Reviews of Cyteen

This file contains reviews by

Eric Lee Green

by Eric Lee Green (elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US)

Date: 21 Nov 88 06:33:08 GMT

If C.J. Cherryh doesn't place high in the awards with this book, it won't be because it's a bad book. This is one of the better books that I have read recently, and certainly stacks up well against some of the weaker awards winners of the recent past (Speaker for the Dead and Uplift War come to mind, as books that won because they were popular sequels to award winners, not because they were fine literature).
One of the advantages of science fiction is that it can be a "literature of ideas". Unlike modern literary fiction, which denies the veracity of reality and says that emotions are the only thing that's "true", science fiction can explore difficult issues in the Real World. In this case, Cherryh tackles the "nature versus nurture" debate in developmental psychology circles, scientific ethics vs. the needs of society, and and even skips around the edges of one of the most difficult questions around: what is Man? And that's only the beginning... this is one of the most idea-chocked pieces of science fiction to hit the presses since the Golden Age came and went.
As for the writing, it's Cherryh's usual style, with all its advantages and disadvantages. Cherryh tends to wander between an omniscient 3rd-person narrator and a single personal 3rd-person narrator. She usually ends up painting a pretty good picture of the person whose viewpoint she's writing from, but the supporting cast sometimes come out in various shades of grey. In Cyteen she breaks somewhat from that style, occasionally shifting into the viewpoint of some of her peripheral characters. Still, most of it is told from the viewpoint of the main character, Ariane Emory, and the primary secondary character, Justin Warrick, both Parental Replicants: perfectly cloned genetic copies of their parents, brilliant researchers with serious personality problems. Her characterization holds up quite well considering the immense size of the book, except for at the very end where her uncle Denys acts extremely out of character -- but more on that later.
Cyteen is big -- VERY big. My copy is the Science Fiction Book Club edition, 850 pages of small text. It took me 14 hours to read it, and I am a quite fast reader (it takes me maybe 4 hours to snarf down the average 250 page novel). But so is the scope of the book: the attempt to recreate a human being, by duplicating heredity exactly and environment as much as necessary. In this case, it's Ariane Emory who's the subject of the experiment, after her famous predecessor and namesake dies either by accident, by murder, or by suicide (I favor the suicide theory, since she was dying of cancer and wanted to embarrass the person accused of the murder, but we never know exactly what went on down there in that room). At which point comes in "Uncle Denys", who takes over parenting her at age 7, when her surrogate mother is shipped out to the edge of the Union (the original Ariane's mother died at age 7). The original Ariane, too, was given over to an uncle, but there's one critical difference between the original Ariene's uncle and Denys: Denys doesn't sexually abuse his charge.
Add in that the ORIGINAL Ariene is still in the picture, through the miracles of computer files left to her replicant in hopes of saving her from the original's mistakes, and what comes out is a very brilliant, reasonably sane young woman, with all the brilliance but few of the personality problems of her namesake. She still is troubled, at times (who of us aren't), especially by loneliness, but she can cope: she doesn't descend to the warped sexual fantasy and abuse of her predecessor. What Cherryh seems to be saying is this: suffering is necessary, to reach your potential. Without suffering of some sort, there's no reason to perform to the ultimate of your ability. But, too much pain and suffering can warp a person, and if the person simply is not strong enough, can break her. It's a bleak philosophy. Alas, if you look at the ranks of the most brilliant people of yesteryear, it suddenly doesn't seem so unlikely.
At which point we get to Denys, and where he acts out of character: At the end of the book, he tries to kill her.
It's not TOO unexpected... Denys, intentionally or unintentionally, came perilously close to sabotaging the project by being too soft on little Ari. Still, he's a rather sedentary person, very intellectual, very warped, and it's simply out of character for him to order a direct assasination of the girl who lived with him for 5 years. Denys struck me as the sort of person who'd put arsenic in your porridge, or flood your room with poison gas, not the kind who'd resort to weapons... weapons are so... unsubtle.

Final ratings:
Characterization: above average
Content: Much above average.
Style: average
Entertainment index: above average
Overall: above average.

Note that I'm fairly difficult to please... I haven't rated many other book I've read this year as "above average"... Cherryh's other book _The Palladin_ comes to mind (alas, it, too, suffers from a bad ending... of Cherryh's recent books, the only one I can think of that had a decent ending was the Chanur series).

Why this book won't win a Nebula: It's not "literary" enough... everybody knows that Nebulae are awarded for style, not content. Why it won't win a Hugo: Hugos are popularity contests. Cyteen has the potential to be a very popular book... huge blockbusters seem to be especially common lately, and Cyteen avoids the primary error of most of them (huge casts of supporting characters, so lightly sketched that all of their names and jobs could be interchanged without the reader being able to tell the difference). Unfortunately, distribution is going to be a BIG problem... the Science Fiction Book Club printed Cyteen in small type, on larger-than-paperback pages, and it's still more than 800 pages. It most probably will have to be split in two to be put into paperback... will the publisher do it, and will booksellers stock it? Only time will tell... in the meantime, it seems unlikely that it will attain the popularity to win a Hugo in its year of publication.

Should you go out and buy it? It depends. Do you have a month to spare, or read fast enough to devour it in one gulp over a weekend? Can you keep your attention on one book for 16 hours worth of reading? (big question... even I started wandering, occasionally, towards the end). Do you want to join the SF Book Club, or buy it in hardcover? If the answer is "Yes" to all of the above, then buy it. If your idea of literature is the Xanth series and Alan Dean Foster, don't bother.