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.

Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3)

Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3), by Dan Simmons

“Endymion” by Dan Simmons is the third book in the Hyperion Cantos series While “The Fall of Hyperion” immediately follows “Hyperion,” “Endymion” picks up more than 300 years after the second installment.  So far, all three books have been quite different.  This installment follows Raul Endymion of Hyperion, the future messiah Aenea, and the android Bettik as they go on journey over many planets.
                                                         

What’s interesting is how this book is told from the point of view of two characters, Raul Endymion, and Father Captain Federico de Soya and generally centering around Aenea. A late introduction from the character Nemes was probably introduced to help move the book to close. 

While satisfying enough to warrant the hefty length of the novel, the ending felt rushed and loosely ended, clearly setting up the stage for the final installment of the Cantos. The strength of the author’s writing is ability to build world as clearly demonstrated with his character’s lack of depth as most of his characters are more ideas and archetypes than people with personalities fleshed out; Aenea is the standard “chosen one”, Father Captain de Soya is the typical military man growing to question his morality and righteousness, and the main enigmatic antagonist Nemes is the “baddy”, though introduced late but worth the wait for the final battle with the Shrike.

Enjoyable and worth the read if you enjoyed Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, which comprises the first duology of the Hyperion Cantos. One word of warning: the mystery posed in the opening pages of "Endymion" remains unresolved at the end.

I rate the book 4.75 out of 5 stars.

Interference (Semiosis Duology #2) , by Sue Burke

Interference (Semiosis Duology #2) , by Sue Burke


Compared to the the first installment of the series, this book isn't as good. There are enough vestiges from the original story to keep tale familiar right from the start. The author abandons the previous book's generational storytelling format where each  chapter is told from the perspectives of descendants to a shorter time-frame but told from different characters point of view.  Almost all of the characters are new, mostly unlikeable and harboring their own agenda. While the overall arc of the main plot was loosely interesting enough, I feel the the story of the Corals were introduced too close to the end of the book. A little more foreshadowing the of dangers brought by the Corals could have fleshed out the main antagonist.  Overall, though enjoyable enough, it feels as though this book is a "setup" for another installment in this series as a lot of effort and time is put into fleshing out the newly introduced characters yet leave a lot of the results of their actions driven by their oft-not compatible motivations unresolved.


I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars

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Sue Burke’s new science fiction novel Interference is the sequel to her previous book Semiosis. That book introduced us to Pax, a superhabitable Earth-like planet some fifty-six light years away. Human colonizers, fleeing an ecologically and politically ravaged Earth, arrive on Pax; they must learn to get along with the native life forms. These include, most notably, intelligent plants. All the plant species on the planet are sentient to varying degrees; they are often engaged in Darwinian struggles against one another as well as against the animals who feed on them. There are also a number of language-capable animal species too, including the predatory eagles and the scavenging bats. (The colonists give names reminiscent of Earth species to all the life forms they discover, even though their biochemical makeup and descent are quite different). Pax also has a population of large arthropod-like beings known as the Glassmakers; intellectually and culturally, they are at least the equals of Homo sapiens, though their manners and outlooks are unsurprisingly quite different. In Semiosis, the human community learns, over the course of several generations and about a hundred years, that in order to survive they must give up their colonialist/pioneering/conquering mentality, and instead negotiate ongoing relationships with the other species. By the end of the novel, a stable community of human beings and Glassmakers has been established, with both species in effect playing the role of “service animals” for Stevland, the intelligent bamboo species that dominates the portion of the planet on which they live.

Burke draws on recent scientific research that has discovered that, already here on Earth, plants are sentient in the sense that they actively sense and monitor their environment, they are able to learn and remember, they make decisions among possible alternatives, and overall they respond flexibly to the situations in which they find themselves. Plant neurobiology is a real scientific subfield. For more on this, see the recent books by Daniel Chamovitz and by Monica Gagliano. Only animals have cells specialized as neurons, but non-specialized plant cells exhibit the same physiological bases for thought — electrochemical reactions and transmissions from cell to cell — as animal neurons do. Of course, Burke’s intelligent plants on Pax are extrapolated far beyond anything that actually exists on Earth. But such further specialization, on the basis of already-existing biochemical processes, is not wildly implausible. Intelligence in varying degrees is a useful adaptation, evidenced to some extent in all living organisms on Earth, and there is no reason why it could not develop further. On Pax, plants have cells specialized in similar ways to animal neurons {Another science fiction novel that includes speculation on neural cells added to plant architecture is Joan Slonczewski’s The Highest Frontier}.

You definitely need to read Semiosis first in order to make sense of Interference. But given that, the sequel at least equals the previous book, and adds layers of richness to Burke’s world-building. Interference picks up the story about a hundred years after the end of Semiosis. The human/Glassmaker/bamboo community is largely doing well. Life on Pax is not quite a utopia, but it arguably allows for a greater degree of flourishing than most of the actual social formations we are familiar with here on Earrh. There are all sorts of minor injusticies, power differentials, and petty disputes and jealousies. And there is a lot of work to be done: many advanced technologies have been lost, and metals are generally not available. Nonetheless, the small society on Pax, organized around one single village, offers a lot of room for personal idiosyncrasies. Many things are done collectively, and resources are shared on a mostly equal basis. Everyone has access to food and shelter. People accrue obligations to one another, but there is no money. Glassmaker society is matriarchal and somewhat hierarchical; among the human inhabitants there seems to be gender equality. Humans and Glassmakers together make decisions on a more or less democratic basis, though there is no doubt that Stevland, the intelligent bamboo, has ultimate authority.

But Stevland is not a dictator; it understands that its own well-being is entirely intertwined with that of the two other sentient species, as well as with a wide variety of other plant and animal life with which it remains in communication. The politics of Pax rests upon the biological conditions of commensalism, mutualism, and symbiosis. One of the best things about both novels is the way that Burke imagines such relations arising out of Darwinian competition. Burke’s vision stands in opposition to selfish gene theory, but it is in general accord with more recent theories about the evolution of cooperation, multi-level selection, and ecological webs of multispecies dependencies. Burke does not skimp on the horrors of predation and parasitism; some of the competition among species described in both volumes is violent to the point of extermination. But the novels also insist on the ways that mutual dependencies are also a crucial part of evolution; cooperation itself evolves, and complex forms of life could never come to exist without it. Most importantly, perhaps — at least from a human point of view — is the fact that the multispecies community on Pax maintains a more or less steady state, in terms of energy, ecology, and economics. It does not strive to endlessly expand in the manner of all too many human societies on Earth, ranging from ancient and early modern despotic regimes all the way to contemporary capitalism.

The ground for all this was already established in Semiosis; but Interference pushes things a lot further. The second book has a wider scope than the first. Interference starts on Earth, and we witness a near future involving massive genocide followed by the establishment of an ecofascist regime. This helps us appreciate, by contrast, the positive aspects of life on Pax — despite its dangers, and its lower levels of technology and material well-being. At the start of the novel, Earth has lost contact with Pax; a spaceship is sent there on a scientific mission, to find out what happened as well as to check on the animal and plant life. This allows Burke to avoid the danger that is often attributed to utopian fiction: a portrait of a more or less stable and satisfying social situation can lead to a boring, conflict-free narrative. Instead, we get massive cultural and political conflict, already among the human beings on the spaceship, even before they arrive; and all the more so, once they have arrived, between them and the humans on Pax, not to mention all the other species.

I will avoid spoilers at least to the extent of not recounting any of these conflicts in detail. I will restrict myself to several observations. The book extends the range of sentient species further than had already been done in the first volume. Imperatives of both violent conflict, and grudging or active cooperation, together with instances of both understanding and misunderstanding, continue to ramify in Interference. Burke does not extend her vision of sentient diversity to the extent of radical incommunicability, i.e. the existence of intelligences so different from one another that they are unable to communicate at all. But she does try to imagine how sentient arthropod (Glassmaker) intelligence might in fact be quite different from ours, and plant intelligence even more so. This is highlighted in Interference by the way that each chapter of the novel has a different narrator: we get Earth humans, Pax humans, Glassmakers, and plants. The ongoing events are described from vastly varying perspectives. Interestingly, it is the human narrators who come out the worst: they range from badly misunderstanding what they experience, to seriously delusional, to outright sociopathic. The Earth humans come out as far worse than the Pax humans, though the latter also show serious limitations. The chapter narrated by a Glassmaker is somewhat more understanding and sensible than any of the human ones; and the chapter narrated by Stevland is the most rational, observant, emotionally balanced, and self-aware of all. We also get, from Stevland’s perspective, a powerful sense both of the plant’s stable rootedness and rhizomatic proliferation, and of the constriction it feels from being unable to really travel.

In short, Interference gives us an absorbing and exciting story, but it also asks us to think about how things might be otherwise than what we take for granted, both for better and for worse. In particular, it thinks about emotion, intelligence, and the problems of living with others in both a biological and a sociological register. It neither reduces social processes to biology, nor pretends that biology is irrelevant to our own species being (or to those of presumptive other intelligent beings). It extends Darwinian perspectives to the social and intellectual realm — and it does this in ways that are opposed to, and offer a useful counterpoint to, the nastily reductive fictions of’ so-called ‘evolutionary psychology.’ All in all, Interference, like its predecessor, is science fiction at its best.