Product Description

The triumphant concluding novels to the Hyperion Quartet, together in one volume for the first time. ENDYMION Two hundred and seventy-four years after the fall of the WorldWeb in Fall of Hyperion, Raoul Endymion is sent on a quest. Retrieving Aenea from the Sphinx before the Church troops reach her is only the beginning. With help from a blue-skinned android named A. Bettik, Raoul and Aenea travel the river Tethys, pursued by Father Captain Frederico DeSoya, an influential warrior-priest and his troops. The shrike continues to make enigmatic appearances, and while many questions were raised in Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, still more are raised here. Raoul's quest will continue. THE RISE OF ENDYMION The time of reckoning has arrived. As a final genocidal Crusade threatens to enslave humanity forever, a new messiah has come of age. She is Aenea and she has undergone a strange apprenticeship to those known as the Others. Now her protector, Raul Endymion, one-time shepherd and convicted murderer, must help her deliver her startling message to her growing army of disciples. But first they must embark on a final spectacular mission to discover the underlying meaning of the universe itself. They have been followed on their journey by the mysterious Shrike--monster, angel, killing machine--who is about to reveal the long-held secret of its origin and purpose. And on the planet of Hyperion, where the story first began, the final revelation will be delivered--an apocalyptic message that unlocks the secrets of existence and the fate of humankind in the galaxy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12721 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 992 pages

MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS
"Builds the tension to a crescendo.. Quite a read."

Review
"Shot through with a mother lode of character, heart and intelligence worthy of the best of Ray Bradbury. A treat for those who like their war movies cynical, their creature features plausible and their SF human and approachable." (Steve White DREAMWATCH )

"Builds the tension to a crescendo.. Quite a read." (MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS )

Synopsis
The triumphant concluding novels to the Hyperion Quartet, together in one volume for the first time. ENDYMION Two hundred and seventy-four years after the fall of the WorldWeb in Fall of Hyperion, Raoul Endymion is sent on a quest. Retrieving Aenea from the Sphinx before the Church troops reach her is only the beginning. With help from a blue-skinned android named A. Bettik, Raoul and Aenea travel the river Tethys, pursued by Father Captain Frederico DeSoya, an influential warrior-priest and his troops. The shrike continues to make enigmatic appearances, and while many questions were raised in Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion, still more are raised here. Raoul's quest will continue. THE RISE OF ENDYMION The time of reckoning has arrived. As a final genocidal Crusade threatens to enslave humanity forever, a new messiah has come of age. She is Aenea and she has undergone a strange apprenticeship to those known as the Others. Now her protector, Raul Endymion, one-time shepherd and convicted murderer, must help her deliver her startling message to her growing army of disciples.

But first they must embark on a final spectacular mission to discover the underlying meaning of the universe itself. They have been followed on their journey by the mysterious Shrike--monster, angel, killing machine--who is about to reveal the long-held secret of its origin and purpose. And on the planet of Hyperion, where the story first began, the final revelation will be delivered--an apocalyptic message that unlocks the secrets of existence and the fate of humankind in the galaxy.

Customer Reviews

Some of the best SF of the last 20 years
This is outstanding, finely-plotted science fiction on an awesome scale, with believable characters (both good and bad) which it makes you care about.

I'm always wary of over-hyping in a review, but I'd definitely put this among the best SF published in the last 20 years - equalling the best that has been done by Iain Banks (before he went off form) and Peter Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy.

This is really the conclusion of a story begun in the two Hyperion books, and it manages the difficult trick of taking you on 270-odd years into a universe that looks very different from the one of Hyperion, but still managing to follow on some of the themes, and the key plotlines, from the previous books. A few of the same characters are reintroduced (mainly via time-travel) but most of the main characters are new, so it avoids the feeling of a lack of imagination which I felt with Peter Hamilton's latest book (Dreaming Void) set in his Commonwealth universe. Here the changes from the fall of the Hegemony at the end of the second Hyperion book to the universe at the start of Endymion all seem to me natural and completely plausible, if surprising in some cases.

For example, the Church has managed to find out the secret of using the cruciform (introduced in Hyperion) to allow everyone to be resurrected after they die, with all their memories and without the decline that happened to the original people that we first saw with the cruciform. Using this power, the Church has - in a very plausible way - managed to gain dominance over the area previously controlled by the Hegemony, but outside the Ousters still hold sway. The way that the Church has done this is not revealed until late in the second book - and is a crucial plot development.

One negative review points out various things that reader didn't follow - personally I think all of them are fully explained (although I'm not saying every loose end is tidied up - with a universe as complex as the one created here, I think that would be impossible and not even a good thing, but I do think all the main plot developments are fully explained). To take just one point, the Shrike is back, and if it seems less powerful than before, I think this is just because Simmons puts it up against some superhuman opponents that are (almost) a match for it.

If you enjoy powerful SF which you need to make a little effort with (rather than seeing plot developments a mile off) then you owe it to yourself to read these books, starting with Hyperion !

Flawed genius
Having read the Hyperion novels over ten years ago, and having been unaware until very recently that further novels in this series were available, I was delighted to see these books for sale. I started reading as soon as I got home and barely managed to put them down until I had finished all 900+ pages. Dan Simmons is an incredible writer with a real gift for detail. His work is singularly inventive and I urge anyone, whether they are science fiction fans or not (I am not), to try these novels, although they will only really make sense if you have already read the two that precedes them. The wealth of detail that makes up this body of work is utterly compelling and the only thing you will regret about entering this universe is having to leave at the end.

However, as other reviewers have commented, neither of these novels are perfect. For example, having established some 'truths' in the first two novels, the author is obliged to reveal that one of the 'truths' (a tenet relating to Ultimates / Stables / Volatiles from the Hyperion Cantos, an epic poem written by a character in the novels) to be a lie. This may have been planned all along but to me it felt as if the author had had to contradict his earlier writing in order to make the plot work at a critical juncture. As all four novels are incredibly densely plotted there was more than one occasion where I had this nagging feeling (the changing nature of the Shrike, which seemed not only a more positive character but also a physically weaker character than before, also felt quite contrived to me).

I also found it infuriating that there were several typos in the second book (I was reading the Gollancz SF individual editions). Not only did I see characters' names misspelt a couple of times but also found one character threatening another with the immortal line: "I will bum the flesh from your legs". I can only assume that this should have read 'burn'. Laughing out loud at a highly dramatic end scene was probably not what the author had in mind at this point.

However, despite these minor irritants, I still loved, loved, loved these books and look forward to reading anything and everything Dan Simmons writes in the future. For a mind altering experience which does not require the use of illegal stimulants, Dan's the man.

Disappointing conclusion to "Hyperion"
(warning: spoilers)

While I have high praise for Dan Simmons' writing style, and the highest praise for the "Hyperion" saga (the first two books which was the predecessor to Endymion), I must say that this successor and conclusion to what Simmons started is disappointing. The Pax/catholic-church-dominated universe that has been constructed is an very unlikely result of the collapse of the Hegemony, and the sudden return of the AI's - the TechnoCore - as a player is too much like an anti-Deus-Ex-Machina, resurrected to blow more life into a story that really should have been concluded with the end of the Hyperion books.

Also, the way the SHrike makes (again) a re-entrance, but suddenly as a "good guy", is incomprehensible, and represents yet another discontinuity compared to the Hyperion novels where it was a "bad guy".

I would have given the book 3 stars if I hadn't been so disappointed with the way it fizzed out the huge potential of the predecessor.