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Cyteen (Cherryh)
4/5. So, um. I would not recommend this course of action to anyone else in the world, necessarily, but apparently being in the hospital with nothing to do -- except wait and think about chromosomes -- is the signal for my brain to crave dark fiction about twisted people manipulating one another and everyone else's chromosomes. (This is not to say I didn't appreciate the comfort-recs, which are much more relevant right now.) So, yeah. I ate up this book that I'd been trying for years to read with no success. And loved it, because it is brilliant.
It is totally brilliant. I kept wanting to make comparisons to Dune in my head, in terms of scope and sweep of future history-epic, the careful working-out of the history, the careful working-out of the SFian details (in Dune the ecology, in Cyteen the genetics), the tackling of Big Questions (in Dune the limits of prescience, in Cyteen what makes a person). Only Cyteen's Smart People are a a great deal less laughable than Dune's Smart People, and related to this, Ari Emory is about twenty million times a better and more effective villain than any of the Dune villains, even in the first third of Cyteen. Really, Cherryh just does people in general a lot better than Herbert.
It was like Cherryh took all the tropes of genetic-SF what-makes-a-person stories that I'd ever seen and then ran with it. Ran a marathon with it, that is. All four of the main characters — Ari, Justin, Grant, and Florian/Catlin (who count as one character) — explore a different facet of how our genetics and our environment interact, how our interior programming corresponds to who we are.
And (unlike Dune, which never does this) sometimes it gut-punches you. Sometimes it's clearly telegraphed, and sometimes it comes without warning, and sometimes you come up for air to realize that a punch has been sneaking up on you for hundreds of pages. For those of you who have read it, let me just say: Gehenna. My absolute favorite gut-punch is relatively early on, when we learn what happened to Florian/Catlin I. Pow. And then we switch POV to Ari II, and we learn why, and that's its own punch that comes out of nowhere. OW. (And this, of course, foreshadows the last half of the book. Brilliant.)
It is also Cherryh, which meant that I had much the same problems with it that I've had with all the other Cherryh novels I've ever (tried to) read. Sometimes there is a textbook history lesson. I have trouble with those. (In retrospect at least half my problems with my previous attempts at this book were because I got stalled in the prologue textbook lesson. Next time I read a Cherryh I'm totally skipping it.) Or POVs that are needed for a plot point but otherwise are really kind of not useful. (This time, I just skipped those. I should have figured out to do that years ago.) And Cherryh, unlike Bujold, doesn't do climaxes, or really endings in general. It eventually… ends, because she's done telling the story, but there's no single spear-point cathartic moment like there is in, oh, Curse of Chalion.
This is just one of those books where I want to buttonhole strangers in the streets and tell them about it. I don't necessarily want to tell them to read it; it's a pretty dense 700 pages with no clear ending, which is clearly not going to appeal to everyone. I just want to talk about it.
It is totally brilliant. I kept wanting to make comparisons to Dune in my head, in terms of scope and sweep of future history-epic, the careful working-out of the history, the careful working-out of the SFian details (in Dune the ecology, in Cyteen the genetics), the tackling of Big Questions (in Dune the limits of prescience, in Cyteen what makes a person). Only Cyteen's Smart People are a a great deal less laughable than Dune's Smart People, and related to this, Ari Emory is about twenty million times a better and more effective villain than any of the Dune villains, even in the first third of Cyteen. Really, Cherryh just does people in general a lot better than Herbert.
It was like Cherryh took all the tropes of genetic-SF what-makes-a-person stories that I'd ever seen and then ran with it. Ran a marathon with it, that is. All four of the main characters — Ari, Justin, Grant, and Florian/Catlin (who count as one character) — explore a different facet of how our genetics and our environment interact, how our interior programming corresponds to who we are.
And (unlike Dune, which never does this) sometimes it gut-punches you. Sometimes it's clearly telegraphed, and sometimes it comes without warning, and sometimes you come up for air to realize that a punch has been sneaking up on you for hundreds of pages. For those of you who have read it, let me just say: Gehenna. My absolute favorite gut-punch is relatively early on, when we learn what happened to Florian/Catlin I. Pow. And then we switch POV to Ari II, and we learn why, and that's its own punch that comes out of nowhere. OW. (And this, of course, foreshadows the last half of the book. Brilliant.)
It is also Cherryh, which meant that I had much the same problems with it that I've had with all the other Cherryh novels I've ever (tried to) read. Sometimes there is a textbook history lesson. I have trouble with those. (In retrospect at least half my problems with my previous attempts at this book were because I got stalled in the prologue textbook lesson. Next time I read a Cherryh I'm totally skipping it.) Or POVs that are needed for a plot point but otherwise are really kind of not useful. (This time, I just skipped those. I should have figured out to do that years ago.) And Cherryh, unlike Bujold, doesn't do climaxes, or really endings in general. It eventually… ends, because she's done telling the story, but there's no single spear-point cathartic moment like there is in, oh, Curse of Chalion.
This is just one of those books where I want to buttonhole strangers in the streets and tell them about it. I don't necessarily want to tell them to read it; it's a pretty dense 700 pages with no clear ending, which is clearly not going to appeal to everyone. I just want to talk about it.
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(and I hope it's nothing too awful that was causing you to be at the hospital!)
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(It wasn't great, but physically everything went extremely well, so that's good.)
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oh man I love/hate how they torture each other because they are family and they are so alike and understand each other so deeply.
I hadn't thought about it in quite this way, but... yeah. Yeah, this!
ETA: You mentioned not long ago that it was very difficult to read -- was this because of the twisted psychological torture or some other reason? I can certainly see having to be in a certain mood to really get through it, and I am sure that was also part of why I had trouble even starting it before.
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Step 1: Read ten or fifteen pages, veeery slow, to make sure I caught everything that was happening. This took about half an hour.
Step 2: Stick a bookmark in and close the book. Then spend a while figuring out what was motivating everything that I had just read. this took about half an hour, usually.
Step 3. Close my eyes and recover from the headache that came from successfuly figuring out Ariane Emory's twisty plans.
Step 4. Return to Step 1.
Because I am a doggedly stubborn person, I made it about a hundred pages before I said that giving myself a headache every fifteen pages was not smart and gave up. The second time I tried, about two years later, whether it was because I had already put in the effort of figuring out some of the stuff, or because I was two years older and wiser and a better reader, or maybe I was just in a better mental place, but I was able to work through that first hundred pages a lot more easily while still figuring out everything, and then the rest of the book was much less of an intellectual struggle.
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(Have you read John M. Ford?)
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Anyway, I do recommend it if you can take the dark twistiness of it :)
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If you want to know what's going on with Gehenna... actually, I'm not sure reading 40,000 in Gehenna helps that much. It addresses the questions raised in Cyteen from a very different direction.
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I agree strongly about the twistiness and compelling characters and interesting ideas. I think I was not totally sold on any of those three things before reading, hence what seems to me now like a huge time between knowing of its existence and actually reading.
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(Oh, wow, on second thought, Dune is a fascinating work to compare Cyteen with. Irulan's description of Paul as avoiding the "clear, safe" path because it leads to stagnation and intentionally creating a future beyond prescience v. the AX azi made precisely for their ability to mutate beyond their sets (v. the continual refinement of the models to make them predict deeper effects of set changes). And then there are the Bene Gesserit's ambiguous role v. Reseune's, and how both books construct a space in which the ethical principles of these genetic and childhood manipulators isn't necessarily wrong if you take their sfnal elements as axiomatic...)
Sorry you weren't warned about the opening, btw! Not reading the prologue is a common suggestion; I kind of suspect someone made Cherryh add it, because all the information there can be inferred later.
(Me: very fannish about Cyteen, and I both wish I could accost people to talk about it and get them to play with it; a third of the extant fic were gifted to me as part of fic exchanges. If you're at all interested in fic, based on what you've written here I think you might enjoy A House in His Head and The Cuckoo's Agenda, both of which have twisty and kind of terrifying identity issues wrapped in very Cherryh-like prose and atmosphere.)
agh I hope this is coherent mostly I just love this book a lot
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Interesting what you say about the mismatch of style in Dune. I agree — it's actually one of the things I like about it, that it's trying to do these two sort of opposing things — but I also agree that Cyteen was a great deal more emotionally intense because of the match in style. I almost feel like Dune is sort of the outline form of Cyteen? Like, if the characters were more fleshed-out and more geniuses, if there were actual interaction where the characters influenced each other in ways that sometimes were unexpected and sometimes subtle, if the intensity were punched up… And yet, it's kind of what both books are about, I think? Dune argues (at least in the early books) that characters and interactions and unknowing influences mean nothing compared to the vast sweep of history/humanity's-imperatives — and Cyteen argues that these are, on the contrary, everything. (I mostly agree with Cyteen, but I have points of agreement with Dune's worldview and anyway find it wildly fascinating as well.)
(I think that what I was actually thinking when I made that comparison is the visceral feeling of "big ideas exploding my brain!" and then the followup of "wow these big ideas are super-worked-out and THAT is exploding my brain!" that was very similar to me when I read both of them.)
YAY FICS. Yes, rec me all the cyteen fic EVER. I have been afraid to read it because I love the book so much I wasn't sure which fic would retain the things I loved about the book.
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It's one of those books I feel like I ought to like because Important Thinky SF Classic but it honestly made me never want to read Cherryh again.