Sci-Fi

After a short break for recovery, we’re back with part two of the Dan Simmons novel The Rise of Endymion from 1997. After far too many weeks, Danielle is back, and so is our far more optimistic guest co-host Filip from the Mind Duck Books podcast. The first thing our intrepid hosts attempt to recall is how the story started in the previous episode. It is a surprisingly difficult challenge for all three of the hosts, and it’s unclear if that has more to do with the time since the last episode, or the story itself. Considering the opening of this episode has our first ever correction on the podcast, we’ll let you be the judge. As Sam dives into this new episode we open with the reappearance of the Shrike! It’s back on Mars and dropping sick beats and ripping the cruciforms out of people. Meanwhile, Raul is suffering tremendous pain which turns out to be a hilariously dramatic kidney stone. He’s staying with a local religious group with a name that’s hard to spell and harder to say, and spends most of his time in drug induced dreams that are heavy on exposition. Also meanwhile, Father Captain de Soya is on the forefront of the crusade against the Ousters, and it is so brutal and cruel that, unsurprisingly, de Soya has second thoughts. That’s all well and good, but the real surprise of this episode is how thoroughly Filip’s optimism withers over the course of the story when confronted with all the amazing nonsense thrown at him. We promise that’s fun and not depressing!

Special thanks to friend of the pod and honorary co-host Filip from Mind Duck Books for joining us on this thrilling journey! Find Mind Duck Books on Twitter @mindduckbooks, Instagram @mindduckbooks, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Sam finally begins the final part of the the Hyperion Cantos with the 1997 book The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons. It’s finally here! The last book in the absolutely bonkers Hyperion series, and in desperate need of help our intrepid hosts have called in Filip from the Mind Duck Books podcast for much needed moral support. We kick off with Danielle doing a frankly astonishingly good summary of the previous book to catch everyone up. Still, Filip does have a few questions that Sam has no answers for, of course. The book begins with the pope dying and being, inevitably, resurrected in some possibly retconned way where Paul Duré resurrects first but is then murdered by Cardinal Lourdusamy. Regardless, Hoyt is reelected pope and declares a crusade on the Ousters! This greatly upsets the newly reinstated Father Captain de Soya, but he takes command of one of the new Arch Angel warships anyway. Meanwhile, Aenea and Raul are on Earth, it’s been three years, and Aenea’s mentor, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, has just died. Aenea declares the architect camp experiment on the Earth over, and tells the other apprentices that they must return to the Pax and risk death because… Well, she never really says why, but it sure seems important. Then she gives Raul an abbreviated biography of the real Frank Lloyd Wright for yet more inscrutable reasons. After that, she tells Raul he needs to go alone back down the Tethys river in a kayak to find the ship they crashed, and then meet her and A. Bettik later. Raul is unhappy about this, but sets off down the Mississippi anyway to begin his journey. Back in the Pax, not only is the Pax fleet anticipating the return of Aenea, so is the TechnoCore, which has dispatched four what are essentially terminators, including Rhadamanth Nemes, to kill her. The Pax Mercantilus is also looking to nab Aenea so they can engage in some political machinations and replace the Vatican as the ally of the TechnoCore. Does this book need yet more plots now involving complex political schemes? No, but it sure is fun! In conclusion, Sam is super angry we don’t spend more time with the Ousters.

Special thanks to friend of the pod and honorary co-host Filip from Mind Duck Books for joining us on this thrilling journey! Find Mind Duck Books on Twitter @mindduckbooks, Instagram @mindduckbooks, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s finally here, the finale of the 1996 Dan Simmons novel Endymion! Where we last left off, Father Captain de Soya had been called back to Pacem to receive new orders and a new crew member. It turns out the pope has been having visions from “God” that have told him the location of Aenea on Sol Draconi Septem. The pope is also declaring a crusade against the ousters, and everyone knows crusades are always a good idea. The new crew member, Rhadamanth Nemes, is a type of super solider being created for this crusade, though de Soya has reservations. Meanwhile, Raul an the others are still with Father Glaucus waiting to make their trek across the wraith infested surface to the next Farcaster portal. The Chichatuk return and they gear up, finally ready to face the wraiths (a name Danielle still has massive issues with). Anyway, they cross the surface and leave through the Farcaster never having even seen a wraith, and Sam is incoherent with frustration. Just after they leave, de Soya and his crew arrive in the system, but while he’s still resurrecting, the obviously non-human Nemes heads down to the surface to try and murder Aenea. She uses the same kind of silver skin-suit that Kassad and Moneta had, and she gets to work, murdering Glaucus and the Chichatuk, and shooting flashlight beams out of her mouth much to the delight of both our hosts. Sam is ecstatic that here, in the last part of the book, the plot has finally shown up in full force, and things only ramp up from there as the story races towards an exciting conclusion, then smashes into a wall with a bizarre coda. Honestly, it’s the best that could have been hoped for.

This week Sam brings the penultimate episode of his deep dive into the 1996 Dan Simmons novel Endymion. When we last left off, it was implied the our hero Raul was dead, thought this was obviously not the case. This part open with us learning how Raul escaped death, both at the hands of the human Pax soldiers, and the jaws of the rainbow sharks. Although well armed, Raul refuses to shoot any of them (sharks or people) but that’s okay, Aenea and A. Bettik have swum out to where Raul was drifting in the infinite ocean to save him, so no worries. The trio escapes through the Farcaster portal and find themselves on Hebron. There no signs of life, in fact it looks to have been recently abandoned in a hurry. Raul is infected with something he picked up in the ocean, so they spend a few weeks recuperating before moving on. After the next portal, they emerge in a vast, but quite sealed, cave of ice on a planet so cold that the atmosphere is broken. This about breaks the limit of Sam’s ability to suspend disbelief, and is quite angry that everyone isn’t already dead. Meanwhile, Father Captain de Soya conducts a thorough, but inconclusive, investigation on Mare Infinitus. He determines that Raul was there, and has identified him by fingerprint, but not much else. He decides it’s time for him and his crew to venture to an Ouster controlled world to find Aenea, and wouldn’t you know it, he picks Hebron. But psych! They never make it there as their ship is pursued by Ousters and makes run for it before they can be resurrected. De Soya wakes up on Pacem, where he faces a very brief inquisition before being told he’s being sent back out on his search again. Meanwhile, Raul comes up with an incredibly stupid plan to escape the ice cave that, even more incredibly, some how works. This leads to yet more dead-ends until they abandon the raft and explore the tunnels through the ice. It’s here they encounter humans living on this world, but will they be friendly or dangerous? (Friendly, immediately they are extremely friendly, sorry for the not-so-spoiler). So join us for possibly the angriest Sam has ever been at a media piece he’s presented. Fun!

This week Sam brings us part four of Dan Simmons’ 1996 book Endymion. It’s been a while, but we’re back with more Hyperion! It’s been so long, in fact, that Danielle has completely forgotten everything that happened in the previous episode including the title, though to be fair, there wasn’t really all that much going on. Raul, Aenea and A. Bettik are all trapped on some mysterious jungle world after barely escaping the Pax by fleeing through the hitherto non-functional Farcaster portal. The Shrike makes a brief cameo, but immediately leaves without dropping any sick beats, which is a huge disappointment. Aenea and crew decide to raft down the river to the next Farcaster, which gives Raul time to feel paternal towards Aenea, which is just all kinds of gross given what we know of their future. They get caught in a storm and “Yee-haw!” a bit, as you do, before finally ending up through the other portal and onto Mare Infinitus. Their big plan is to drift aimlessly across the infinite ocean and hope they come across the next Farcaster portal. Infuriatingly, this works. However, Raul needs to make a brief detour to distract some nearby Pax so they can sneak by. Meanwhile, Father-Captain de Soya and his crew spend two months hopping around to eight different planets, and Sam insists on telling Danielle about each one, even if they don’t matter, because he loves sharing the pain. Eventually, de Soya comes to Mare Infinitus where he hears about an attack a few months ago by a single man. This, de Soya correctly concludes, was Raul, and he’s delighted to have his first lead in months. Unfortunately, Raul was killed in the attack, or at least the book tries to make it look that way, but since Raul is the one “writing” the book, it’s not much of a fake-out. So join us as we delve deep into the relationship between Raul and Aenea, and into more Keats poetry and philosophy (finally!), and, most importantly, try to find out just why we’re being told about those fly-cycles!

We’re back in record time with part three of the 1996 Dan Simmons novel Hyperion. Danielle makes a much better showing this time, recapping the previous episode with aplomb. After letting Aenea escape after emerging from the Time Tombs, Father Captain de Soya is regrouping in the Parvati system with his Swiss Guard commandos to capture Aenea when she arrives. During the journey, Aenea and Raul spend some quality, and slightly creepy, time together. Skinny dipping is involved. Anyway, Aenea essentially improvises a plan where she threatens to kill everyone on her ship if de Soya doesn’t let her escape. Not willing to risk it, de Soya agrees, but then just tracks them to their next destination in Renaissance Vector, a heavily fortified Pax world, so it doesn’t seem like much was accomplished by this whole gambit. While waiting again for their arrival, de Soya starts having dreams about Aenea as his daughter, and this is where Danielle starts feeling completely over this whole story. Really, it only gets more infuriating from there, as the method in which the ragtag crew lead by a child escape yet again is absolute nonsense. It may be short, but this episode is especially dense with nonsense, raising perhaps the biggest question of the series so far: How the heck is the river Tethys still flowing?

After a spooky hiatus, Sam is back with more of the 1996 novel Endymion. The biggest fallout for Sam’s diversion into Slugs is that poor Danielle is left completely unable to recall anything that happened in the first part of Endymion. Luckily, not much went down, so it’s on to part two! Father Captain de Soya has returned to Pacem, and after a brief resurrection and Mass, he meets with some of the top brass of the Church. He’s informed that the Pax somehow knows that Brawne’s daughter Aenea is scheduled to emerge from the Time Tombs in the near future. De Soya is tasked to retrieve the child when she appears, or pursue the child wherever she goes until he does capture her, and then return her to Pacem. De Soya is assured that no harm will come to her, only that she will be saved. Despite finding that not so reassuring, de Soya heads out to take command of Pax forces to capture a child. Back in Endymion, Endymion (the person) is back from exploring the city. During dinner, Martin assures Raul that he’s going to be grossly outmatched and outgunned in his attempt to rescue Aenea. However, Martin has a secret weapon, that just happens to be the same secret weapon that always appears: the old Hawking mat! So Raul grabs his apparently essential tricorn hat, hops on the mat, and speeds through the labyrinth to sneak into Time Tomb valley. In the valley itself, de Soya readies his troops as a massive sandstorm rolls in, which can only mean one thing: DJ Shrike is on his way! So the big questions remain: Will Raul rescue Aenea? Can they escape the Pax? Will Danielle remember any of this next time? Hopefully we’ll find out!