Endymion

Do you get giddy when reading loving descriptions of Renaissance Italian art and about Vatican imbroglios in the morally bankrupt Borgia style, coupled with hand wavey space opera stuff and gestures to FREAKY ALIENS? Are your two favorite character archetypes the rakish rogue type a la Han Solo and the fussy, tortured monk warrior type a la Obi Wan Kenobi? Do you think the creepy hive mind-educated little kid queen from Dune is one of the best parts of Dune? Do you like pulpy fun stuff? My friend, do I have the book for you.

In its best moments, it achieves Miyazaki or Moebius moments of weird, imaginative space opera. In its worst, it's crack trash that is hard to put down (well, except for some of the middle chapters that feel repetitive). Dan Simmons clearly had fun writing this. I had fun reading it. Much fun was had by all.

De plot
I wasn't sure how Simmons could continue after Fall of Hyperion, which basically ended with the Hyperion civilization, as we knew it, ending in one cataclysmic tornado of AI godheads, freaky aliens, and hallucinatory waterfalls into space. Several characters went to very mysterious ends, and I was sure that unveiling their destinies would convert all those bangs to whimpers. So Simmons doesn't. Instead, we stay in the newly-changed human universe, fast-forward 270 years to a galaxy now dominated by a Roman Catholic/Papal Dark Ages empire where people wear the creepy “cruciform” parasites, thus allowing (almost) everyone constant resurrection, and pray to various Catholic saints about never ever resurrecting AIs. We meet a backwater rogue, Raul Endymion (a young Harrison Ford?), in a bar fight (well, sorta). He's recruited by an old sage to protect a magical little girl, Aenea, who will be coming out of the Time Tombs' magical time portal in 48 hours and promises to be the usual sci-fi Chosen One/Messiah/One Who Teaches/blaahhhhh blah.

Meanwhile, the Vatican recruits the compassionate, disciplined torchship (?) priest-captain, Father Captain Federico de Soya (Luigi lo Cascio? Nino Manfredi? Silvio Orlando? Roberto Benigni? OK, well, maybe not Benigni...) to go hunt Aenea as well. There are many inventive scenes of action and gore (including marvelous appearances by everyone's favorite monsters made out of spikes - The Shrike! - and a Terminator-style commando (ahem) “hell-woman”), much fetishization of Catholic aesthetics and cyberpunk aesthetics, and a super obviously Americo-centric POV of the far future (year 3000+).

It is all very fun. And this is all recycled sci-fi stuff: the space Dark Ages with the (Catholic) Church as humanity's protector of data and information, encircled by jerkface ghosts in the machine, plus Han Solo, Dune, and ‘murca.

Dispassionate critical response
And now, allow me a loving paean to Father Captain Federico de Soya. They introduce de Soya as a compassionate, tormented warrior-priest with a heart of gold and IRON CLAD DISCIPLINE over his adorable crises of faith (since he's in the villain role, being the pursuer). I loved this guy so much I, first, became exasperated every time I had to switch back to the (much less interesting) Raul-Aenea-android storyline and, second, immediately searched my Kindle version of Rise of Endymion to make sure he appears in that too (no spoilers). Oh, de Soya! You so great. If you notice any de Soya fanfic appearing on the Internet in the near future... yeah, that'll be me. Sigh, de Soya! If you made a smoothie of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Man of La Mancha, that one movie with Nino Manfredi, all my personal love of Rome, Renaissance stuff, Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition, medieval stuff, and everything else I love about 15th-16th century shit, you would have de Soya. And I mean a literal smoothie of grist and gore, as that's how he spends half the book, thanks to the (incidentally hilarious) technology of super fast velocities coupled with hand wavey magical space resurrection voodoo. Did I mention I love this book?

Informed sci-fi fan/writerly response
What is it about the genre that provokes authors to write endless, interminable series where book 1 is an eye-popping masterpiece, and books 2 through infinity are of exponentially decreasing quality, rapidly approaching zero? Gateway, Ender's Game, Dune - they're all wonderful, and they all have like a billion shitty sequels. So I approach always with a long pointy stick. Hyperion was super inventive and great, super not embarrassing to recommend to non-sci-fi friends. Fall of Hyperion was approached with trepidation... and was OK! Still reasonable! Endymion (or, Hyperion 3: More Hyperion) was approached with even more trepidation... and I was shocked! It's still OK! Maybe even a bit better! Very different from Hyperion though. Warning.

Anyway, yeah. A big guilty pleasure. Enjoy!