral standards, intimately invades his space and plays with his hair/beard while threatening him and knowing there's nothing he can do to stop it, and casually throws cassidy's murder in his face once he has him under control.

and also once he gets used as a vessel for the eldritch abomination that proceeds to explicitly kill everyone in the town, his body gets used to eat ricky alive.

this show, man. this show.

(also pericles is a sapient parrot whose sapience is explained by his descendence from eldritch abominations, but tbh by the time you get to that the ship is already a singularity of problematicness, so i mean)

 

what the fuck, is THAT where the show went after i stopped watching?

 

HAHAHA YUP

i still, often, find myself going 'wtf was this show real' looking back on it

it got so horrifying and i love it

Spoiler: spoilers, facial horror

another example of the kind of thing that happens in this show: fred's biological parents end up getting permanent plastic surgery to look like fred and old!daphne, respectively, for some weird and impractical scheme. the change sticks. they are Not Happy when it sinks in that it's permanent. it is so disturbing holy shit

 

.......okay what. should i watch this show.

 

you should watch this show

the writing can be incredibly grating and often gross (and honestly in some places potentially triggery, heads up) in subplots that don't have to do with the main story but oh my god is the main story worth it

(it also helps that the main story is actually an eerily, painfully, bittersweet and resonant allegory for breaking the cycle of abuse and trauma and untreated mental illness, or at least reads that way hard, and it got me through the last few years of living in my old home)

 

Yeah, in particular I don't like the romance subplots in the first season, and honestly into season 2 it seems more like they're the result of characters struggling with compulsory heterosexuality, Velma especially. Luckily Velma gets a Science Girlfriend in season 2 and it's great? So.

 

I got up to partway through the Detective's Story before the audiobook I was listening to died. Man that book was weird.

 

Man I love Hyperion. One of my favourite all time books, even if Tumblr was talking about how it was meant to be problematic or w/e.

The sequels were a little disappointing though. I felt like they decreased in quality with each one, never quite managing to recapture the feel of the first one, due to lack of further mystery and abandoning of the the Canterbury Tales style story telling structure.

Spoiler: Spoilers

Plus all that stuff about the messiah girl began to feel a little too self-aggrandizing after a while, and the plot line with the war of the human and machine gods seemed inconsistent or even retconned from how it was described in the first book by that one AI.

Still, maybe I should listen to at least the first book again, because I really enjoyed it a lot.

 

Frankly, you've gotten through the weirdest parts. Well, the most horrifying. All of the six stories are difficult to get through for varying reasons, but over the course they go from... it's a steady transition from horrifying to heart-rending. They get sadder as they go on. I still hurt about the last one. They never stop being GOOD, but I would put it between... hm... the third and the sixth for my favorites. Poet's and Consul's Tales. That's why I made the whole 'weed out the weak' crack, you get a huge payout if you can make it through the sheer weirdness of ESPECIALLY the first two (talking about you, people of the cruciform. talking. about. you.) and get to the end of Detective's story (which drops a huge explanation bomb) and onto the sixth story, which is... miserable and amazing.

Shame though about the audiobook. Is there a good recording of it? I very much prefer to read books as a personal preference but a few of these stories would be amazing read out loud. (Looking at you, Poet's Tale.)

'Problematic.' They're not wrong, but I feel insulted somehow. Hyperion knows what it's doing. It's bringing all this shit up for a reason. It's not just... throwing shock factor at the wall or bringing up heavy subjects and not examining them.

I've never read any but the first book, which is my standard practice when it comes to novels that were not meant to be series, but became them. I figure I'll enjoy the first the most and slowly but surely want to stop reading for a while.

And yeah, the mystery of the Shrike, what it is, why it acts in such inexplicable ways, what even is inside of it--the mystery of the planet that birthed it and how humans got there and why they need it so badly--that's one of the great things about the novel. It's slow burn, and you earn the information you get about the setting that you eventually get. If the Shrike becomes less of an incomprehensible creature in future novels I'm pretty sure I don't want to read them. It left QUITE the impression on me.

Spoiler

...though I am occasionally tempted to actually pick up Fall of Hyperion and figure out what the FUCK happens after an ENDING LIKE THAT.

(That can't be right!! Where's the rest of it???)

 

Ha, yes, I figured. :::PPP Yeah, that part was seriously something.

This one had a different person for... I think all the different narrators, but I could be remembering wrong. It was quite a while ago.

 

If it helps, Fall of Hyperion is a good read. Heck, Endymion is as well; it's mainly the fourth one that sort of lost me, but I kept listening just for the sake of the plot resolution. It's just that the first one is very much the best of the four.

 

I read the first tale of Hyperion at a county fair while Amber rode in a horse show. I brought the book along in case I was ever bored or overwhelmed and needed to spend five minutes in a book.

I read a hundred or so pages and do not remember the horse show. While everyone around me was like, cheering on the kids, and eating a picnic, I was very, very quietly whispering "Oh. Oh my God. No. All along. Oh God. I know where this is going."

Hm, interesting. I'll pick up Fall of Hyperion if I ever see it around then, since I am curious about what happened, and I certainly wouldn't mind seeing these characters again.

 

I'd try to guess which year but tbh to an outside observer you seemed to be stuck in books during the county fair at least 75% of the time

 

I was toning down how much I was stuck in books to make myself look better. And I label my books with when I read them--it was summer 2013. I also ignored one of sister prime's theater rehearsals with the same book! She was dping that Russian play?

 

Longtime trash ship: Albert and the Count from Gankutsuou.

There's no defense but I love it. * shrug emoji *

 

Longtime trash ship: the count form Gankutsuou/me

They did a fucking number writing up that impressively cracked up blue space man.