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Title: Cyteen
ISBN: 0446671274
Author:
C.J. Cherryh
Publicate Date: 1995-09-01
Publish: 1995-09-01
List Price: $15.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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1: Rich, Complex, and Multilevel
Boys from Brazil, meet the Girl from Cyteen!
A successful writer makes old ideas work in new settings. In Cyteen, C.J Cherryh takes the premise of an irreplaceable leader, sets it in her Union-Alliance universe, and produces one of her best novels to date.
There is a kind of similarity between Hitler and Cherryh's heroine Ariane Emory: Whereas Hitler wanted to create a master race, Ari has helped create a slave race -- the azi, artificially gestated human beings who, readers of Downbelow Station will recall, gave union its edge over Sol in a recent war. For her work Ari has received the status of Special -- a person so valuable that she is practically beyond the law. Now she wants to expand her researches in cloning and hypnopaedic teaching for the good of Union, her company, and (last, but not least) herself -- but she goes too far. In an effort to mold Justin, the replicate son of another Special, into the perfect assistanct, she hypnopedically rapes him. Justin's father, in revenge (or is this truly his motive?), kills her (or does he?)
In any case her company cannot do without her. Thanks to modern technology it does not have to. It starts Ari II growing in an artificial womb and plans to rear her in circumstances as identical as possible to Ari I's.
As this is a C. J. Cherryh novel, though, nothing goes as anyone has planned. I have taken you through roughly the first fifth of the novel and had still told you little of what has happened. The storyline that follows is rich, complex, and multilevel, blending a coming-of-age novel with a political thriller with a philosophical look at a society based on values very different from ours and on a technology that will very soon be ours. Who knows whether we will use it even as wisely as Union does?
In Cyteen you also have the C. J. Cherryh trademark of overstressed characters struggling to cope with almost continuous life-and-death situations. In this case the warfare is mainly psychological, but is just as deadly as physical.) The Ari who emerges from the struggle is not quite what the company expected -- and every bit as hard to deal with as the original.
It helps, but is not essential, to have read Downbelow Station and Forty Thousand in Gehenna as background to Cyteen. Even if it is not essential, read them anyway! Why let good sf go to waste? Also, if you like the philosophy and psychological warfare of Cyteen, go on to read Wave Without a Shore. This novel has never gotten the attention that it deserves.
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2: Weak writing, no plot to speak of...and it won the Hugo
I'm trying to read at least one book by all of the major sf authors, and finally it was Cherryh's turn. (Does anyone know how to pronounce her name, btw, which was "Cherry" until she added an extraneous 'h' to the end?) Equally hard to pronounce is Reseune, the city (I guess - it's not clear if it's the city or a larger area) where the story takes place in Cyteen. I'm guessing Cyteen is the name of the planet. Clarity and good, clean sentence structure is a big problem for this author. And so is plot, apparently. In place of action, people sit around a lot -- A LOT -- and talk. They have anxious, lip-biting conversations for page upon page. (Does anyone really bite their lip so hard it bleeds? The main character slices right through more than once. If we could just understand what he's feeling better, it might not seem so very odd.) This book seems to be one a psychologist, or perhaps a sociologist, would love. There's very little action here. Just a lot of heart-pounding navel-gazing. I guess I give Cherryh credit for attempting to bring emotional depth to sf, but she has utterly failed here. This is not emotion, it's melodrama. It's overwrought soap opera. Calling it space opera is being quite generous. This whole story could take place in a lab facility in the Maryland suburbs. There is the human clone element, but otherwise it's not what I'd call science fiction. The whole blackmail thing was unclear, to me. Why this guy felt he was being blackmailed, I had no clue. And what was the secret his Dad withheld? No idea. After 200 pages, I gave it up. The thought of reading 400 more pages of this drivel makes me want to bite my lip till it bleeds.
Cyteen: further evidence that the Hugo award is not an indicator of quality.
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3: A masterpiece
Who killed Ariane Emory? CJ Cherryh has set many novels in her Alliance-Union universe, most with themes that go well beyond the adventure stories being told. Cyteen draws all those themes together. In this dazzling epic Cherryh shows that whole universe -- by telling the story of a woman larger than all of it. Ariane's planet specializes in the production of azi, artificially grown humans with artificial mental programming -- and she's the greatest programmer in history, the Psychmaster. She and her fellow azi producers run the planet through a web of intrigues worthy of the Chinese Imperial court. Ariane is well aware of the moral ambiguities of her profession, as her colleagues are not. That makes her essential to her planet and she knows it. And then she's murdered, leaving vital work unfinished, work only the Psychmaster can do. Her colleagues (one of whom may have killed her) clone her and embark on an eighteen-year program to re-create Ariane Emory, duplicating not only her genes but her upbringing to reproduce the woman they knew. They succeed -- far better than they had intended. Ariane II is a child and they think they can control her. But Ariane II is nobody's pawn.
The story of Ariane growing to adulthood is fascinating -- she has to survive the same maze of intrigues and motives that killed her predecessor. The backstory of her society that is played out behind is even more interesting. Ariane I at first seems a cold and sadistic tyrant; over time we learn (and her successor learns) that she was far more complex than that.
Who killed her, and why? The answer's there. It will surprise you.
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4: Simply good
Loved the book. Introduced me to Cherryh, and I am happy for the acquaintance.
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5: Cherryh's best?
Understanding the experience of consciousness is increasingly starting to be recognized as something that today's science somehow both needs to address - yet doesn't know how or where to start. Before consciousness, however, there is the basic construction of the psyche. That's probably the core theme of this admittedly many-themed book.
By analogy with the idea of Philosopher-Kings in ancient times, Ariane Emory (the central character) is a kind of Scientist-Genius-Queen - despite operating in a complicated multi-star-system, and many-factioned, democracy. She is the head of the major scientific-industrial complex (Reseune) that produces azi - human beings who are both genetically and psychologically programmed for specific societal roles, in contrast to 'born men', who's genetic makeup is relatively random, and who learn from the 'flux' of everyday experience. Largely as a result, she is almost guaranteed to be the head of the Science faction, and hence a crucial member of the Council of Worlds.
She is also a (literally certified) genius in her own right, but her primary interests have developed from psychogenesis (the creation of minds that is the central technology of Reseune) to sociogenesis (the creation and maintenance of societies). In particular, her concern over the increasing rate of expansion to ever-further-out star systems - and the resultant possibility for irreparable cultural and psychological fragmentation within 'humanity' - has pushed her into a series of long-term experiments that she knows she won't live long enough to finish (despite being on a longevity technology known as 'rejuv'). As a result, she initiates a program to clone herself, with the hope and expectation that her clone will be able to complete these programs.
Previous experiments with cloning geniuses have resulted in spectacular failures. It's not sufficient to clone the geneset, it is also necessary to re-create enough of the specific 'psychset' - the general environment, specific people and their influences, and especially significant events.
Such is the background for the events against which Cyteen unfolds, although we only become aware of it as the story develops. However, before everything is ready, Ariane is murdered in one of the Reseune labs. It has to be by an insider, and fortunately there is a readily available patsy, Jordan Warwick, another of the certified geniuses, who Ariane has previously manipulated into producing a genetic (although not a psychological) clone - Justin.
Jordan maintains his innocence, but is nevertheless exiled to a lab on another continent of Cyteen. As a 'Special' (which is what they call the certified geniuses) he has an extreme analogy of diplomatic immunity, which means that the regular laws don't apply to him. But he has maintained contacts with dissident political groups, some of which have extremist factions that engage in terrorist acts - so he is deemed an extreme security risk.
The other primary character (although there are many other important and interesting secondary characters) is Grant - Justin's childhood companion (and adult lover). Grant is an 'alpha-class' azi. The alpha-class azis are the most 'functional' of the azi classes. They come as close to 'born-men' as azis can get, but they are still primarily the result of elaborate psychological programming.
As it happens, both Justin and Grant are psychset designers. The fact that Grant is also azi gives him particular insight into certain kinds of problems in psychset design. In addition, he also has access to his own psychset programming, which creates some interesting issues in terms of his struggles with having to learn how to deal with 'flux-learning' for the situations which he increasingly encounters for which there is no pre-programmed learning ('tape').
Anyway, Ariane's death initiates her cloning program, along with a kind of 'regency' in which her 'uncles' (Giraud and Dennis) take over the running of Reseune (including the investigation into her death, the exiling of Jordan Warwick, and the political positions she held). They also run the cloning program - which not only requires controlling young Ari's environment, but also cloning her personal bodyguards, Caitlin and Florian - high-level azi who are programmed for extreme loyalty to Ari.
As young Ari grows up, she ends up encountering a program left by her predecessor to guide her through a wide variety of situations that the elder Ari had foreseen. This starts to give here considerable independence - at least within Reseune, although her very existence has been kept a closely guarded secret from the rest of the world.
She also starts to discover that her predecessor was in many ways a manipulative tyrant who performed sadistic - but apparently carefully designed - 'interventions' on both Justin and Grant that were intended to focus their attention on her and her world. The repercussions of these interventions create major complications for young Ari as she attempts to figure out how to not only survive the intensely political environment within Reseune, but how to deal with the long-term sociological problems that her predecessor was trying to deal with, and to develop the external political power necessary to see those programs / experiments through to completion.
This might seem like a lot to put in a book, but it barely scratches the surface of what is going on in Cyteen. Cherryh has an interesting way of writing in a kind of 'stream-of-consciousness' style that keeps the action moving along - sometimes at an almost breathless pace, and she uses it to full effect in this truly 'epic' novel. There are many twists and turns as the various plots develop, including a rather surprising ending.
When I first read Cyteen it was after reading 'Downbelow Station' and 'Forty Thousand in Gehenna', two earlier novels in Cherryh's 'Merchanter Universe'. My recent re-reading started with Cyteen, which casts considerable light on those earlier works - especially Gehenna (which turns out in Cyteen to have been a hastily put together 'wartime experiment' which Ariane intended as a kind of 'canary-in-the-coal-mine' for the evolution of the larger society, and especially for some of the 'deep-sets' in the azi programming).
A particularly interesting issue that surfaces in Cyteen is that Ari built a core 'failsafe' into the programming for the Gehenna azi. It said, in effect, 'this is your world, take care of it and survive, and teach your children what is important'. It would take effect if the colony failed, the born-men died off, and there was no more 'tape'. One of the particular long-term implications here is the fact that a term such as 'world' is highly subject to 'semantic drift' over time - and hence the unpredictability of what future generations of Gehennans might interpret as 'their world', not to mention the other terms such as 'important', 'survive', and so on. Re-reading Gehenna with this awareness is a particularly interesting experience!
So is this Cherryh's 'best' work? I think its only serious competitor is the Chanur series, which certainly rivals - and perhaps even surpasses - Cyteen in epic scope and complexity. Chanur also has a bunch of characters who are ultimately more 'engaging' and likeable than most of the characters in Cyteen. Nevertheless, the core logic underlying Cyteen, and its role in tying the whole 'Merchanter Universe' series together - not to mention the fascination of the whole 'cloning' premise - make me inclined to give it the edge.
It's perhaps inevitable that many of the future technology projections come across as a bit dated at this point. For example, the elder Ari's program to help young Ari comes out in all text, whereas a modern version would almost certainly incorporate multimedia. But these are just quibbles that don't seriously detract from the brilliance of the remarkable vision underlying this exceptional novel.
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