Endymion - Couverture souple

Simmons, Dan

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 8498723582 ISBN 13 : 9788498723588

Editeur : B de Bolsillo, 2010

Synopsis

Han pasado 274 años desde la caída de Hyperion, y la Hegemonía se ha transformado en una teocracia regida por Pax, la organización cívico militar de la Iglesia católica. Gracias al cruciforme, la inmortalidad es efectiva y la nueva fe, universal. Pax sólo teme la llegada de un nuevo mesías. Un joven pastor condenado por asesinato, Endymion, deberá muy a su pesar proteger, con el androide Bettik, a ese nuevo mesías: Aenea, hija de Keats, que retorna de las Tumbas del Tiempo de Hyperion. Trepidante novela de acción y aventuras, Endymion resuelve algunos interrogantes planetados en Hyperion y La caída de Hyperion, pero plantea otros de extrema importancia. Simmons trata con su característica habilidad y maestría un original y sorprendente universo especulativo.

A propos du livre

Extrait

You are reading this for the wrong reason.

If you are reading this to learn what it was like to make love to a messiah--our messiah--then you should not read on because you are little more than a voyeur.

If you are reading this because you are a fan of the old poet's Cantos and are obsessed with curiosity about what happened next in the lives of the Hyperion pilgrims, you will be disappointed.  I do not know what happened to most of them.  They lived and died almost three centuries before I was born.

If you are reading this because you seek more insight into the message from the One Who Teaches, you may also be disappointed.  I confess that I was more interested in her as a woman than as a teacher or messiah.

Finally, if you are reading this to discover her fate or even my fate, you are reading the wrong document.  Although both our fates seem as certain as anyone's could be, I was not with her when hers was played out, and my own awaits the final act even as I write these words.

If you are reading this at all, I would be amazed.  But this would not be the first time that events have amazed me.  The past few years have been one improbability after another, each more marvelous and seemingly inevitable than the last.  To share these memories is the reason that I am writing.  Perhaps the motivation is not even to share--knowing that the document I am creating almost certainly will never be found--but just to put down the series of events so that I can structure them in my own mind.

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" wrote some pre-Hegira writer.  Precisely.  I must see these things in order to know what to think of them.  I must see the events turned to ink and the emotions in print to believe that they actually occurred and touched me.  If you are reading this for the same reason that I am writing it--to bring some pattern out of the chaos of the last years, to impose some order on the essentially random series of events that have ruled our lives for the past standard decades--then you may be reading this for the right reason, after all.
WHERE TO START? With a death sentence, perhaps.  But whose--my death sentence or hers? And if mine, which of mine? There are several from which to choose. Perhaps this final one is appropriate.  Begin at the ending.

I am writing this in a Schrodinger cat box in high orbit around the quarantined world of Armaghast.  The cat box is not much of a box, more of a smooth-hulled ovoid a mere six meters by three meters.  It will be my entire world until the end of my life.  Most of the interior of my world is a spartan cell consisting of a black-box air-and-waste recycler, my bunk, the food-synthesizer unit, a narrow counter that serves as both my dining table and writing desk, and finally the toilet, sink, and shower, which are set behind a fiberplastic partition for reasons of propriety that escape me.  No one will ever visit me here.  Privacy seems a hollow joke.

I have a text slate and stylus.  When I finish each page, I transfer it to hard copy on microvellum produced by the recycler.  The low accretion of wafer-thin pages is the only visible change in my environment from day to day.

The vial of poison gas is not visible.  It is set in the static-dynamic shell of the cat box, linked to the air-filtration unit in such a way that to attempt to fiddle with it would trigger the cyanide, as would any attempt to breach the shell itself.  The radiation detector, its timer, and the isotope element are also fused into the frozen energy of the shell.  I never know when the random timer activates the detector.  I never know when the same random timing element opens the lead shielding to the tiny isotope.  I never know when the isotope yields a particle.

But I will know when the detector is activated at the instant the isotope yields a particle.  There should be the scent of bitter almonds in that second or two before the gas kills me.

I hope that it will be only a second or two.

Technically, according to the ancient enigma of quantum physics, I am now neither dead nor alive.  I am in the suspended state of overlapping probability waves once reserved for the cat in Schrodinger's thought experiment.  Because the hull of the cat box is little more than position-fused energy ready to explode at the slightest intrusion, no one will ever look inside to see if I am dead or alive.  Theoretically, no one is directly responsible for my execution, since the immutable laws of quantum theory pardon or condemn me from each microsecond to the next.  There are no observers.

But I am an observer.  I am waiting for this particular collapse of probability waves with something more than detached interest.  In the instant after the hissing of cyanide gas begins, but before it reaches my lungs and heart and brain, I will know which way the universe has chosen to sort itself out.

At least, I will know so far as I am concerned.  Which, when it comes right down to it, is the only aspect of the universe's resolution with which most of us are concerned.

And in the meantime, I eat and sleep and void waste and breathe and go through the full daily ritual of the ultimately forgettable.  Which is ironic, since right now I live--if "live" is the correct word--only to remember.  And to write about what I remember.

If you are reading this, you are almost certainly reading it for the wrong reason.  But as with so many things in our lives, the reason for doing something is not the important thing.  It is the fact of doing that remains. Only the immutable facts that I have written this and you are reading it remain important in the end.

Where to begin? With her? She is the one you want to read about and the one person in my life whom I wish to remember above everything and everyone else. But perhaps I should begin with the events that led me to her and then to here by way of much of this galaxy and beyond.

I believe that I shall begin with the beginning--with my first death sentence.

Présentation de l'éditeur

Endymion es la tercera novela de la tetralogía «Los cantos de Hyperion», una saga fundamental de la ciencia ficción moderna que fue galardonada con tres premios Locus y el Hugo de 1990.

La publicación de la serie a lo largo de la década de 1990 coronó a Dan Simmons como un referente indiscutible del género, capaz de construir un mundo al estilo de los Cuentos de Canterbury, y al mismo tiempo hacer un claro homenaje a John Keats.

Han pasado doscientos setenta y cuatro años desde la caída de Hyperion, y la Hegemonía se ha transformado en una teocracia regida por Pax, la organización cívico militar de la Iglesia católica.

Gracias al cruciforme, la inmortalidad es efectiva y la nueva fe, universal. Pax solo teme la llegada de un nuevo mesías. Un joven pastor condenado por asesinato, Endymion, deberá muy a su pesar proteger, con el androide Bettik, a ese nuevo mesías: Aenea, hija de Keats, que regresa de las Tumbas del Tiempo de Hyperion.

Tras resolver algunos de los interrogantes planteados en Hyperion y La caída de Hyperion, Simmons vuelve a ofrecernos, con su característica habilidad y maestría, un sombroso universo especulativo.

Reseñas:
«Pocas lecturas dejan el poso inevitable que logra esta serie. Cualquier obra de Simmons merece ser leída, pero esta, además, no se olvida nunca.»
Miquel Barceló

«"Los Cantos de Hyperion" establece el estándar de la ciencia ficción para el siglo XXI.»
Peter F. Hamilton

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: B de Bolsillo
• Date d'édition: 2010
• ISBN 10: 8498723582
• ISBN 13: 9788498723588
• Reliure: Poche
• Nombre de pages: 736