The Rise of Endymion

Plot

More than 275 years after the Hegemony of Man collapsed—that old interstellar network built on farcaster portals—the Roman Catholic Church runs things through a theocratic body called the Pax. The Church and the Pax are in secret cahoots with the TechnoCore, which supplies cruciforms that let people resurrect and live forever. But the Core is terrified of Aenea, the half-human, half-AI daughter who could wreck its grip on the 31st century. Hyperion has been swallowed by the Pax, but other planets push back, with independence movements cropping up wherever different religions or philosophies survive.

Raul Endymion sits in prison, writing down everything he remembers about his time with Aenea. On Pacem, Lenar Hoyt—now Pope Urban XVI—declares a fresh Crusade against the Ousters. Father de Soya can’t stomach the killing of Ouster children and leads a mutiny. Back on Old Earth, Aenea teaches people about something called the Void which Binds. When she turns sixteen, she orders Raul to leave Earth and grab the Consul’s ship. Over on God’s Grove, three cyborgs pull Radamanth Nemes out of storage, and the four of them nearly catch Raul, but the Shrike gets in the way. Raul finds the ship. A trip to the Buddhist world T’ien Shan racks up a five-year time debt, so Aenea is twenty-one when they finally meet again.

On T’ien Shan, Raul and Aenea become lovers. She tells him that lots of folks on the planets she visited have taken communion from her. That communion carries a virus that gives them access to the Void which Binds and makes them unable to host a cruciform. Then she drops a bombshell: while they were apart, she married someone else and had a child, living with them for two years. Raul is crushed. Aenea freecasts the Consul’s ship away from T’ien Shan, using the Void to travel without any portal. They end up at an Ouster Dyson Sphere, where Raul meets Het Masteen and Fedmahn Kassad—two Hyperion pilgrims who died in other timelines. There he learns the ugly truth: cruciform resurrection drains energy from the Void, damaging it permanently, and the Core murders people whenever it needs more neural processing power.

Characters

Aenea is a young woman born to the human Brawne Lamia and an artificial intelligence that took the persona of the poet John Keats. She is frequently called a messiah, acting as a teacher and a figure of semi-religious significance. Her death as a martyr serves as the spark that brings down the Pax. Raul Endymion, once a shepherd who wandered Hyperion, is brought into Aenea’s service by the poet Martin Silenus and eventually becomes her romantic partner. Father Captain Federico de Soya, a priest in the Catholic Church and an officer in the Pax Fleet, was originally sent to capture Aenea in the earlier novel Endymion. After saving her life, he was sent into exile on MadredeDios and lost his command, but at the start of this story he is recalled to duty. He rebels a second time after seeing the Pax Fleet commit atrocities and rejects the cruciform. A. Bettik is an android who was born centuries before the Farcasters fell in the 29th century. He spent hundreds of years as a laborer on Hyperion and later worked for Martin Silenus. After Raul befriends him, he joins Aenea on her journey. At the story’s end, it is revealed that Bettik is actually an observer from an advanced alien race, one that also makes use of the Void Which Binds. Cardinal Simon Augustino Lourdusamy serves as the Vatican’s Secretary of State and is the real power behind Pope Urban XVI. He orchestrates the hunt for Aenea and, with the Pope’s approval, plans a crusade against the Ousters. Father Lenar Hoyt, a key figure from Hyperion, was among the final pilgrims to that world and carries both his own cruciform and that of Father Paul Duré. After the Fall of the Farcasters, he has served as Pope multiple times, reigning as Urban XVI during this novel. Cardinal John Domenico Mustafa holds the office of Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Office. He is one of the most powerful cardinals and does not belong to Lourdusamy’s faction. He personally looks into the Shrike’s massacres on Mars and acts as the Church’s direct agent in the search for Aenea on T’ien Shan. He clashes with TechnoCore forces twice: first wounded by Nemes, then killed by Albedo.

Reception and awards

Critics generally liked the book, though not without reservations. The New York Times hailed the whole series as a major modern sci-fi achievement, highlighting its grand scale, worldbuilding, and thoughtful take on science versus faith. Publishers Weekly enjoyed the action but found the plot needlessly tangled and Aenea’s motives poorly explained. Some reviewers felt the story suffered from excessive background detail and insufficient forward momentum, though they credited the author’s inventiveness. The novel took home the 1998 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and was a finalist for that year’s Hugo Award.