I survived! 
 As I've reported in my previous reviews of this series there were times where it seemed as if my gray matter was going to be permanently fried by this epic sci-fi story. I finally got through to the end with most of my marbles still in the bag they came in. 
 It's almost impossible to give a summary of this without spoiling the previous book so I'll just say that Aenea and Raul Endymion continue their interstellar journey to fulfill her ultimate destiny as the powerful forces of a corrupted Catholic Church and the artificial intelligences of the TechnoCore try to stop them by increasingly desperate means. Oh, and the mysterious and deadly time-traveling Shrike continues to pop up. 
 This isn't just your standard sci-fi space opera about a chosen one saving the galaxy from the Death Star. What Simmons has done here is create a tale that spans time and space in which even Jesus was a player and the ultimate stakes are the fate of evolution of life in the entire universe. As with the other books, he's done an incredible job of building multiple stories and fusing them all together into a rich and diverse whole. Any one of his concepts could have been the basis for an entire book or series like a planet where the cities have been built high onto the tops of mountain peaks due an acidic ocean at lower altitudes. That's just one stop along the way for Aenea and Raul. 
 So how did I live through it? Dan Simmons finally revealed himself to be human and somewhat fallible here in the last book. Don't get me wrong. It's still an excellent series and one of the most ambitious sci-fi stories I've read. But there were a few things that irked me in this one that took it down from five stars to four and that probably kept my brain pan from overheating. 
 First is that Simmons goes back and alters some of what we're previously told in the earlier books. I'm not sure if he originally planned to end it after two books but carried it to four and had to do some changing to fit an ending he came up with later, or if he just discarded some ideas late in the game, but I didn't like that what we thought happened in the first two books turned out to be untrue. Simmons didn't commit any crimes against his fans on a George Lucas scale, but it bothered me, particularly the revisions to the Shrike's origin and ultimate fate. 
 I also don't think that Simmons knew when to turn off the creative mode and shift into resolution mode. He kept adding elaborate new settings and characters and events right up until the end game, and it started reminding me of how Lost just kept piling new characters and mysteries into its final season and didn't do nearly enough wrapping up. Simmons still managed to provide a mostly satisfy ending, but when he added yet another mind blowing new setting in the last quarter of the book, I found myself getting a little impatient. 
 Still, these are minor quibbles about a sci-fi story that swung for the fences and managed to deliver on almost all of it's potential.