I started C.J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning novel Cyteen back in February, which feels like a decade ago, but stopped after 190 pages because it was so slow and I was wrapped up in finishing the top 100 prospects package for The Athletic. I returned to it in late May and did indeed finish it the day before the draft last week, because I’m very stubborn, and it bothered me that I had just three Hugo winners left to read. (I now have two, the last two books in the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which in turn inspired the game Terraforming Mars.)
Cyteen is not very good, just as Downbelow Station, a novel set in the same universe as Cyteen that is Cherryh’s other Hugo winner, was not very good. They’re emblematic of what science fiction used to represent – books that were so heavy on the fictional science that they paid little attention to the aspects that make a novel good: plot, prose, and characters. Cyteen has a plot, sort of, although it’s paper-thin for a novel of more than 650 pages. The prose is leaden enough that you could use it at the dentist’s office to protect your chest during X-rays. The characters are at least moderately interesting, although I found it hard to get to them through the byzantine renderings of story and scene in the book.
Cyteen is set on a planet and two space stations of that name, serving as the capital of the Union, which has itself declared independence from the Alliance … none of which is necessary to know to read this book. The intrigue here is all internal to Cyteen politics, as the wise, Machiavellian leader Ari Emory, who runs the cloning-research station Reseune and serves on Union’s executive council, is murdered early in the book, after which some of her adherents initiate a program she’d designed to raise a clone of her to take over where she’d left off. The bulk of the novel follows her clone, also named Ari, and sets her in opposition to two groups: her ‘uncles’ Denys and Giraud, who are both powerful figures in the Reseune hierarchy and would benefit from Ari’s return to power; and the Warricks, Jordan and his clone/son Justin, as well as Justin’s clone and companion Grant, who were implicated in the first Ari’s death and remain untrusted rivals as the second Ari grows up and gains authority.
That’s about enough story for a novel of half Cyteen‘s length, but Cherryh stretches this out to a needless degree, incorporating all manner of side plots or irrelevant details that make this an utter slog to read. The discussions of young Ari’s puberty felt made me feel like I was invading a fictional character’s privacy, and it’s discomfiting to see a young girl’s moods reduced to a function of her hormone changes. The details of the cloning program are not interesting in the least, nor are those of the Alliance-Union conflict or the internal intrigues of Cyteen and Reseune politics. It just doesn’t work: making readers feel interested in the details of politics of fictional entities requires a lot of effort, at the macro level and the micro level of individual characters, and Cherryh just doesn’t do it.
The character of Ari is by the far the most compelling, although it’s more for what she represents than who she is. Ari is genetically identical to her predecessor, and her guardians attempt to mimic as many conditions of her predecessor’s upbringing as possible, as if by creating a perfect facsimile of the original’s nature and nurture they will thus develop a perfect facsimile of the original person. Of course, it’s never quite possible to replicate the ‘nurture’ half of the equation, and Ari deux is still a person with free will and agency, eventually pushing back against the bounds of her strict environment. It’s also a meditation of sorts on predestination, whether the second Ari can escape the destiny that’s been assigned to her by her genes and her makers.
The Hugo Awards have recently faced and defeated an attempted coup by a small number of white, male, pathetic authors who claimed that their works were being unjustly overlooked in the voting in favor of works with more progressive themes. My interpretation is that these authors, whose leaders include an open white supremacist, want a return to the earlier era of the Hugos and sci-fi in general, where setting took precedence over story or character – greater reliance on the science part of science-fiction or heavier use of fantasy elements in fantasy. Cyteen is heavy on the science, both hard sciences and soft, and that might be why it won the award in 1989, but I don’t think it would get nearly the same reception, critical or commercial, today. Cherryh is still writing and I presume she still has an audience, since I always see new books of hers whenever I’m browsing in bookstores, but this type of science fiction is best relegated to the dustbin of history.
Next up: I’m about to start Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.