(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D.,Cape Town, South Africa)

The ‘Hyperion Cantos’ are concluded. With The Rise of Endymion (1997), Dan Simmons has rounded off an enormous epic, a metaphysical space opera whose only contemporary rival in ambition and copiousness is David Zindell’s ‘Neverness’ quartet. The book is large. On the cover, the Shrike gazes at mountains and pagodas, a breathtaking vista. The reader’s excitement mounts. Surely this prodigious series will end brilliantly and well?

The answer is that it does and it doesn’t. In some people’s view, the ‘Cantos’ ought to have been limited to the first two volumes, Hyperion (1989) and The Fall of Hyperion (1990). After all, these big tomes, essentially a single novel in two parts, achieved an enormous amount: a summary of most of genre SF’s previous styles, concepts, and concerns; grand meditations on the themes of the poetry of Keats; prodigies of world-building; the creation of many intriguing characters; superb space-battles; a general sense of huge scale and vast complexity. Although not all the threads of the plot were fully resolved, the tale had in its essence been told. But Simmons extended it further, with Endymion (1996); now, centuries after the action of the opening volumes, with the interstellar Hegemony that was their setting collapsed and gone and the AIs of the Technocore seemingly withdrawn from human affairs, new characters and situations arose, drawn in part from other Keats poems. Endymion seemed an exciting futility, involving as it did an interminable pursuit across space, with the morose hero, a young girl messiah, and a blue android again and again escaping capture by the minions of the evil Papacy that now governed the human worlds. It was breathtaking, but it hardly carried the story forward. Was Simmons merely marking time, spinning out a circular narrative in order to capitalize on the success of the earlier novels? Would the fourth and final volume have anything worthwhile to offer?

Considering the problem mentioned, The Rise of Endymion fulfills its mandate of climax and closure rather well. The plot does move briskly: the alliance of Papacy and Technocore supplies magnificent intrigue and villainy; the gradual mobilization of resistance to the tyrants, involving a galactic odyssey by Raul Endymion, is an opportunity for colourful world-creation by Simmons; the space-operatic heroics are impeccably choreographed; the final Christ-like fate of the messiah, Aenea, is genuinely moving; many long-standing enigmas of the series are resolved, if a bit hastily. But on the philosophical level: after the tantalizingly complex visions of the underlying nature of things offered in the original ‘Hyperion’ books, the final revelations we get here are facile, pious mush. A certain self-righteous religiosity infects the text as it proceeds, and eventually we learn this: there is a universally accessible continuum, which unites us all in mind and memory; it allows us to walk instantly from world to world; etcetera. The cast ends up in effect waving magic wands, in a daft excess of wish-fulfilment and sub-Buddhist balderdash. This, combined with a surfeit of plot inconsistencies and careless editing, makes this otherwise grand confection rather hard to swallow.

BANTAM SPECTRA (USA). 1997. HARDCOVER.

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