Rise of Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #4)

Rise of Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #4)

The Rise of Endymion completes the Duology of Endymion and the entire Hyperion Cantos as the final installment. For vastness of scope, clarity of detail and seriousness of purpose, Simmons's epic narrative is on a par with Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

"The Rise of Endymion,'' like its three predecessors, is full of action, replete with personal combats and battles in space that are distinguished from formulaic space opera by the magnitude of what is at stake -- the salvation of the human soul. This is a nearly seamless continuation of the story from Endymion. Raul, after having separated from Aenea, continues on his own journey with the end goal of meeting back with her as planned. Captain de Soya is brought out of exile and commanded to continue his pursuit of Aenea as the Pax, the Church, and the Core all seek to capture her. As the final story in the Cantos, this is where they all come together and finally meet, and the story concludes with two big twists--one of which you can see coming early on and the other simply brilliant and refocuses what you have learned from the story along the way about A. Bettik.

In the end, The Rise of Endymion is a good conclusion to a good story that will not disappoint readers who enjoyed the first half.  I do feel the lenght could be a little shorter as I feel some of the chapters could be severely shorter without dimishing the point.

I rate the book 4.75 out of 5 stars.

From NYTimes:

The Inquisition is back. This is the animating premise of THE RISE OF ENDYMION (Spectra/Bantam, $23.95), the fourth book of Dan Simmons's galaxy-spanning series that began in 1989 with ''Hyperion.'' For vastness of scope, clarity of detail and seriousness of purpose, Simmons's epic narrative is on a par with Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Frank Herbert's ''Dune'' books, Gene Wolfe's multipart ''Book of the New Sun'' and Brian Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy. No one in modern science fiction, not even Wolfe, has dealt more sensitively with the interface between religion and science. Yet ''The Rise of Endymion,'' like its three predecessors, is also a full-blooded action novel, replete with personal combats and battles in space that are distinguished from formulaic space opera by the magnitude of what is at stake -- which is nothing less than the salvation of the human soul.

In reviewing the first two books in this series, ''Hyperion'' and its sequel ''The Fall of Hyperion,'' I noted that they actually constituted a single thousand-page novel that should be read from the beginning. The current book and its forerunner, ''Endymion,'' follow the earlier volumes so closely in plot development that I am not sure how comprehensible they would be to readers unfamiliar with the rest of the series. But taken together, these four volumes represent one of the finest achievements of modern science fiction, a convincing demonstration of how liberating, in the hands of a masterly practitioner, genre conventions can be.

In the Year of Our Lord 3131, most humans in the galaxy are in communion with the reborn Church of Rome, which controls access to the life-giving parasite known as the cruciform. Those who ''wear the cruciform'' may be killed by accident or illness, but unless the very atoms of their body have been blown apart, the dead can be resurrected with all memories and faculties intact. ''The Rise of Endymion'' opens with the ninth death of Pope Julius XIV and his rebirth as Urban XVI. The significance of the Pontiff's new name is not lost on the more learned members of the hierarchy: two millenniums earlier, another Pope Urban called for a holy war against unbelievers, a preaching that led directly to the First Crusade.

This time the Church does not have to beg support from temporal powers; its own battle fleet is the biggest, fastest and best armed in space. But despite its galaxy-spanning power, the Church has reason to fear two groups of enemies: the Ousters, gene-altered humans whose idiosyncratic space habitats owe allegiance to no one, and the scattered followers of a young girl named Aenea, who is rumored to be a new messiah and whose most dangerous gift, quite literally, is empathy. While the Pope's battalions wreak havoc on the Ousters, the agents of the Inquisition close in on Aenea. Her most prominent defenders are the good-hearted Endymion, the multitalented narrator of the tale, and the enigmatic Shrike, a half-human killing machine of uncertain provenance but unwavering loyalty. Behind the scenes lurk layer upon layer of shadowy string-pullers, ranging from competing factions of the TechnoCore, the nest of artificial intelligences that long ago wrung independence from their human creators, to even more arcane presences whose purposes can only be guessed at.
As in previous books in this series, Simmons alternates between impassioned discussions of moral issues (one of which revolves around the diabolical logic of Pascal's Wager) and scenes of action rendered with an agonizing, slow-motion precision. He takes the reader to planets and habitats of lavish complexity and agreeable strangeness. Even when the arena shifts to the metaphysical, Endymion's ingrained distaste for rhetoric keeps the language lean and grounded. At his best Simmons knows how to light up a faded conceit: ''Her gaze was reptilian -- simultaneously remote and rapt.'' The story of Aenea and her mission involves so many mysteries within mysteries that just when you begin to think Simmons cannot possibly remember, much less untangle them, he reveals how neatly they all fit together in the service of his overarching theme -- which is that prolonging life is less important than enriching life and a merely physical immortality is just another kind of death.