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The Rise of Endymion, Dan Simmons, Bantam Doubleday Dell:
The plot of this and Endymion is an annoying construction that depends on a supposedly important character keeping mum for most of the book. That aside, it's an OK read. Aenea, Raul, and the other students at Neo Frank Lloyd Wright's artist's commune on Earth have to leave when NFLW dies. Raul goes back onto the galaxy-spanning river Tethys, now back in limited service for purposes of advancing the story only. Earth too, come to think of it. Aenea goes off somewhere else, she's not telling. After a measured dose of adventure and misadventure, Raul meets up again with Aeanea on Neo-Tibet, and eventually the galactic government comes chasing them, a chase which continues right up until the conclusion, which reminded me of Broken Saints, except with a much more conventional resolution. Sorry, Aenea, you are the Messiah.
Among Aenea's concerns are the fact that human civilization has advanced so little in the thousand years since the galaxy was settled that it even has something like Neo-Tibet. Also Neo-Rome, Neo-Israel, Neo-Arabia, and Neo-New-Zealand. They don't call them that, but they might as well. To some extent the Church that has replaced the Hegemony from the Hyperion books, the Pax that replaces FORCE, and the TechnoCore that plays the TechnoCore, except really stupid, are all part of an effort to stave off an actually interesting science fictional future. We see bits of it with the Ousters, the Templars (a sort of direct-action interstellar Sierra Club), and some aliens who have all pitched in to create amazing megastructures that probably wouldn't work as described, but it's the thought that counts.
When I started reading this, I was mostly struck by how all 4 books show the usual collision science fiction experiences with the sheer scale of the Milky Way. They're obliged to posit two different kinds of faster-than-light travel, because slower-than-light travel involves spans of time so far out of human scale that you can't really write about them. So there's some kind of warp drive that involves time-dilation, extremely mild but still inconvenient, and "farcasting", instantaneous but requiring a lot of setup. All this so that one of them (guess which one) can stop working at the end of The Fall of Hyperion and enable the events in the next 2 books. It's quite instructive, in an indirect way.