Farcasting my way through Hyperion

I recently stumbled on a sci-fi book called "Hyperion" while flicking aimlessly through the Kindle store.

The cover or synopsis did not really catch me, but I downloaded the sample first chapter and it looked alright enough for me to want to give the book a chance.

I must say that I was extremely positively surprised by the quality of the book.

The cover is very low key sci-fi, but you know what they say about judging books by their cover.
That you shouldn't

The story is set in a future where man travels the stars both in space ships but also by using teleportation gates called "farcasters" that allow you to walk from one world to another as easy as walking through a door (some houses of the rich people even have rooms on different worlds connected by farcaster, which must create all sort of problems for census population counts).

In this universe there exists a being known as the "Shrike". A mechanical monster that resides on a backwater planet, which origins are unknown, but which kills at will and seemingly appears and disappears with no regard for the laws of physics.

This being has spawned a religion of people that believe the Shrike is an instrument of God to make man atone for his sins (stuff like wiping out semi-intelligent species, destroying the eco-systems of countless planets and accidentally imploding Earth by creating an out-of-control miniature black hole. Small stuff).

Every year countless pilgrims come to the planet Hyperion to seek out the Shrike.

The Hyperion books is the tale of the last of these pilgrims, telling the story of the members of the pilgrim party and expanding into how that eventually effects the whole universe.

The book does a really good job of portraying characters and telling interesting stories with focus on the emotional conflicts, all the while doing this in a cool sci-fi setting.

I am currently reading the second book "The fall of Hyperion" in the four book saga, and while it was a bit of a slow starter for me I am finding it even better than the first book at the moment.

If you like your typical Warhammer 40k book, then this may be too sedate for you (not enough chainswords or people devouring corpse emperors).

But if you appreciate a slower and more character focused story with your sci-fi, then I think you will find that Hyperion really fits the bill.