{"id":8479,"date":"2020-06-17T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8479"},"modified":"2020-06-16T21:56:44","modified_gmt":"2020-06-17T01:56:44","slug":"cyteen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/06\/17\/cyteen\/","title":{"rendered":"Cyteen."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I started C.J. Cherryh’s Hugo Award-winning novel Cyteen<\/a> <\/em>back in\nFebruary, which feels like a decade ago, but stopped after 190 pages because it\nwas so slow and I was wrapped up in finishing the top 100 prospects package for\nThe Athletic. I returned to it in late May and did indeed finish it the day\nbefore the draft last week, because I’m very stubborn, and it bothered me that\nI had just three Hugo winners left to read. (I now have two, the last two books\nin the Mars<\/em> trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which in turn inspired the\ngame Terraforming Mars.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyteen <\/em>is not very good, just as Downbelow Station<\/a><\/em>, a novel set in the\nsame universe as Cyteen<\/em> that is Cherryh’s other Hugo winner, was not\nvery good. They’re emblematic of what science fiction used to represent \u2013 books\nthat were so heavy on the fictional science that they paid little attention to\nthe aspects that make a novel good: plot, prose, and characters. Cyteen<\/em>\nhas a plot, sort of, although it’s paper-thin for a novel of more than 650\npages. The prose is leaden enough that you could use it at the dentist’s office\nto protect your chest during X-rays. The characters are at least moderately\ninteresting, although I found it hard to get to them through the byzantine\nrenderings of story and scene in the book. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyteen<\/em> is set on a planet and two space stations of\nthat name, serving as the capital of the Union, which has itself declared\nindependence from the Alliance \u2026 none of which is necessary to know to read\nthis book. The intrigue here is all internal to Cyteen politics, as the wise,\nMachiavellian leader Ari Emory, who runs the cloning-research station Reseune\nand serves on Union’s executive council, is murdered early in the book, after\nwhich some of her adherents initiate a program she’d designed to raise a clone\nof her to take over where she’d left off. The bulk of the novel follows her\nclone, also named Ari, and sets her in opposition to two groups: her ‘uncles’\nDenys and Giraud, who are both powerful figures in the Reseune hierarchy and would\nbenefit from Ari’s return to power; and the Warricks, Jordan and his clone\/son\nJustin, as well as Justin’s clone and companion Grant, who were implicated in\nthe first Ari’s death and remain untrusted rivals as the second Ari grows up\nand gains authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s about enough story for a novel of half Cyteen<\/em>‘s\nlength, but Cherryh stretches this out to a needless degree, incorporating all\nmanner of side plots or irrelevant details that make this an utter slog to\nread. The discussions of young Ari’s puberty felt made me feel like I was\ninvading a fictional character’s privacy, and it’s discomfiting to see a young\ngirl’s moods reduced to a function of her hormone changes. The details of the\ncloning program are not interesting in the least, nor are those of the\nAlliance-Union conflict or the internal intrigues of Cyteen and Reseune\npolitics. It just doesn’t work: making readers feel interested in the details\nof politics of fictional entities requires a lot of effort, at the macro level\nand the micro level of individual characters, and Cherryh just doesn’t do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The character of Ari is by the far the most compelling,\nalthough it’s more for what she represents than who she is. Ari is genetically\nidentical to her predecessor, and her guardians attempt to mimic as many\nconditions of her predecessor’s upbringing as possible, as if by creating a\nperfect facsimile of the original’s nature and nurture they will thus develop a\nperfect facsimile of the original person. Of course, it’s never quite possible to\nreplicate the ‘nurture’ half of the equation, and Ari deux<\/em> is still a\nperson with free will and agency, eventually pushing back against the bounds of\nher strict environment. It’s also a meditation of sorts on predestination,\nwhether the second Ari can escape the destiny that’s been assigned to her by\nher genes and her makers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hugo Awards have recently faced and defeated an\nattempted coup by a small number of white, male, pathetic authors who claimed\nthat their works were being unjustly overlooked in the voting in favor of works\nwith more progressive themes. My interpretation is that these authors, whose\nleaders include an open white supremacist, want a return to the earlier era of the\nHugos and sci-fi in general, where setting took precedence over story or character\n\u2013 greater reliance on the science part of science-fiction or heavier use of\nfantasy elements in fantasy. Cyteen<\/em> is heavy on the science, both hard sciences\nand soft, and that might be why it won the award in 1989, but I don’t think it\nwould get nearly the same reception, critical or commercial, today. Cherryh is\nstill writing and I presume she still has an audience, since I always see new\nbooks of hers whenever I’m browsing in bookstores, but this type of science\nfiction is best relegated to the dustbin of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: I’m about to start Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart\nThinking<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[102,806,603,524],"class_list":["post-8479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-disappointments","tag-hard-science-fiction","tag-hugo-award","tag-science-fiction","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8480,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8479\/revisions\/8480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}