Book Review: The Rise of Endymion, by Dan Simmons

The Rise of Endymion is the fourth and final novel in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. The novel won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1998.

On Pacem, spiritual home of the Catholic Church, Pope Lenar Hoyt dies and is reborn, taking the name Urban XI. He announces a Crusade against the Ousters and commands every planet to finance the building on one Archangel-class starship.

On Old Earth, Aenea is now 16 and tells Raul he must travel - alone - via farcaster to retrieve the Consul's ship buried under a riverbed on an unknown world. They will then meet on the world of T'ien Shan and be reunited. 

The time debt spent on the ship means that five years pass for Aenea without her friend before they are reunited. During this time, Aenea has become the teacher predicted and has started to spread her message - and her 'virus' - across worlds. In the months they spend together on T'ien Shan, Aenea reveals to Raul that she married and had a child during the five years they were separated. Raul is devastated, but the pair still become lovers and Raul realises how much he cares for her.

When the Pax discovers them, they manage to escape, picking up their former enemies Father-Captain De Soya and Sergeant Gregorius, who have spent the preceding six years harrying the Church's ships as they slaughter the Ousters.

Aenea administers her teachings, giving them each water to drink laced with a drop of her blood; this causes the cruciforms that give them immortality to die and drop off their bodies, freeing them from the TechnoCore and the Church.

Returning to pick up Aenea's followers who wish to travel with her, Raul fights the evil cybrid Rhadamnth Nemes and, despite her superhuman strength and ability to move through time, manages to defeat her. Raul is seriously wounded and put into stasis onboard the Consul's ship.

The refugees farcast out of danger and into the middle of Ouster space, and Raul awakens in a living pod that is part of the Ousters' great project - a biosphere encircling a start. Billions of trees and animals living in vacuum and enclosed in containment spheres. Their plan is to enclose a star in a living ecosystem trillions of kilometres round.

Aenea finally allows Raul to "take communion" and drink the virus within her blood. He learns to hear the voices of the dead within the Void Which Binds, and then the voices of the living. He hears the Pope proclaiming the war against the Ousters and knows ships are coming to destroy the biosphere. Aenea sends a message to the Pope that she is coming to Pacem for the final confrontation.

On the long journey to Pacem, Aenea visits hundreds of worlds with all the friends and refugees who came with her. At each world on or two are left behind to continue spreading Aenea's message and teachings. Finally, at Pacem, only Aenea, Raul and Father De Soya are left.

They break into the cathedral through the catacombs and arrive in the nave where the Pope is performing a High Mass. Before the confrontation, Aenea gives Raul a drink, which contains an antidote to the contraceptive injections he had received years before. He is baffled but before he can question her, Aenea asks Father De Soya to leave the Cathedral, and then she runs down the nave towards the Pope.

Both Aenea and Raul are captured. Raul is summarily sentenced to be imprisoned in a box in orbit around a distant planet. At some undetermined point, a random series of events will conspire to release a poison gas into the box and kill him. Any attempts to break into the box will also kill him. It is a Schrodinger cat box.

Aenea is tortured by the Church. It is during this time that she makes her great revelation - the TechnoCore is hiding insde the cruciforms that give eternal life! One AI lives in every one of the billions of cruciforms, and every time that AI needs some more computing power, it causes its host to die. As the brain dies, a frenzy of neural activity occurs, thus boosting the TechnoCore's computing power.

Before Albedo, the TechnoCore adviser, can deny the accusations, Aenea is burned to death.

Every one of Aenea's disciples on all the of the worlds she visited acts as a relay of Aenea's torture, revelation and agonised death. It causes interstellar panic and revulsion, and billions of people reject their cruciforms, crippling the TechnoCore and rejecting the Church and its evil.

In his cell, Raul feels Aenea's agony and death and for months he is insane with grief. Finally, after thirteen months of incarceration, Raul learns the other two parts of Aenea's teaching - the listen to the music of the spheres (to hear the planets he has visited) - and to take the first step. He learns to use the Void Which Binds to 'freecast' - to step from one world to another.

He arrives on Pacem and meets Father De Soya again. They travel back to Old Earth, which has returned from its exile and now is once more in the solar system. There, on Old Earth, Raul meets Aenea - the younger Aenea who travelled in time whilst he was on the Consul's ship. She is young again, and alive, and Father De Soya marries them. They have just under two years together, before Aenea must leave him and their child and travel back into his past - her future - to her death.

Unfortunately, the Pax discovers them, and Raul and Aenea, along with their close friends are forced to flee, taking refuge with the Ousters on the edge of civilized space. There, Raul learns just what secret it is that Aenea carries that makes the Pax so afraid of her, and their journey comes to a dramatic climax in the Vatican, where they confront the Pope, and seemingly meet their respective destinies

 Rise of Endymion lives up to - and exceeds - every expectation set up by the first three Cantos.

Startling in its ending, in the realisation that Aenea knew from the start how she would die, and the fact that she found the strength to do it, it is the ultimate story of loss, courage and faith. The sacrifice of her life for the lives of billions may sound cliched, but the novel is so utterly absorbing and ambitious that at no point does the reader feel like he has ready anything similar before.

Raul's pain at knowing Aenea married and had a child is cleverly offset by closing revelation that he is the husband and father. The time jump needed her is not as confusing as it might be, and Raul's joy at seeing her again is tempered by the reader's knowledge that we know she will have to leave, disappear off into her future and never be seen again by this Raul.

The host of new characters introduced in this novel perfectly complement the action and the other books. The concept of the biosphere is staggering and its astonomical scale breathtaking.

Other revelations abound within the book which I have not mentioned above. As a novel, Rise of Endymion stands proud. As the final episode of the Hyperion Cantos, it provides the perfect denouement to the various themes and plot lines illustrated throughout the previous books.

Taken together, the Hyperion Cantos are a work of startling breadth and depth, individually wonderful books, and together something much greater than the sum of its parts.

A must-read for any lover of science-fiction, fantasy or just damn good writing.

These books and more can be bought here: http://astore.amazon.co.uk/hubpages02d-21