ESCAPE TIME!  with KC Heath

ENDYMION
Dan Simmons
Bantam Spectra 1996
Paperback 563 pgs
ISBN#  0-553-57294-6

 

How would you like to go for a swim in zero-g during an interstellar voyage?  This incredibly imaginative, fun reading adventure, part of Simmons' continuing Hyperion saga, will blast you through time and space from the Valley of the Time Tombs on Hyperion, via C-plus Hawking drive to Renaissance Vector, crashing through long dead farcaster portals to the many worlds of the River Tethys and beyond. 

More than two hundred and fifty years after the Fall of the Hegemony, extreme political power now rests with the Catholic Church which has discovered resurrection for their populace in the cruciform symbiote.  Torchship captain Father de Soya has been ordered by Pope Julius XIV (a many times resurrected Lenar Hoyt) to take a squad of Swiss Guard on the archangel ship Raphael on a mission to capture Aenea, whom he fears to be an agent for the TechnoCore.  This expedition is painful in the extreme for the Father Captain and his comrades because their craft defies time and space, rupturing the light-speed barrier and all who reside within (the passengers are turned to "raspberry jelly").  After each fatal trip these Christians are resurrected in creches, and find themselves days ahead of their prey with ample time to set powerful traps.

Hero Raul Endymion has likewise been given a mission, an absurdly impossible mission by the ancient poet Martin Silenus (who is kept alive by Poulsen treatments): Take the dead Counsel's fragmented-memory AI ship, hawking mat, and the android Bettik; find and bring back Old Earth, find out what the TechnoCore is up to and stop them; topple the Pax theocracy; and protect the twelve-year-old girl Aenea (orphaned offspring of Shrike Pilgrim Brawne Lamia and the cloned renegade cybrid John Keats) who is just now emerging from the Time Sphinx.

And who is Aenea?  Is she a cybernetic deity, the fledgling Ultimate Intelligence spawned by warring factions of the TechnoCore?  Or the messianic key to human spiritual evolution?  And why is the deadly Shrike protecting her?

A definite must read for all Simmons fans as well as anyone wanting a hi-tech armchair adventure that's out of this world!