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![[Endymion]]( ../images/endymion.gif)
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If John Keats was turning over in his grave when Dan Simmons resurrected him as a "cybrid" in The Fall of Hyperion, he's doing cartwheels now that he's got a teenage daughter in Endymion, whose fate it is to save the galaxy from an unholy alliance of Church and Software.
In this third novel of the Hyperion saga-which promises to be a tetralogy, at least-Simmons picks up the history of his monumentally imagined universe nearly three centuries after the apocalypse he engineered at the end of the second novel. What makes this sequel so delicious is its gleeful conceit of a Catholic Church that has literally come to its Nicene fruition: universal acceptance by billions of faithful on hundreds of worlds. In the tradition of Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s sci-fi classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Simmons's futuristic Church power is of a peculiarly medieval order: at once cruel, corrupt, and beneficent to the masses, who now enjoy the blessing of an eighth sacrament, most miraculous of all-bodily resurrection.
What makes the miracle possible? A parasitic cruciform creature, which, when applied to the human body, makes it virtually death-resistant. The bargain is a Faustian one, however: the miracle comes compliments of an insidious Internet-run-amok called TechnoCore, which has been planning its dominion over humanity for centuries. (The great Fall of Hyperion of the preceding novel constituted the first effort by humans to thwart that cybermegalomania.)
And now it falls to Aenea, John Keats's daughter, to unyoke humanity from its strange and unwitting thralldom. In a fantastic combination of Huckleberry Finn and The Wizard of Oz, she embarks on a raft adventure down a river with portals to different worlds, accompanied by a rough-and-ready young fellow with a heart of gold (the Endymion of the title) and a blue-skinned android.
It is impossible to sum up the breadth of Simmons's stunningly realized cosmos in a brief review. Comparisons to sci-fi epics like Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune simply donŐt work. While Asimov and Herbert may have the surer touch with dialogue and character development, Simmons is a pure conjurer. With a few verbal brush strokes, Simmons has us taking for granted things which, sentences before, were positively unimaginable to us. The immediacy of Simmons's writing is breathtaking: so little has to be explained to the reader (here's where Simmons is superior to anyone working in the genre, past or present) because it's all so real already, sprung Athena-like from his head-time tombs, farcaster portals, forest, ice, and ocean worlds, and all the rest.
The founding principle of this series of novels reveals everything one needs to know about its nature. "Hyperion" and "Endymion" are poems by Keats based on Greek mythology. What is more, they are acts of mythopoesis, or myth-making, in themselves, boldly attesting to the primacy of imagination in human affairs. The Romantic idea that nothing is real unless imagined found poignant voice in John Keats. Its current avatar, on the grandest scale, is Dan Simmons.
Michael Alec Rose is a music professor at Vanderbilt University.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.