El ascenso de Endymion

Nick Barlow reviewed The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons (Hyperion)

The future of humanity is at stake? Yes, but have you considered my manpain?

2 stars

I enjoyed the first part of this, when things that had been set up in the previous books were finally paying off and there was a sense of things coming to a crisis point out of anyone's control. Then the plot skipped forwards a few years and we had to focus on Raul's whining for far too long. The main revelations all come about through someone infodumping them because we can't reveal them through plot when all that space is being taken up by Raul having a crisis because while he's having wonderful, amazing, sex with the girl he's known since she was 11 (and yes, ewww to that whole thing) she might have had a relationship with someone else, and we can't have her having her own agency. Then we might have to treat her as a character, not a plot function, and that won't do. Add in a …

I enjoyed the first part of this, when things that had been set up in the previous books were finally paying off and there was a sense of things coming to a crisis point out of anyone's control. Then the plot skipped forwards a few years and we had to focus on Raul's whining for far too long. The main revelations all come about through someone infodumping them because we can't reveal them through plot when all that space is being taken up by Raul having a crisis because while he's having wonderful, amazing, sex with the girl he's known since she was 11 (and yes, ewww to that whole thing) she might have had a relationship with someone else, and we can't have her having her own agency. Then we might have to treat her as a character, not a plot function, and that won't do. Add in a few descriptions that come close to "she breasted boobily into the room" and it's yet another SF "classic" that shows just how little the male domination of the field was questioned.

Jon PENNYCOOK reviewed The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons (Hyperion)

Review of 'The Rise of Endymion' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

Stop after reading the first two books of the Hyperion Cantos. The second two books throw away the original storyline, rather like a modern reboot of some classic film.
The two "Endymion" books are very repetitive - they move to a new planet, bad stuff happens, they move on. There are enormous, boring, infodumps about a Christian sect, a Buddhist sect, and sex between the two main characters. The world building is excessive - nothing is left to the imagination. The explanation for why the name of the magic carpet should not be capitalised was boring in its repetitiveness.
In order to rescue a story going nowhere, magic is invoked. Also, wherever the author can't deal with continuity from the previous novels, the narrator implies that the original narrator didn't really know what was going on, which seems lazy.
Apparently love is the key to everything, and it has magical …

Stop after reading the first two books of the Hyperion Cantos. The second two books throw away the original storyline, rather like a modern reboot of some classic film.
The two "Endymion" books are very repetitive - they move to a new planet, bad stuff happens, they move on. There are enormous, boring, infodumps about a Christian sect, a Buddhist sect, and sex between the two main characters. The world building is excessive - nothing is left to the imagination. The explanation for why the name of the magic carpet should not be capitalised was boring in its repetitiveness.
In order to rescue a story going nowhere, magic is invoked. Also, wherever the author can't deal with continuity from the previous novels, the narrator implies that the original narrator didn't really know what was going on, which seems lazy.
Apparently love is the key to everything, and it has magical effects, and many characters are in love with others that the characters lack depth.
This use of magic reminds me of a Sherri S Tepper novel. Also like Tepper's works, the males are fairly useless or evil.
The books also have similarities to The Door Into Summer by Robert A Heinlein, with the cat replaced by an android.

Perhaps the "Endymion" books might work as Young Adult fiction.