Chris reviewed Endymion by Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos, #3)
Endymion at the Time Tombs
4 stars
This novel continues the Hyperion Cantos, a two-volume work which recapitulated much of the imagery of the traditional space opera in a story of far-future pilgrims in a galaxy beset by religion and the weird cult of the Shrike, who can grant immortality or else an eternity of pain. Two stories are interleaved here, brought together by the search for what is essentially a Messiah: Aenea, who is about to be released by the Time Tombs and bring down the rule of organised religion. Ancient poet Martin Silenus (who as his name suggests is once military, scatological, and part-animal) chooses a young man called Raul Endymion to accompany Aenea into the future. Former soldier Endymion suspects he's being sent on a suicide mission; Silenus makes it clear that his view of heroism is somewhat different to that put forward by generals who throw 'disposable' lives into the field of …
This novel continues the Hyperion Cantos, a two-volume work which recapitulated much of the imagery of the traditional space opera in a story of far-future pilgrims in a galaxy beset by religion and the weird cult of the Shrike, who can grant immortality or else an eternity of pain. Two stories are interleaved here, brought together by the search for what is essentially a Messiah: Aenea, who is about to be released by the Time Tombs and bring down the rule of organised religion. Ancient poet Martin Silenus (who as his name suggests is once military, scatological, and part-animal) chooses a young man called Raul Endymion to accompany Aenea into the future. Former soldier Endymion suspects he's being sent on a suicide mission; Silenus makes it clear that his view of heroism is somewhat different to that put forward by generals who throw 'disposable' lives into the field of conflict. Endymion is expected to push beyond the life which he had on his home planet, and which he was due to lose very shortly anyway; to become a hero in the ancient sense, a human taken up into the heavens.
Meanwhile the Pax, an arm of the very Jesuitical church which promises literal resurrection of the flesh due to a cruciform alien symbiote, is concerned that Aenea will bring about the end of its hegemony over known space. It sends Father-Captain De Soya to, it claims, merely bring her back. De Soya and his loyal crew undergo death and resurrection after death and resurrection in a fruitless search that becomes less and less meaningful. What can Aenea threaten that is worse than what already exists? To Simmons�s credit, De Soya is no villain, but a man limited by his beliefs, just as Endymion is limited by being a small-town lad who has never been very far. This is his strength as well as a liability. he is open to what Aenea needs to discover; the nature of the AI TechnoCore which built gateways through space-time and which the Church now fears may not be as dead as was thought; and the nature of what the TechnoCore discovered in the non-space: �Lions and Tigers and Bears� as Aenea says.
That is not all the story though. At the outset Endymion is in an orbiting capsule waiting for his ordained death; and in the novel narrating Endymion speaks of his life with the adult Aenea, who at the end of Endymion is no more than a child, deposited by Endymion on the doorstep of a miraculously preserved Fallingwater, the house Frank Lloyd Wright built over a river at Bear Run, Pennsylvania. Lloyd Wright, with his belief in rationalism and the perfectibility of the built environment, and Teilhard de Chardin, for whom human knowledge might one day literally create God, stand as pointers to a forthcoming age of reason.
But while all this tremendous immanence is being hinted at, Endymion does bring in much of the scenery of space opera; the treeships, the water world whose hugest inhabitant is known as the �Lantern-Mouth Leviathan� (o shade of Roger Zelazny); the ice world inhabited by nomads and strange beasts, the cyborg warrior who is sent to destroy Endymion and Aenea when the Church has failed or refused. Epic it is, and hugely inventive, sustaining its over four hundred pages with vast pace and energy.
