Book Review: Cyteen

C. J. Cherryh

1988

Awards: Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ – – – –

Cyteen is one of the central books in C. J. Cherryh’s enormous Alliance-Union universe series. It is billed as a masterwork of colorful characters and multi-layered political intrigue.

It is, indeed, a complex tale of intergalactic politics. Unfortunately, it is also incredibly boring. And massive. I found myself less and less motivated to finish it with the turn of each one of its 680 pages. I didn’t care about the politics or the intrigue. I thought the writing was overwrought. The characters were all unappealing and I was troubled by the abusive treatment of those who were clones.

The story takes place on the planet Cyteen, primarily in the city of Reseune, the home of giant labs that churn out genetically engineered clones. Many of these are “azi” clones, which are people not only designed with a specific genetic makeup but also neurally programmed from birth to have particular personalities and skill sets.

There are factions within factions in Cherryh’s universe, most of which have unmemorable names with similar connotations even though they are opponents (e.g. “Alliance” versus “Union”). Cyteen is a Union planet, so the relevant opposing parties in this book are both sub-factions of the Union faction: Expansionists, who support cloning and colonizing as many habitable worlds as possible, and Centrists, who don’t like either cloning or colonization. The Expansionists hold the majority on the governing council of Cyteen and its colony worlds but the Centrists are a powerful and angry minority.

At the beginning of the book, a brilliant scientist and powerful Expansionist politician, Ariane Emory, repeatedly sexually abuses a younger brilliant scientist, Justin Warrick, who works under her in the Reseune labs. Ariane is then found dead. Justin’s father, Jordan Warrick, a brilliant scientist backed by the Centrists, is accused of Emory’s murder and banished to a remote outpost.

The Expansionists then create a clone of Ariane using her stored DNA, in hopes of recreating someone with her scientific brilliance and leadership abilities to pick up where she left off. Justin, who is actually a clone of Jordan in addition to being his son, is left in Reseune to cope with debilitating flashbacks while watching the young clone of his abuser growing up close by.

Along the way there are endless interest groups that want various things out of Ariane, Justin, and/or Jordan, and which play excruciatingly subtle intergalactic politics with the three of them, their projects, and their funding.

I didn’t like the mealy-mouthed Justin or his insipid azi servant/lover Grant; I didn’t like the cruel Ariane or her goody-goody azi assistant/lover Florian or her impersonal azi guard Catlin; I couldn’t keep any of the governing council members straight; and all the other characters were either uninteresting or sneaky and conniving.

The political maneuverings were incredibly hard to keep track of, partly because the positions of the different sides seemed way too abstract to be really motivational. The Expansionists are supposedly driven by the “fear of loss of momentum” and abstract economic collapse at some point far in the future. The Centrists are supposedly driven by fear of clones, expansion, “peripheralization,” and “diffusion of human cultures.” Those don’t seem like the kind of things you’d bomb your opponents for, much less risk war over. For people to sacrifice their lives, it seems like the cause has to be closer and personal, like the fear of immediate physical danger or deprivation. I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of the abstract scheming and I didn’t see how any of the characters could, either.

And none of it seemed to have any impact on the story in the end, anyway, making reading it feel like a complete waste of time. The main characters spent interminable hours agonizing over the minutiae of politics, and speculating intensely on the meaning of people’s tiniest actions, but very little actually happened. On the rare occasions when something did happen, we often had to hear the event described again and again from multiple participants’ only slightly different points of view.

The most troubling aspect of the book, though, was the role of the azi clones. Azi are designed to be dutiful subordinates such as servants, assistants, or guards. Each azi is programmed from birth to obey their single Supervisor unconditionally, to feel bad when they are displeasing naturally-produced humans, and not to let too much free will or complicated emotion get in the way of their actions. They don’t have the same rights as other people: they can be legally mind-probed, punished or rewarded with drugs and behavior modification programs, and “terminated” with sufficient cause.

Needless to say, this creates some very weird relationships. Azi are expected to behave on the one hand like servants and on the other hand as lovers and emotional supports, even though the relationship is never one of equals. At one point, one of the Expansionists justifies the azi program by explaining that their primary purpose is to ensure genetic diversity as humans expand to new colony planets. But it is hard to see that an azi is anything but a slave (albeit often in a gilded cage).

And the azi are so well programmed that they never seem to bridle at this. In fact, Cherryh has a way of soft-pedaling and almost, it seems, reveling in all the abuse. Not only was this a bit upsetting, but it also made me think that perhaps Cherryh herself was not fully aware of the implications of what she had created.