Saturday, October 13, 2012

Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons (3.5 stars)

Nooooooooo, more boring recaps!
It all began in the Cantos Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago. That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the TechnoCore explained how the early cyberspace webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the time of the Hegemony....
What is this, a dust jacket?

After explaining the history, Simmons goes around telling you that lots of pieces of the previous books were lies. Aenea destroys a carefully constructed and creative reveal of Core machinations between Ummon and the Keats cybrid in a previous book:
There were not and are not three camps in the TechnoCore...there are billions. The Core is the ultimate exercise in anarchy - hyperparasitism carried to its highest power.
Although I have to admit that it sounds more realistic than a very simple three-camps society. I did like Tom Ray being responsible for the creation of the TechnoCore, and the explanation of the cruciform and how it is now capable of proper resurrection without the severe mental and reproductive damage seen by Father Lenar Hoyt on Hyperion.
The failure of the symbiote was due to the simple demands of information storage and retrieval. In a human mind, there are neurons. In a human body, there are approximately 10^28 atoms.
Speaking of Hoyt, the image of Cardinal Lourdusamy killing Father Dure to bring back the Pope (Hoyt) was chilling and excellent.
Cardinal Lourdusamy's already thin lips tightened to the point of disappearance between florid jowls. "Do you have anything else to say before you return to hell, Antipope?"
Cybrid Frank Lloyd Wright teaches Aenea about architecture. OK. I guess. Apparently every messiah needs a trade? As an aside I was shocked to learn about the violent death of Wright's partner and her children via this novel.

Simmons tries a little too hard to make Aenea christ-like: going off into the desert on her own, giving communion of her blood, having a last supper, going off to face death by crucifiction. Aenea's vaguely Buddhist mysticism lecture circuit on T'ien Shan got tiring:
The Buddha nature is, after all, the after-the-crucible essence of being human. Flowers all attain their flowerhood. A wild dog or blind zygoat each attain their doghood or zygoathood. A place - any place - is granted its placehood. Only humankind struggles and fails in becoming what it is.
As did the 'instead of explaining that, let's have sex my mindless little unquestioning Raul' plot device, and the pages of descriptions of mountains:
Beyond our Sacred Mountain of the North, I know, rise the Four Mountains of Pilgrimage for the Buddhist faithful - O-mei Shan to the west; Chiu-hua Shan, "Nine Flower Mountain," to the south; Wu-t'ai Shan, the "Five Terrace mountain" with its welcoming Purple Palace to the north; and lowly but subtly beautiful P'u-t'o Shan in the far east.
Apparently Raul doesn't really listen to Aenea anyway, since he is surprised when they become lovers, despite her having told him on a number of occasions that it was their future:
Life has taken a turn that I had never anticipated, never imagined.
Despite the convenient 5-year time-debt to close the age gap, it still seems creepy. Especially since he still calls her 'kiddo'.

So, the ending. The two-year gap and father of Aenea's child was painfully obvious, but well written, and the identity of the 'Observer' was similarly obvious but very unsatisfying - nothing more about the 'Lions and Tigers and Bears'. Some reveals about the Shrike, but really no proper explanations, especially about how it went from pure-evil super villian in the early books to Aenea's dependable deus ex machina bodyguard in this one. But hey, not everything needs to be tied off neatly and explained.

I thought the concept of a Shared Moment being transmitted through the galaxy was very powerful. As for the connection to other people through the Void Which Binds, it was described in a very Utopian way, but having access to everyone's past or present thoughts sounds...terrible.

I loved Raul's death sentence in the Schrodinger cat box: such a classic elaborate bond death trap.

Overall I thought this was a pretty decent ending to the series, with some great ideas and an impressive plot arc.

3.5 stars.