Great SCI-FI Concepts - VISUAL TRANSLATION // Part 2
Featuring:
THE HYPERION CANTOS (Dan Simmons)
Just to put it out there - Dune and Hyperion are my favourite books of all time! I read the Hyperion Cantos about 12 years ago, during a time, when I thought I had already read the best science fiction had to offer – Frank Herbert’s Dune saga. But as I was reading Hyperion, the first novel from the 4-part Hyperion Cantos, that belief came crashing down. It’s not that I didn’t think Dune wasn’t brilliant anymore - I still feel the original Dune, God Emperor of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune are one of the most imaginative and fantastic books ever written - especially due to deriving so well from human history and psychology. However, with Hyperion, Dan Simmons managed to gift-wrap fantastic concepts in in a different form. Both books are fantastic, mysterious, immensive and involve awesome, mind-bending sci-fi concepts, but Dan Simmons’ Hyperion somehow seems »poshed up« and more modern, so that it, well.... made me feel smarter, haha.
I don’t want to spoil too much of the story for anyone that would be tickled to read Hyperion anytime in the future, but the general idea is, that 7 pilgrims are allowed to visit a mysterious planet, called Hyperion, before it’s closed off and abandoned by the Hegemony of Man (a coalition of planets, populated by humans, and assisted by the TechnoCore – a conglomerate/organization, consisting of A.I.s, that have reached self-sentience). We learn more, by hearing a story from each of the pilgrims, with all of them adding an important piece to the bigger puzzle.
Similar to last week’s journey, I thought it’d be interesting to re-visit some of the sci-fi concepts that could look fantastic, if they were ever visually translated from their original book-form. There had been multiple attempts to bring Hyperion either to cinemas, or our TVs already, but it seems we’re going to have to wait a minute until that actually happens. Until then, let’s explore some of the best ideas from the book series that blew my mind as I tried to visualize them.
P.S.: To all of those who have read Hyperion - no, I did not include the Shrike, the Tree of Pain, the Tesla Trees, the Cruciform, or even the Labyrinth worlds. They’re all amazing ideas, any maybe someday I’ll make a Hyperion Concepts Part 2. 😂
Treeship
A spacecraft, made out of a massive living tree by the Templar of God’s Grove. It is made spaceworthy by using containment fields. I always imagined the containment fields to be invisible, so it’s just a huge luscious tree, floating through space. I always liked high contrast-y stuff, but imagining colourful nature personified, flying through the blackness of the cosmos, has always seemed one of the most fun images, that a book has helped conjure.
TechnoCore
A group of Artificial Intelligences that achieved sentience. In the book, they act as an independant society and a race, with their own factions, each fighting for different goals. Don’t think a spoiler alert is needed here, but most of the story revolves around how the AI’s manipulate events for their own purposes. No surprise there, AI’s in all media are usually bad and evil. In any case, I always thought there’s other, more inovative ways of visualizing virtual space, other than what we’ve seen in »Johnny Mnemonic«, »Ghost in the Shell« and the likes. I’m haunted by the possibilities and would love to tackle a visual concept of a TechnoCore assembly/meeting someday.
River Tethys
Now this one’s just pretty. In one of the books, we follow the main heroes, as they travel the River Tethys through many different worlds (mostly ruined, due to the disastrous events at the end of the second novel). Many worlds, how does that work exactly? So, farcasting is instantanous travel, that allows one to travel immense distances without any time delay. And on the River Tethys, there are farcasting portals, which essentially enable both the river and the heroes to flow from one planet to another seemlesly. A many-world-river? Fantastic.
Gideon Drive
This concept tickles my brain so much. A little bit of a SPOILER ALERT here. The concept is introduced in the third book, in the aftermath of the »Fall«, where most of the technology from the first two novels has been either destroyed or simply, isn’t functioniong anymore. With farcasting off the table, for reasons revealed in »The Fall Of Hyperion«, the Gideon Drive becomes the primary technology, that allows for instantaneous travel in space, with one important difference – the forces and acceleration pulverise the traveller’s organs and tissue in the process. Thanks to a parasite, called the »Cruciform«, which infinitely resurrects it’s human carrier, the body eventually heals itself to it’s former glory. The idea of being killed, resurrected and slowly (and painfuly) healed back, every time you make a jump, just seems like a perfect idea to see on a screen. Especially, if someone has to do it hundreds of times, in pursuit of someone...
Void Which Binds
As the name implies, it’s a space that unifies all existence, space and time. In the books, it is used for travel and communication – both Farcasting and the Gideon drive operate by tapping into the Void Which Binds, which is essentially Planck Space. It’s also inhabited by powerful entities, which we never encounter, that are cutely named »Lions, tigers and bears« (a reference from The Wizard Of Oz, where the term describes a predator which may or may not exist). This is so abstract and mysterious, that it’d be beyond fantastic to design. None of that Marvel-quantum stuff. 🤣
