At least we finally learn the backstory behind the TechnoCore, the cruciform, and other mysteries. Thankfully, he never goes into detail about their bowel habits, but this novel could easily be cut by half without doing any harm.
Also, after Aenea and Raul are reunited after years of time debt, they have a lot of sex, and Simmons indulges us with every raunchy detail.
For example, after arriving on an unknown world, we spend thirty minutes hearing about the sky, rolling storms, and Raul’s tiresome, Aenea-obsessed, internal dialogue. There is so much rambling in this novel that I was often tempted to skip ahead. While Simmons does this in the other novels of the cantos, this one is the worst. This is largely a predictable milieu story that goes into enormous detail describing people, places, and tangential events that are better left to the imagination while failing to follow through for the most important events. This is a series of immense ideas and mind-bending scope. If you are a fan of science fiction, this series has it all: time travel, space battles, realistic physics and limitations in space travel, artificial intelligence, and, yes, a sweeping romance. Though the Cantos is most definitely a polemic against organized religion, and Roman Catholicism in particular, Simmons shows a surprising gentleness to the church in the series' resolution, and allows the reader to draw their own conclusions about whether the church saved its own soul or not. This is epic sci fi at its very best: imagining an all-too plausible future universe where people struggle with age-old conundrums and ever-evolving moral responsibilities, shadowed by the persistent anxiety of man versus his machines. But this is a good thing, as it heightens the mystery of his universe and spurs the reader to imagine what will happen next after the final paragraph.
There are resolutions, big reveals, and shocking twists a-plenty, but Simmons still leaves a some things in the shadows, only partly explained. This is the crowning finale to Dan Simmons' sprawling Hyperion Cantos.
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