Hyperion

Seven pilgrims travel to the world of Hyperion, to the Time Tombs, which are moving backward through time, and to the Shrike, a three metre creature of blades that kills almost everyone who approaches it and is said to grant one pilgrim a wish. Interstellar war is about to reach the planet. On the journey six of them tell the story of why they are going, and those six tales are the novel.

A Jesuit finds a tribe in the mountains with a cruciform parasite that resurrects them badly. A soldier's account is a war story and a very strange love affair. A poet explains the collapse of his career and the writing of the Hyperion Cantos in the funniest and filthiest section. A scholar's daughter comes back from the Tombs ageing backwards, losing a day of memory every day, and by the time of the pilgrimage she is an infant he carries in a rucksack, and his story is unbearable.

Simmons built it on the Canterbury Tales, and each pilgrim's tale is written in a different register: horror, military science fiction, satire, noir, tragedy.

Be warned that it does not end. Hyperion stops at the gates and The Fall of Hyperion continues immediately, so buy both.

The universe around the pilgrimage is fully built and mostly conveyed in passing: the Hegemony linked by farcaster portals so that a rich person's house has each room on a different world, the TechnoCore of artificial intelligences that supposedly serve humanity, and the Ousters, human descendants adapted for space who are about to invade.

Around five hundred pages, ambitious and stylistically dazzling, and the shifts between registers are the point rather than an inconsistency.

Best for readers who want the pleasures of six very good novellas and one enormous unanswered question, and who do not mind waiting a whole book for it.