Things I MIGHT Write 3: Hyperion Station

One of the great looming mysteries/background events of the Arenaverse is Hyperion -- the secret project that created Marc C. DuQuesne and his friends Oasis, Wu Kung, and others, a cosmic-scale effort to create the heroes of a thousand fictional worlds that succeeded in a terrible and great fashion, and collapsed in Wagnerian tragedy. It is one of the major influences on the plot of Grand Central Arena and sequels, with the current in-progress sequel even being titled Shadows of Hyperion. 

There's been a lot of interest in Hyperion from fans. Many people really want to know the full story, how it happened, and so on. I certainly know more about that than I knew for many, many of my other stories, so in terms of preparation I could do it. But there are two major, major problems with actually writing it, and I'm not sure if I can deal with them in any reasonable fashion.

The first is... the story of Hyperion Station is DARK. We know certain people come out alive, but out of a thousand Hyperions, there aren't over twenty left alive by the time of Grand Central Arena, and weren't more than a hundred even immediately after the Fall of Hyperion. I just don't generally write "Dark". It's not fun for me to write, and I'd have a LOT of dark to write through. 

The second problem is probably the harder one, though; if someone convinced me I could make a LOT of money by writing Hyperion Station I could probably plow my way through it, focusing on the few bright sparks that come from that disaster. But...

... The story of Hyperion is first and foremost about people creating heroes -- and specifically heroes of fiction from three eras called the First, Second, and Third Media Explosions. We live in the First Media Explosion, so about one-third of the Hyperions are derived from things that exist, or are supposed to exist, now. One can invent fictional fiction, so to speak, and I have, but there's a limit. Creating an effective "expy" of an existing fictional character is an effort, a challenge of how to evoke the essence of the character without copying the character. And honestly... I can't see doing that with all the characters that would play a part. By sidelong references and winks I've already established that some of the Hyperions come from major, major properties and implied others. I don't see how I can play in all those sandboxes and NOT get sued, yet some of them are simply vital to the story. 

So it's not IMPOSSIBLE that I'd write it -- it's not a dead idea, like the things in my prior "Things I Won't Write" series -- but there are some immense challenges to ever doing so.

But the little pieces of it that I did write sometimes really tempt me to continue...