Just Finished Reading Endymion by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons is beginning to become one of my favorite writers.  I read his standalone novel Drood, which is a historical drama featuring Charles Dickens, and have now just finished the third book in his four-part science fiction Hyperion Cantos series, titled Endymion.  This series was published back in the 1990s...it pains me a little to say "back in" to refer to that decade, which part of me still somehow sees as lying in the future (I was born in 1956).  But I digress...

It wasn't always so, but in recent years if one wants to be seen as a serious, competent science fiction writer, he or she had better display a pretty serious competency in science and technology...and in detail.  Alas, the days of Ray Bradbury and others successfully bluffing their way through stories pretending knowledge that they did not have are over, but at least with Dan Simmons, there is no cause for concern: this guy, if he is bluffing about his scientific prowess, then he sure as heck fooled me.  As a matter of fact, there has been so much futuristic science and technology info injected into this series...especially the first two books...that at times I felt like screaming at the author "OK, you win...now can we please just go forward with the story?"...but then again, these are the times we live in: had Simmons done as I wished, the veteran sci-fi readers out there probably would have crucified him for it.  In any case, book number three, titled Endymion, finally got down to a reasonable narrative with a stable cast of characters I could follow...I guess by that time Simmons felt he had already proven what a hotshot scientific dude he was...

As is the case with other series, Dan Simmons has created his own future universe with humanity branching off into two groups: the Ousters...the first wave to settle space and which adapted themselves to their new homes, and the Hegemonists...people who transplanted their own cultures to different worlds and terraformed them to their own tastes.  These two groups were at war with one another, and the Hegemonists were heavily dependent on highly advanced artificial intelligence with its own consciousness...an idea later adopted in the Matrix movie series...which provided them with "farcasters": portals through which people could instantaneously travel from one world to another.  The first two books dealt with the fate of the Hegemonists, the Technocore...as that artificial intelligence was collectively called...and those farcasters.  Endymion begins nearly three hundred years after the end of the previous book...but once again we're back on the "outback" planet of Hyperion, featured in books one and two, but with a new force of humanity to reckon with: the Pax...

The problem with describing the setting and situation of the third book of a series that is cumulative in nature...i.e. everything depends directly on what happened in the preceding two volumes...is that just about any effort I make in that regard is bound to spoil the stories revealed in those early books...so I'll refrain from doing so.  After all, I think this is a very good, modern science fiction series and would recommend anyone interested in this genre to invest some time reading it.  I was especially gratified by the compelling, diverse, and memorable characters...from the pilgrims to Hyperion to the Hegemony CEO to the Keats cybrids to Endymion's Raul, Aenea, Bettik, and Father de Soya.  Brilliant character development, but that's what I've grown to expect from great writers...as a matter of fact, it's not their expertise within whatever genre they are writing in but how they make the people in them seem real and invite an empathetic response from the reader that gives them that greatness.  Besides the characters and the plot in Hyperion Cantos, there is also a good amount of deep philosophical discussion going on...as well as some pretty intense poetry!  I guess by all this you can see that Dan Simmons has won me over...that's good, because he's written quite a few other books by now for me to read.  But for the time being, I'm starting on the final book of this series, titled Rise of Endymion...