You have to read these novels in sequence. That said, this book and the next have new characters, a different tone and set in a later time. Not as good as the first two, but still very, very good. ( )

The third book in the Hyperion saga. It is quite a bit in the future, after the Fall, and the loss of the transport portals.
There's a lot going on in this book, some of it science fiction, some more resembling mysticism. It is still vast, very imaginative, and well written. I did not get a sense that the series was winding down, or should. ( )

(Alistair) And now, the sequel to Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, in which we skip a long way down the timeline - nearly 300 years - from the fall of the Hegemony, into a future in which while farcasters indeed no longer exist, many of the worlds of the Hegemony have been united (into a single polity, if not spatially) by other means, and now exist dominated by the Pax, an corrupt distant descendant of the Catholic Church, empowered in the new Dark Ages of the Fall by its ability to grant practical resurrection in the here-and-now (via the cruciform parasites last seen in the Hyperion duology) to those who go along with it. And into the middle of this steps one Raul Endymion, hunting guide and unjustly convicted murderer, who finds himself selected for a rather complicated mission...

And that's about all I can really say about the plot and characters of the book before I would be revealing spoilers left and right and sideways, so I had best stop right there.

So, some generalities. A little bit of a slow starter, but picks up right quickly. Come to think of it, I could probably have said that about Hyperion, too. The comments I made in the Hyperion review concerning the author's style and what I enjoy about it, I also repeat. And while I have heard it said from time to time that the Endymion duology is weaker than the Hyperions, I have not yet found it so, although obviously it's hard to say before completing both of them. Oh, and if you haven't read the Hyperion duology, don't even try to read these first - the backstory is deep enough to get very, very lost in, and I would not recommend trying to figure it out without the prior reading.

And I once again repeat my comment about Mr. Simmons and his trouble with writing duologies rather than bisected single books.

Alas, it will be a while before I make it to The Rise of Endymion, my to-read list currently being 68 books strong and it entering at #69, so, well, I may just need to sneak in a little re-read of this book at that point. But, really, of all the problems I have, a superabundance of books is the most not.

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/ce... ) ( )

Fantastic Conclusion to the Hyperion Series!

Once again, like Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, I am writing a joint review for Endymion and The Rise of Endymion as the two books comprise the totality of one story (I have seen some complain about this, but put the two books together and decide if you want to hold that while reading it!).

With Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons has written a brilliant adventure tale that brings to conclusion the story begun in Hyperion. These two books are more than just another chapter in the universe; they are the next evolution in the story of humans, TechnoCore (AIs) and Lions and Tigers and Bears. Where Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion is a methodical, multi-viewpoint story of how humanity and the Hegemony had arrived at the point of being slaves to the TechnoCore, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion is an adventurous story about the savior of humanity from outside forces and itself.

Nearly 300 years after The Fall, the Catholic Church has risen from obscurity to control the Pax, the new empire of humanity that has slowly widened its grip on the former worlds of the Hegemony as well as waged war against the Ousters. Like the Hegemony, the Pax and church have made a deal with the devil (the TechnoCore), but secretly as most people think the TechnoCore destroyed or in hiding after The Fall. The cruciform has become the sacrament of immortality as administered by the church and is now the defining difference between the believes and followers of the church and Pax and the rest of humanity. This church, like its last incarnation in the previous Dark Ages (for the time after The Fall was a new Dark Age), this church has the same instruments of control such as the Holy Inquisition and the reward of your immortal soul.

Enter Raul Endymion, a non-christian hunting guide on Hyperion. After killing an off-world hunter, who is a dignitary of the Pax, for killing his dog and nearly killing him, Endymion is sentenced to death by firing squad. But, Raul has a guardian angel that secretly saves him from his fate: Martin Silenus. In exchange for his life, Silenus enlists Endymion to rescue and then protect Aenea, the daughter of Brawne Lamia, who will be exiting the Time Tombs in a few days as a 12 year old.

But, this task will not be easy, as the Church and Pax – whose Pope is Lenar Hoyt – know she is coming and they consider her an enemy of the state. Enter Father Captain De Soya, who is charged with the capture of Aenea at the Time Tombs.

With the help of a Magic Carpet, thus begins the adventures of Raul Endymion, his charge Aenea – the One Who Teaches – and their traveling companion, the Android Bettik as they travel from world to world via the thought dead farcasters of the River Tethys in search of Earth, the answers to humanity’s future, and the destruction of the Pax and TechnoCore; All while being pursued by Father Captain De Soya and an even larger threat directly from the TechnoCore itself. Along the way, they will discover new friends, new worlds, and new love (no, Raul is not a pedophile!), and what the church and TechnoCore are planning for humanity.

Come along on this amazing adventure of discovery and redemption, and watch as a Mesiah-to-be grow up and as a new hero is born. ( )

The past few years have been one improbability after another, each more marvelous and seemingly inevitable than the last.

How could anyone stay sane with entire lifetimes stored in one human mind?

“Meaning no disrespect, sir,” says the other man, “but there’s no way in the Good Lord’s ******* universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.”

Why am I seeking logic or sanity here? I’d asked myself at the moment. There hasn’t been any so far.

Sounds like and IPhone to me;

All were capable of being used as communicators, of storing massive amounts of data, of tapping into the local datasphere, and – especially with the older ones – of actually hooking into planetary fatline relays via remote so that the megasphere could be accessed.

"..What he wanted -- what he wanted his shepherd to learn -- was how exalted these things could be -- poetry, nature, wisdom, the voices of friends, brave deeds, the glory of strange places, the charm of the opposite sex. But he stopped before he got to the real essence."

"What real essence?" I asked. Our raft rose and fell on the sea's breathing.

"The meanings of all motions, shapes and sounds," whispered the girl. "...all forms and substances/ Straight homeward to their symbol-essences..."

The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggles through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just doesn’t give a sh*t.

On the debate on whether Artificial Intelligence has a soul;

“And what was our DNA designed to do for the first few hundred million years, my son?” Eat? Kill? Procreate? Were we any less ignoble in our beginnings that the pre-Hegira silicon and DNA-based AI? As Teilhard would have it, it is consciousness which God has created to accelerate the universe’s self-awareness as a means to understanding his will.”

How Artificial Intelligence fits into evolution;

Father Glaucus turned his blind eyes in her direction. “Precisely, my dear. But we are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design. They may resist it. They may try to undo it for their own complex purposes. But the universe continues to weave it’s own design.”

“I attribute no definitive and absolute value to the various constructs of man. I believe that they will disappear, recast in a new whole that we cannot yet conceive. At the same time I admit that they have an essential provisional role – that they are necessary, inevitable phases which we (we or the race) must pass through in the course of our metamorphosis. What I love in them is not their particular form, but their function, which is to build up, in some mysterious way, first something divinizable – and then through the grace of Christ alighting on our effort, something divine.”

Connectedness;

“In the Cantos,” I said, “the scholar character seems to discover that the thing the AI Core had called the Void Which Binds is love. That love is a basic force of the universe, like gravity and electromagnetism, like strong and weak nuclear force. In the poem Sol sees that the Core Ultimate Intelligence will never be capable of understanding that empathy is inseparable from the source…from love. The old poet described love as ‘the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon…’”

“So you’re saying that there needs to be another Isaac Newton to explain the physics of love?” I said. “To give us its laws of thermodynamics, its rules of entropy? To show us the calculus of love?”

I was really disappointed when I finished this book. It was just like a chapter in a saga. I wanted to know WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! But when I reread the passages where I had turned down the page corners. I could see that it was a whole book on it's own. And a good one at that. Writing like this makes me think that Dan Simmons is really cool. ( )