Cyteen (Cherryh)

[cahn]

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.

Comments

[sophia_sol]

Oh huh, that would explain why I've bounced off the opening of this book so many times. Of course, I'm not sure that I want to read dark fiction about twisted people manipulating each other? So I'm not sure I'll go back to this and skip the history lesson at the beginning to read the rest. But I'm glad reading it was a good experience for you!

(and I hope it's nothing too awful that was causing you to be at the hospital!)

[seekingferret]

Eeeeeeeeee! I love Cyteen. I love the feeling that all of these people are smarter than I am and if I want to understand what's going on, I have to think for a lot longer than they do, and 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.

[luzula]

This is in the to-read pile in my bookcase, but I've been putting it off because it's so thick. But I glanced at the opening, and the textbook section is not going to put me off--I love fake documentary style stuff like that.

[ase]

I would never have recommended Cyteen for hospital reading, but looking back, I read a lot of Cherryh while going through some pretty stressful times. Cyteen is brilliant and twisty with compelling (not always nice) characters and interesting ideas.

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.

[cordialcount]

Ahh, late, but Cyteen is one of my favorite sf novels and Ariane Emory I one of my all-time favorite characters (where are all the other fictional women like her?? I want to say she exemplifies my favorite female character type, but I don't think it's a type), and I'm delighted that you enjoyed it! It's one of the few genre novels that succeeded, for me, at feeling like it took place in the mental spaces of geniuses. Parts of which, I think, are 1) that minute attention to technical detail in some places combined with claustrophobically tight PoVs/the sensation of not knowing enough in others and 2) the, ah, terse locution, as much as some readers hate it. One of Dune's themes is the limitations of prescience, but you wouldn't know it from the stylistic and tonal texture of book 1: poised, measured, with a really classical feel to its allusions and mythic tropes. Whereas Cherryh's style works toward the same ends as her plot and character details, sometimes very precise and confident control and sometimes doubt and broad brushwork-- flux, as Grant keeps saying-- and that gives her books an unvarnished intensity, even when everything seems to be going well, that Dune doesn't hit for me either. You're always standing at the precipice to extraordinary discoveries; some of these you have to muddle through, and you won't like them; some of these you are the most prepared person in the world for, but you still can't make them go perfectly right, and that brilliance-- not quasi-magical skill-- can leave you no ignorance of the consequences; and some of these are the legacies left to you by other brilliant people, and you also have to negotiate the forces that think you should walk down their roads. I like Dune, I do not mean to criticize it, I just wouldn't have expected it as a first choice of comparison. :D

(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

[carmarthen]

Huh, I think I read...2/3? of Cyteen (it was a three-volume edition and I didn't have the 3rd and never bothered to hunt it down) and just...couldn't get into it at all, mainly because all the characters sounded to same to me and I couldn't really buy anyone's behavior. :-/

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.