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The Rise of Endymion

Dan Simmons

The 2046 pages in the Hyperion series represents a highly condensed version of a two-year story Dan Simmons told his elementary school students when he was still a school teacher. ("Only the kids know the whole story of Hyperion." - Dan Simmons 9/97)

Frequent allusions to this deep historical background gave Hyperion a magnetizing fascination much like the extensive mythology underlying The Lord of The Rings. But in a similar way that the explanations in Silmarillion were interesting but lost the excitement of adventure, the long philosophical explanations here satisfy by answering our curiosity but lose the previous page-turning mesmerism. When an author leaves gaps for our imagination, readers feel more involved and their personal fantasies augment the story.

The above doesn't mean to say we don't recommend Rise of Endymion ­ it's a great book, just not on the level of Hyperion. In many books with multiple characters, the differences between them blur - they have the obvious good guy/bad guy differences but subtle nuances between different characters tend to blend. Here, the personalities not only clearly delineate but also build complex emotional connections, change, and evolve as the story unfolds.

Again, however, this was more true in the first two books of the series than in the last two. While Hyperion developed and focused on emotional characters in the midst of strange worlds, Rise of Endymion gave the characters more of a background role and emphasized the highly imaginative environments. It was hard to feel the described relationship between Raul and Aenea, why she would like/love him so much. While she had so much wisdom, he was so dense; her compassion vs. his selfishness; her expansive vision and his narrow-minded pettiness. Possibly a case of "opposites attract" but the many inconsistencies undermined a plausible love story.

Interesting that the story evolved in the context of a classroom. Many statements create wonderful jumping off points for lively discussions:

"Religion seems to have always offered us that false duality. The silences of infinite space of the cozy comfort of inner certainty."

"Almost everything interesting in the human experience is the result of an individual experiencing, experimenting, explaining, and sharing. A hive mind would be the ancient television broadcasts...consensual idiocy."

"That's what writers and artists and creators do, boy. Listen to the Void and try to hear dead folks' thoughts. Feel their pain. The pain of living folks too. Finding a muse is just an artist or holy man's way of getting a foot in the Void."

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