Orphans of the Helix (Hyperion Cantos, #4.5), by Dan Simmons, 1999

Orphans of the Helix

"Orphans of the Helix" is a 46-page science fiction short story by American writer Dan Simmons, set in his Hyperion Cantos fictional universe (one of three, the others being "Remembering Siri", a story which is also a chapter of Hyperion, and "The Death of a Centaur", which deals with an early and allegorical version of either The Fall of Hyperion

Its a nice return to the universe of Hyperion several hundred years later after the end of Rise of Endymion and learn what came of the various societies and heroes  Short and sweet with a tiny twist at the end left me wanting more-- and to return to this world again.

I rate the book 5 out of 5 stars.

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From Wikipedia:

Orphans of the Helix

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"Orphans of the Helix" is a 46-page science fiction short story by American writer Dan Simmons, set in his Hyperion Cantos fictional universe (one of three, the others being "Remembering Siri", a story which is also a chapter of Hyperion, and "The Death of a Centaur", which deals with an early and allegorical version of either The Fall of Hyperion or Endymion). It was first published in the anthology Far Horizons in 1999.

"Orphans of the Helix" won the 2000 Locus Award for best novella.^[1]

Contents

• 1Setting
• 2Plot summary
• 3References
• 4External links

Setting[edit]

It is set more than 481 years after The Rise of Endymion; the Pax is long since defeated, and the Aenean movement has been helping various groups colonize unknown space. One of the groups is the "Amoiete Spectrum Helix", which after their persecution by the Pax has been reconstituted. Approximately 600,000 opt to colonize some star system centuries of travel core-wards beyond former Pax space using a spinship built by the Aeneans, who give them special permission to use the Hawking drive, despite its deleterious effects on the Void Which Binds (after redesigning it to reduce the effect by orders of magnitude).

Plot summary[edit]

The spinship Helix has not yet reached a suitable destination when it receives a distress signal from a binary star system. Four of the five shipboard AI (apparently formerly of the TechnoCore; in characteristic Simmons fashion, each is patterned after a famous literary figure, in this case, Japanese: Saigyo, Lady Murasaki, Ikkyu, Basho, and Ryōkan) decide that the call is worth investigating, not least because of the further anomaly that the orbital forest around the lesser of the two stars, which the AIs intend to resupply their ship from, is of neither Ouster nor Templar construction, though they may have settled on it.

The AIs awaken certain crewmembers, and together they enter the system, where they are greeted by hundreds of thousands of space-adapted Ousters; they importune the Helix to save their civilization from an enormous and ancient harvester spaceship (which gathers food, air, and water), which visits every 57 years, and is so programmatically inflexible that it sees the Ouster and Templar settlements as infestations of the tree-ring, and attempts to cleanse it by eradicating them. Over the centuries, the colony's technological infrastructure has been steadily ground under by its assaults, and many die attacking or being attacked.

A brief assay of the harvester's defenses (for the 57 years have elapsed since the last visit, and the harvester has arrived) by one of the Helix's armed vessels reveal the ancient device to be minimally defended and weakened by age; easily destroyed. However, the harvester is presumably being used by its creators, and destroying it might be tantamount to condemning that civilization to slow starvation and death. Even despite its misdeeds, the crew of the Helix cannot countenance that possibility, though they saw no inhabitants in the other, red-giant system.

Since they cannot get to the system normally before the harvester strikes again, the crew votes to risk the Helix and its hundreds of thousands of stored inhabitants by making a very short Hawking drive jump. The jump succeeds, and they begin scanning the system for life. On an inspiration, they scan inside the red giant star, and discover a truly ancient rocky world which the star had enveloped in its expansion. It is honey-combed, and occupied by a curious oxygen-breathing race, whose primary method of technological communication is via modulated gravity waves (explaining the failure of previous attempts to contact the harvester). Aboard is Ces Ambre, the only survivor of the family which took in Raul Endymion; though she is not an Aenean, she received the Aenean nano-technology; she cannot freecast, but she is capable of empathatic communication with the more than 3 billion "modular... so fibrous" minds in the cinder planet. She successfully explains the harm their harvester has caused. They are devastated to learn of what they had done, and immediately transmit a gravitonic sequence which would reprogram the harvester (they offer further to commit collective suicide to atone for their crimes, but the Spectrum feels that this is not needed), as indeed it does. They also reveal the reason they stubbornly stay in their original planet and constructed the harvester and tree-ring: they like their home, and don't want to leave.

Ces Ambre offers a vial of her blood to the tree-ring inhabitants; though she is not philosophically an Aenean and refrains from using her abilities, she feels that the natives should have the choice.

The crew return to hibernation, and the AI direct the Helix on its way under Hawking drive. Mysteriously, the Shrike, Dem Loa (Ces Ambre's mother), and "Petyr, son of Aenea and Endymion" appear on the bridge. Petyr briefly communes directly with the AIs, healing Basho's psychological conflicts, and directing them to divert the Helix to a nice, but challenging system. He and Dem Loa then vanish, apparently using the Shrike as a method of locomotion.

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.

The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2), by Dan Simmons, 1990

The Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #2), by Dan Simmons, 1990

Dan Simmons's The Fall of Hyperion - second book in the Hyperion Cantos tetrology that began with Hyperion - is a deeply complex and panoramic take on humanity, artificial intelligence, love, hate, time, metaphysics, and divinity.

The Fall of Hyperion, which breaks the plot up into multiple threads, one of which is narrated by a ‘cybrid’ who is the reincarnated consciousness of the poet John Keats, but also provides the reader with a more conventional finish to the story and tells us what becomes of the seven Shrike pilgrims now that they have reached the Time Tombs, but it also fleshes out the story of Meina Gladstone, the leader of the Hegemony of Man, as she deals with a coming war with the Ousters that looms large throughout this novel.

The series of novels in this universe continues, but you can read these two book as a duology and get a complete self-contained story.

What’s particularly beautiful about this book is how absolutely amazingly Simmons ties up the stories of the Shrike pilgrims, whose lives turn out to be more connected than the first book let on. And all of the pilgrims, including the cantankerous poet Martin Silenus (one of my favorite characters in the series) get to be heroes in their own way this time around. Characters with fairly small roles in Hyperion–Amelio Arundez, the Consul’s friend Theo Lane, and so on–appear again with expanded roles. Simmons is extremely generous to his characters in ways that feel both natural and dignified–even those who perish horribly are ultimately redeemed.

I give it a 5 out of 5.