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The Rise of Endymion
Cover of The Rise of Endymion
The Rise of Endymion
Borrow Borrow
The magnificent conclusion to one of the greatest science fiction sagas of our time
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.
The magnificent conclusion to one of the greatest science fiction sagas of our time
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.
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  • From the book "The Pope is dead! Long live the Pope!"

    The cry reverberated in and around the Vatican courtyard of San Damaso where the body of Pope Julius XIV had just been discovered in his papal apartments.  The Holy Father had died in his sleep.  Within minutes the word spread through the mismatched cluster of buildings still referred to as the Vatican Palace, and then moved out through the Vatican State with the speed of a circuit fire in a pure-oxygen environment.  The rumor of the Pope's death burned through the Vatican's office complex, leaped through the crowded St. Anne's Gate to the Apostolic Palace and the adjacent Government Palace, found waiting ears among the faithful in the sacristy of St. Peter's Basilica to the point that the archbishop saying Mass actually turned to look over his shoulder at the unprecedented hiss and whispering of the congregation, and then moved out of the Basilica with the departing worshipers into the larger crowds of St. Peter's Square where eighty to a hundred thousand tourists and visiting Pax functionaries received the rumor like a critical mass of plutonium being slammed inward to full fission.

    Once out through the main vehicle gate of the Arch of Bells, the news accelerated to the speed of electrons, then leaped to the speed of light, and finally hurtled out and away from the planet Pacem at Hawking-drive velocities thousands of times faster than light.  Closer, just beyond the ancient walls of the Vatican, phones and comlogs chimed throughout the hulking, sweating Castel Sant'Angelo where the offices of the Holy Office of the Inquisition were buried deep in the mountain of stone originally built to be Hadrian's mausoleum.  All that morning there was the rattle of beads and rustle of starched cassocks as Vatican functionaries rushed back to their offices to monitor their encrypted net lines and to wait for memos from above.  Personal communicators rang, chimed, and vibrated in the uniforms and implants of thousands of Pax administrators, military commanders, politicians, and Mercantilus officials.  Within thirty minutes of the discovery of the Pope's lifeless body, news organizations around the world of Pacem were cued to the story: they readied their robotic holocams, brought their full panoply of in-system relay sats on-line, sent their best human reporters to the Vatican press office, and waited.  In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.

    Two hours and ten minutes after the discovery of Pope Julius XIV's body, the Church confirmed his death via an announcement through the office of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Lourdusamy.  Within seconds, the recorded announcement was tightcast to every radio and holovision on the teeming world of Pacem.  With its population of one and a half billion souls, all born-again Christians carrying the cruciform, most employed by the Vatican or the huge civilian, military, or mercantile bureaucracy of the Pax state, the planet Pacem paused to listen with some interest.  Even before the formal announcement, a dozen of the new archangel-class starships had left their orbital bases and translated across the small human sphere of the galaxy arm, their near-instantaneous drives instantly killing their crews but carrying their message of the Pope's death secure in computers and coded transponders for the sixty-some most important archdiocese worlds and star systems.  These archangel courier ships would carry a few of the voting cardinals back to Pacem in...
About the Author-
  • Dan Simmons, a full-time public school teacher until 1987, is one of the few writers who consistently work across genres, producing novels described as science fiction, horror, fantasy, and mainstream fiction, while winning major awards in all these fields. His first novel, Song of Kali, won the World Fantasy Award; his first science fiction novel, Hyperion, won the Hugo Award. His other novels and short fiction have been honored with numerous awards, including nine Locus Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, the French Prix Cosmos 2000, the British SF Association Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award. In 1995, Wabash College presented Simmons with an honorary doctorate in humane letters for his work in fiction and education. He lives in Colorado along the Front Range of the Rockies.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    July 31, 1997
    Is the adolescent girl Aenea actually the new messiah? What is the real nature of that enigmatic killing machine, the Shrike? What are the renegade TechnoCore's true plans for humanity and the galaxy? What destiny will Raul Endymion find among the stars? All the questions are finally answered in this concluding fourth volume of Simmons's award-winning Hyperion saga (Endymion, etc.). The resurgence of the dying Catholic Church after it discovers how to resurrect the dead turns out to have even more significance than its leaders realize. The technological miracle of faster-than-light travel is shown to have a dark side that could destroy the universe. And nothing is what it seems to be. Because his plotting has been so complex in the previous Hyperion books and because his cast of characters has grown so large, Simmons is forced to devote considerable space simply to recounting and explicating past events. Also problematic is Aenea's explanation of her messianic purpose. Her few concrete initiatives, including stopping certain misuses of technology and instituting political and religious freedom across the galaxy, seem plausible. Her larger message, however--an argument for the existence of love as a physical component of the universe on a par with electromagnetism and gravity--never gains substance. Simmons veers from plot summary and vague philosophy to some well-crafted action sequences. Readers of the preceding Hyperion novels will want to find out how everything turns out, but this volume does not stand steady on its own. Author tour.

  • The New York Times Book Review

    "One of the finest achievements of modern science fiction."

  • The New York Times Book Review "The Rise Of Endymion, like its predecessors, is a full-blooded action novel...distinguished from formulaic space opera by the magnitude of what is at stake--which is nothing less than the salvation of the human soul."
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The Rise of Endymion
Dan Simmons
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