The novel “The Rise of Endymion” by Dan Simmons was published for the first time in 1997. It’s the fourth book of the Hyperion Cantos and is the sequel to “Endymion“.

Pope Julius XIV is dead and they have to proceed to a new conclave. When Lenar Hoyt resurrects again, he gets re-elected pope but this time decides to take a different name and becomes Pope Urban XVI. As his first act, he announces a crusade against the Ousters with a new fleet of Archangel class starships.

Raul Endymion is on Earth with Aenea but it comes time to resume their journeys. The two of them must separate for a certain period and the trip creates between the two of them a time lag so when they meet again  on the planet T’ien Shan Aenea is 21 years old. There Aenea is considered a messianic or even a divine figure but the most difficult part of her journey is still to come.

“The Rise of Endymion” is the second part of a novel formed together with “Endymion”. The protagonist Raul Endymion keeps on telling his story in the first person during his imprisonment while the other parts of the book, related to the operations within the Catholic Church, are told in the third person.

The book begins with important changes that start the last phase of the hunt for Aenea, the daughter of Brawne Lamia and the cybrid John Keats, but also to the Catholic Church’s war against the Ousters. It’s a strong start that gives a good pace and a dramatic tone to the Hyperion Cantos’ final book.

The story of Federico de Soya also continues. He had fallen into disgrace after failing his mission to capture Aenea. After spending a period in a kind of exile, he gets called into service again to command one of the new starships of the Pax, the Catholic Church’s army.

The changes also affect the relationship between Raul Endymion and Aenea when they meet again on the planet T’ien Shan after a period of separation. Aenea has become a young woman and this makes things between her and Raul very different than when she was a little girl. It’s not a surprise because the evolution of their relationship was one of the anticipations told by Raul in his memoirs.

The planet T’ien Shan is a key place where various forces meet and collide in a dramatic crescendo up to the grand finale of the story. It’s also the place where Aenea lives for a certain period working with the young Dalai Lama and this allows Dan Simmons to develop the most philosophical parts of all the Hyperion Cantos.

The mystical-religious element is present from the beginning in the Cantos but it’s particularly developed in “The Rise of Endymion”. Despite the war between the Pax and the Ousters and the hunt for Aenea, a good part of the last book is about philosophical and theological discussions among the characters. This adds depth to the story and different characters but sometimes slows down the pace and I understand that someone might not like this element.

I think Dan Simmons develops this part of the story well expanding the foundations of the narrative universe of the Cantos and is clever at using concepts such as the Void Which Binds and love as a fundamental force of the universe without being corny. On the other hand, he makes certain elements of the story more vague.

In “The Fall of Hyperion” explanations were provided about the existing factions within the TechnoCore, about the creation of the Shrike and the John Keats cybrids. In “The Rise of Endymion” Dan Simmons makes things more complex and not only about the TechnoCore but the impression is that he avoided precise explanations because they would be in contradiction with the previous ones.

Despite this problem, in my opinion overall “The Rise of Endymion” is a book in which you can see the narrative strength of the first two again. For this reason, I believe that some negative opinions about the second novel are due to the flaws of “Endymion”, which seems a bit stretched to allow splitting the novel into two parts just like the first. “Hyperion” had its own autonomous strength because its stories could work on their own, “Endymion” is the first half of a novel that needs the second part to work and has some flaws.

In “The Rise of Endymion” I found again the dramatic feeling of the first two books. At the end of “Endymion” the cyborg Rhadamanth Nemes was introduced, who in the last book helps to raise the level of the fight together with her siblings but all the story leads to the showdown.

Aenea’s story is in part anticipated thanks to her ability to predict the possible future. Precisely for this reason, in “The Rise of Endymion” the sense of threat becomes stronger and stronger until the violent end. It’s a really brutal ending, not in a gratuitous way but because that violence is in the nature of hyperparasites such as the factions that use it.

For these reasons, I believe that “The Rise of Endymion” is a worthy final book for the Hyperion Cantos. I think Dan Simmons wrote a climatic conclusion for this saga so I recommend reading its third and fourth book too.