I’ve been reading Hyperion (and now The Fall of Hyperion) by Dan Simmons recently. I was inspired by this post that served as a useful glossary for when I was reading Blindsight by Peter Watts and got inspired to do something similar for Hyperion. There shouldn’t be any spoilers here, but if you really enjoy puzzles then I suggest you avoid this and have a go at figuring out things on your own. This blog has also published a glossary, though more focusing on the (many) literary references in the books.

This is a work-in-progress and basically just ripped from Obsidian.

Hegemony: ruling government of humans across the Worldweb. Run by a CEO (Gladstone).

Fatline: A kind of FTL communication device. Possibly instantaneous? Something to do with tachyons.

Tau Ceti Center (TC2): Hegemony administrative world.

All Thing: Some kind of advisory or opinion gathering thing，consisting of both humans and AIs.

FORCE: Hegemony military.

FORCE:space: Hegemony space military.

Ouster: Branch of humans who split off from the rest since old earth died, adapted for zero g, live in the spaces between stars.

Farcaster: Portal that allows for instantaneous travel.

Worldweb: All worlds linked together via Farcasters for instantaneous travel between them. Ruled by the Hegemony.

Hawking drive: Spaceship engine for interstellar travel I think what spinships use?

EMV: ElectroMagnetic Vehicle I assume. The main way most people travel on planets.

Cryogenic Fugue: Fugue state that is entered in order to skip time during the months/years of interstellar travel.

Treeship: Fancy kind of interstellar ship ran by templars.

Time-debt: The amount of missing time when travelling interstellar. Either by cryogenic sleep or time dilation.

Poulsen treatments: Treatments to deage (or at least give the appearance of deaging) someone. Expensive.

Oort Cloud: Outer cloud of comets around a star. Up to a light year in radius.

Ramscout: Presumably interstellar ship with ramjet engines that scoop up interstellar matter (e.g. hydrogen) to help produce fuel.

Torch ship: Ship with an engine that is both high thrust and highly efficient, as opposed to modern spacecraft which are generally one (high thrust regular chemical rockets) or the other (low thrust, high efficiency ion drives). Think the Rosinante from The Expanse.

Spinship: Appears to be a spin that doesn’t necessarily have artificial gravity but spins in some fashion to produce thrust. ‘spinout’ is when the ship leaves the spin mode. ‘spun up to C-plus status’

Datasphere: Sort of like the Internet, but for a specific planet or object. Not connected to the main Worldweb internet

Comlog: Personal computer. Wearable in some fashion, I guess like a smartwatch.

Stimsim: Recording of someone’s sensory input for playback, similar to a movie but far more intense. Taken from Gibson (e.g. Neuromancer).

Seedship: Ship launched much earlier in history to bring humans to a planet for the first time. Perhaps contains human embryos as ‘seeds’?

Hegira: A journey especially when undertaken to escape from a dangerous or undesirable situation. Synonym for Exodus. An event that happened when Old Earth collapsed.