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edwardhabib 's review for:
The Rise of Endymion
by Dan Simmons
5.5/10.
Revision: I dropped this down from 3 stars to 2. The more I think about it, the less I can forgive this book for actively making Hyperion worse.
It hurts to say it, but The Rise of Endymion was a disappointing conclusion to the Hyperion Cantos. My actual experience reading this book is pretty indicative of how I felt about its contents. In the first few chapters, I was immediately drawn in by the political scheming within the Pax, but during the bulk of the story I was always a bit reluctant to pick the book up, and by the time I got to the end, the pages were literally falling out of my mass market paperback. The 20 days I spent carrying this book around (like my own cruciform parasite) was longer than it took me to tear through the first three books in the Hyperion Cantos. Sure, this book clocks in at a hefty 700 pages with small font and margins, but there definitely isn't more story in here than in its predecessors. In fact, so much of this book is just a cycle of Endymion and Aenea talking, Aenea talking to other people while Endymion listens and relays what they talked about, and Endymion and Aenea capping off each day with boring sex. Even though Aenea is an adult in this book, I still cannot get over Endymion being so obsessed with her, given that they met when he was 27 and she was 12, and he still calls her "kiddo." Not romantic or appealing to read at all. There are also useless sub-plots that should 100% have been cut out of this overly long novel. For example, one main plot point in the first half of the story is that our protagonist suffers and needs to recover from a kidney stone. Riveting stuff...
While this book is full of religious references, these themes lack so much of the depth and sophistication that made Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion so mindblowingly impressive. In particularly, Simmons' attempts to fit Eastern philosophy into this universe felt comparatively shallow and half-assed.
Another huge problem I had with this book was Simmons' constant retconning of what happened in earlier books. The cruciform, the TechnoCore, and even the Shrike are so muddled and demystified in this book that it makes the revelations in earlier books way less cool. The cruciform, for example, went from being an unexplained cosmic horror parasite hidden in the planetary depths in Hyperion to being explained away as nanotechnology in The Rise of Endymion. Boo.
Not everything is bad, though. The beginning and ending are pretty strong. The Pax politics and genocidal plots make for a good villain storyline, and the ending is a very touching conclusion to a time travel love story.
Having read all four books of the Hyperion Cantos, I would definitely recommend reading the first duology, but the Endymion duology (while not bad) is ultimately not worth it.
Revision: I dropped this down from 3 stars to 2. The more I think about it, the less I can forgive this book for actively making Hyperion worse.
It hurts to say it, but The Rise of Endymion was a disappointing conclusion to the Hyperion Cantos. My actual experience reading this book is pretty indicative of how I felt about its contents. In the first few chapters, I was immediately drawn in by the political scheming within the Pax, but during the bulk of the story I was always a bit reluctant to pick the book up, and by the time I got to the end, the pages were literally falling out of my mass market paperback. The 20 days I spent carrying this book around (like my own cruciform parasite) was longer than it took me to tear through the first three books in the Hyperion Cantos. Sure, this book clocks in at a hefty 700 pages with small font and margins, but there definitely isn't more story in here than in its predecessors. In fact, so much of this book is just a cycle of Endymion and Aenea talking, Aenea talking to other people while Endymion listens and relays what they talked about, and Endymion and Aenea capping off each day with boring sex. Even though Aenea is an adult in this book, I still cannot get over Endymion being so obsessed with her, given that they met when he was 27 and she was 12, and he still calls her "kiddo." Not romantic or appealing to read at all. There are also useless sub-plots that should 100% have been cut out of this overly long novel. For example, one main plot point in the first half of the story is that our protagonist suffers and needs to recover from a kidney stone. Riveting stuff...
While this book is full of religious references, these themes lack so much of the depth and sophistication that made Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion so mindblowingly impressive. In particularly, Simmons' attempts to fit Eastern philosophy into this universe felt comparatively shallow and half-assed.
Another huge problem I had with this book was Simmons' constant retconning of what happened in earlier books. The cruciform, the TechnoCore, and even the Shrike are so muddled and demystified in this book that it makes the revelations in earlier books way less cool. The cruciform, for example, went from being an unexplained cosmic horror parasite hidden in the planetary depths in Hyperion to being explained away as nanotechnology in The Rise of Endymion. Boo.
Not everything is bad, though. The beginning and ending are pretty strong. The Pax politics and genocidal plots make for a good villain storyline, and the ending is a very touching conclusion to a time travel love story.
Having read all four books of the Hyperion Cantos, I would definitely recommend reading the first duology, but the Endymion duology (while not bad) is ultimately not worth it.