Evolving Humanity and Mystical Empathy in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos

Completed more than two decades ago, Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos quartet of novels—Hyperion (1989), The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Endymion (1995), and The Rise of End­ymion (1997)—offers timely perspective on contemporary geopolitics by juxtaposing cruel excesses of self-serving powers with the life-giving value of human love. His imagining of a universal force of empathy, mystically experienced across the reaches of space, offers a welcome counterweight to current claims that “empathy is a sin,” while his elevation of environmental concerns speaks to cultural clashes over the nature of value and the value of nature. His vision of still-evolving humanity draws on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in projecting the potential transcendence of human limits, including through human and AI convergence. Humanity’s future, Simmons argues, depends on embracing forms of freedom that acknowledge the power of human connection while rejecting those that divide and oppress.

Humanity is arguably the most catastrophic force in the span of centuries the series covers. Having destroyed Earth through environmental collapse and the apparent creation of a Black Hole believed to have torn the planet apart (dubbed The Big Mistake), humans spread to other planets, exploiting habitats as they went. Their technological prowess (for which they are dependent on artificial intelligences, or AI’s, dwelling in the data world of the TechnoCore) allows their diaspora (the Hegira) to reach for­merly unreachable planets, to dominate any alien inhabitants that might pose intelligent competition, and to forcibly incorporate planets within the appropriately named Hegemony of Man. “We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body,” accuses Sek Hardeen, member of the environmentally focused Templar movement (1990, 367). 

In various combinations and at various times, different groups act violently to advance their spheres of influence. These groups include factions of AI’s in the TechnoCore, including a particularly vicious element called the Ultimates; the Hegemony’s govern­ment acting through its military arm called The Force; a resurgent Catholic Church operating in concert with an imperial system called the Pax; an evolving spe­cies of humans called the Ousters; and a cult devoted to worshiping the mysterious and terrifying metallic figure called the Shrike. Human decency emerges as the most effective countervailing response to the variety of destructive agen­das. Endymion and Rise of Endymion deal especially with the messianic mission of a young woman, Aenea, who, as offspring of a human and an AI, combines the human and technical realms. Although Aenea eschews the designation of Messiah, there are clear echoes of the Passion of Christ in her execution by Church leaders and the Ultimates on a cross-like apparatus on Good Friday. In a concretizing of the Last Supper, her followers obtain a form of satori, or heightened awareness of the underlying matrix of the universe—the Void Which Binds—by drink­ing wine mixed with drops of her blood. In the Shared Moment, a univer­sally experienced empathic connection that makes all humans on all planets aware of her torture and death, humanity is drawn together in transformative unity that Aenea calls the Big Change. 

The revelation Aenea advances is a realization that love is the fundamental physi­cal force, “like gravity and electromagnetism, like strong and weak nuclear force,” holding the universe together. Aenea sees her claim as setting aside more limited understandings of God (1995, 457); she is clear that the Void Which Binds is “not of God” and is not God (1997, 398). Yet in its vaguely defined parameters, the Void Which Binds may represent divine aspects of the universe itself. The human capacity of “empathy” is the key to accessing the Void, since “an understanding of love’s part of the Void Which Binds,” Aenea maintains, is “the essence of humanity” (1995, 458). The Void Which Binds, she says, “is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time” (1997, 400). 

The series’ emphasis on human connection draws on Teilhard’s philosophy in positing that humanity’s survival depends most on evolution into a heightened state of empathy. Fr. Glaucus, a blind Catholic priest banished by the Pax to an ice-bound planet, explains Teilhard’s claim that “evolution was an uncompleted process, yet one with a design” leading to “true humanity” (1995, 447). As Glaucus describes and Aenea interprets: “‘Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.’ ‘Empathy,’ Aenea said softly” (1995, 449). According to Glaucus, “Teilhard did not say that human beings would become God,” but he foresaw an eventual merging of human and divine purposes: “[H]e said that the entire conscious universe was part of a process of evolving toward the day—he called it the Omega Point— where all of creation, humanity included, would become one with the Godhead” (1995, 448). 

With the central positioning of the “Cantos,” a scripture-like narrative poem describing yet also directing progress toward the Big Change, Simmons highlights the power of literary creation.  Language, according to Martin Silenus, the work’s author, “serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” In what could serve as specific endorsement of science fiction’s speculative task, he continues: “Here is the essence of mankind’s creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the flash-bang weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum” (1989, 189). Aenea struggles to distill her philosophy into language that will communicate the most urgent content to her followers, even as she maintains language’s fundamental insufficiency in communicating at all. “All Scripture lies . . . just as I lie as I speak to you now,” she asserts. She settles finally on the two-word phrase, “Choose again,” as an answer to almost any question. Captured in the phrase, she explains, is an antidote to all over-zealous commitments to self-serving causes, especially those too wedded to the past.