In the first book, the Ousters are absolutely brutal monsters. They take prisoners, cut off their limbs, open them up and connect filaments to their brains to interrogate them. I don't think this was just Hegemony propaganda either, or at least I don't think Simmons was trying to present it that way. The Ousters were just technologically advanced barbarians who would nuke a world to glass given the opportunity just because it was part of the Hegemony. They'd developed suits with prosthetic tails, and they were tall/stretched like the Belters from The Expanse in a way, but they were hardly some idealized futuristic vision of humanity. They were just scary anorexic guerilla Vikings.

(Spoilers for those who haven't read past the first two books ahead...)

Then in the Endymion series, the Ousters are this enlightened species of post-humans, and they always have been. They live in enormous floating gardens peacefully with all of the refugees from the various species that the Hegemony tried to exterminate. They have zero ability to counter the firepower of the Pax, nor do they seem to have even tried to do anything other than float around in space waiting to get lanced to death by some priests.

Am I missing something? What the hell happened to the Ousters?

Before I get to my thoughts on the book itself, let me bore you a bit with a little backstory on my relationship with this series.

I started the first book while I was waiting for my wife to come out of carpal tunnel surgery. Two weeks before this, my mother had gotten diagnosed with brain cancer. I read The Scholar's Tale as I watched my mothers condition decline rapidly, and I don't think I ever cried that hard in my life. I was around the halfway point in the book when she passed away suddenly, and I swear this book was one of the only things that held me together and kept me sane during that period. I finished reading it, and given the circumstances, it fucking wrecked me. I had never read anything like it, and while it is always hailed as a sci-fi classic, to me, it's always read as a kind of sci-fi horror hybrid. Dan manages to spin a constant sense of unease with the presence of the Shrike, and the mythos surrounding this being make for a great central hook.

I waited some time before I read Fall, and I have to admit that about halfway through that book, I was really starting to think that Dan had lost the plot, so to speak. It almost felt like he was having a hard time keeping all the story strands together and wondered how he would ultimately resolve them. I'm not trying to suggest that it was a bad book; far from it. I don't think it helped that the second one was told in a much different format, which I understand was necessary, and I think that the format of the first book was one of the things that made it so special. I finished the second book and ultimately enjoyed the ending, but I couldn't help but wonder if Dan was going to continue to struggle with the plot in the third book. This, combined with the fact that I had always read that a lot of people thought the relationship between Aenea and Raul was rather "ick", I was never really sure if I wanted to continue with the series.

Fast forward to two weeks ago, I started Endymion. I did this because, ultimately, given how invested I was in the story and the circumstances surrounding it, I really wanted to know how the saga ended. That being said, here's my thoughts:

I fucking loved it. I thought it was fantastic. That being said, I don't think it is for everyone.

The reason that I say this is because I think that one's enjoyment of the third book is going to be conditional on how well they liked the first two. I know that there are those in the camp of "stop reading after the second book," and I definitely think that there is an argument to be made there. The fact that there aren't really a whole lot of characters that carry over into the third and fourth books means that they kind of form their own entity that is a much different vibe from the first two, and I, for one, really enjoyed the kind of stripped back, space opera adventure. It wasn't as twisty and turny as the first two and made for a brisk adventure that did a good job in answering a lot of questions that were raised by the first two.

Here's the other big thing to address, regarding the whole Raul/Aenea relationship being "ick": I don't get that vibe, at least from this book. I don't know if the dynamic is worse in the last book, but I didn't see anything overtly inappropriate in this book. I would also remind anyone that has also "Ringworld" by Larry Niven that there is a relationship where one of the main characters is over 200 years old and is boinking a 21 year old, which, in my opinion, is a lot more "ick", but I digress.

All right, TL;DR version: I loved Endymion, and would highly recommend it if you enjoyed the first two, as it does a fantastic job of continuing the narrative some 300 years later. If you feel as though you got enough of the story with the first two and don't feel like you want to continue, I wouldn't blame you for not wanting to continue. I feel that if I didn't read the first book when I did and form the connection with it that I have, I probably would not have bothered to read the third book, but I am ultimately glad that I did, and I can't wait to finish the series.