On 2/14/06, Jim Sharkey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hrm. I think after reading the Endymion books I'd have to add a > fourth line, wherein the Shrike is there to protect Aenea, possibly > sent by those in the Void. Though it could be an intercepted and > altered Shrike from the UIs, or sent by the human UI to defend its > third part.
The difficulty with this is, what was that fourth Shrike doing while the other three were messing around with the pilgrims and various political situations? I'd suggest that this was the Reaper faction AI- since when you think about it, what Aenea did was to upset the status quo, rip the TechnoCore out of their comfortable dead-end evolutionary niche (forcing them out into unsearched evolutionary fitness landscapes, laden with Lions and Tigers, and Bears oh my!); which is exactly what Ray's reaper functions did on a smaller scale. > The other three you listed make reasonable sense; however, I will > admit that I never considered the various Shrikes to be separate > timelines as much as they were foci in the war to establish one > future. That is, they were developed by one faction then co-opted by > the various factions in their struggles. That makes sense too- one Shrike and one set of Time Tombs, not a couple co-valent ones phasing in and out, if that makes sense- intermittently controlled by different factions. I'm not completely sure because I seem to remember some incidents which had to take place simultaneously, but since I can't remember what those were, I'll drop this. > What I found interesting about the first two books was not the SF > portions of it nearly as much as the *human* portions. The stories of > the pilgrims were all gripping, and that's what I liked about Hyperion > more than the future conflicts and all. It was the people in the > books, not the events surrounding them, that really spoke to me. In > fact, to some extent Simmons' insistent EYKIW's (everything you know > is wrong) in Endymion irked me, and I felt cheapened the first two a > little bit. I still liked them, but for different reasons and > certainly not as much as the Cantos. The focus in Endymion was on Raul and Aenea, who just couldn't carry that sort of load- it took at least 6 interesting characters from all sorts of genres and everything Simmons could warp and borrow from Kelly's Out of Control to make the first two, and the second two just didn't have that sort of firepower. Endymion still made me fairly happy because it included a decent quota of new and interesting and farout ideas, but there were far more in the Hyperions. > Jim > Listening to the living Maru ~Maru Listening to the music of the spheres _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
