Cherryh, C.J.: Cyteen
Cyteen
Writer: C.J. Cherryh
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 680
This was another title I'd picked up in my quest for women writing SF, and it didn't hurt that it was a Hugo-award winner either. I'd read Cherryh back in 2006 and had some serious problems with it, though I admired her skill with close third-person POV and wanted to give her work another shot. However, I didn't intend to touch it with a ten-foot pole until I got some recommendations I could trust. I did. The top two books praised over and over were Cherryh's Hugo-award winners: Cyteen and Downbelow Station. So I glanced at the descriptions and decided on Cyteen.
I didn't put this beast on my required reading list though. Mostly because it's a BEAST. Nearly 700 pages long, hence why it nearly took me a month to finish this sucker. Which is interesting, since I've flown through epic fantasy of nearly the same length (if not longer) in less than a week. But I'll discuss that comparison later.
What made me decide to pick this up now was the fact that digitalclone and I agreed to make it our January/February challenge read. I'd wanted her to read Cherryh simply because I found comparisons in the style and treatment of close third-person, so she took my advice and settled on this book. It'll be interesting to hear her thoughts, since this is a much, much more complex read than Merchanter's Luck, which I based my recommendation on.
And I’m still trying to wrap my poor little brain around this book.
Saying this book is complex is an understatement. It's such an understatement that it borders on being the wrong descriptor. Perhaps ambitious is a better word. But ambitious would probably better describe what Cherryh's doing with her Alliance-Union Universe on the whole rather than simply this one book, long as it is.
There's some good stuff. There's some head-scratchers. What's interesting is that Cherryh's style was much harder to grasp. For starters, her sentence structure is dated. Her use of italics and dashes thorough interrupted the flow of what I read, making me work hard to parse out a sentence that really needed no zany emphasis at all. So that's one thing that slowed me down.
Another thing that slowed me down was the fact that her use of limited-third didn't feel quite so limited this time around. There's multiple points of view (almost too many, IMHO), and that's fine, except that when a section starts, I wasn't always sure who's head I was supposed to be in. And other times, I knew whose head I was supposed to be in, but there'd be this weird omniscient stuff, like translation of LOOKS (there's a particular scene between Corain and Ari-senior that's just laughable and confusing). Characters would assume they knew what was going on in another's head, which sometimes made sense when it came to a specific character's azi, but the tactic was overused enough to weaken the close, limited-third that Cherryh is so famous for.
And while we're on the subject of STUFF THAT SLOWED ME DOWN, let's talk science. I think I barely understood 10% of the jargon and what was going on. If anything, the various projects the characters were involved with are insanely complex, and it wasn't always easy for me to see what connected with what or how. I got just enough to understand the basic gist of what was happening and how it affected the plot, but anything deeper went in one eye and out the other. Terminology was a huge problem for me. I still have trouble understanding exactly how tape is supposed to work, because I keep translating it to video tape and cassette tape, which takes machines to play, so I keep imagining some poor soul on the table with literal tape running in one side of their head and out the other. I know that's not the case, and I know I've seen the term "tape study" used before in some other SF I've read, but it's a concept that's foreign to me and difficult to grasp, especially in light of the technology that's commonplace now and as well as the now common SF tropes.
So clearly, this book was difficult for me. At one point, comparing it to my experience reading Merchanter's Luck (which I had so much difficulty with getting into that I read Allen Steele's Coyote at the same time), I decided that Cherryh's prose just wasn't my cup of tea, and that after I finished reading Cyteen, that would be IT for my taste-testing of Cherryh's work.
I don't feel that way now. What changed?
If there's one thing that Cherryh does remarkably well, it's characterization. Whether you can get into the book or not (technical issues aside) depends highly on whether or not you even LIKE the POV character, and while this is true for any book, it's particularly true for Cherryh, for Cyteen, because the characters are so complex, so well drawn, no matter how major or minor. If we get their POV, we have their voice. We know them, even if we don't understand them, can't follow their logic.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW.
The actual conflict in this book is very minimal. In fact, there's really not a villain, not an antagonist. Oh, sure, certain characters take up the antagonist hat for a chunk or two, but in terms of an overall ENEMY, there is none. Instead, there's a shit-load of psychological tension, a shit-load of social conflict in terms of character interaction. One character does something that ends up affecting another character in a way that isn't obvious until it's explained. And that's not necessarily poor plotting, it's simply THAT complex. There's so many levels in which this book works that it's worth re-reading (if you like it enough) just to be able to parse out all those layers and to understand it on a new level.
What fascinated me, what kept me coming back and turning the pages, was the development of Ari (for the sake of this review, I'll refer to the first Ariane Emory as Ari-senior, and the PR, her replicate, as Ari). The few glimpses we got of Ari-senior were just enough to vilify her, and her murder created a tidal wave of events that really destroyed other sympathetic characters. So for me, seeing Ari grow up was on one hand, a window into Ari-senior's soul, because we began to see just what exactly made Ari-senior into the woman she was when she died, and on the other hand, a mystery, because I kept wondering just how like Ari-senior young Ari would be, and what kinds of choices she would make that would make her a different woman. Someone to root for. Someone more sympathetic.
I think it's pretty clear, on a variety of levels, what made Ari different from her predecessor. The fascination with horses, which Ari-senior did not have access to, really defined how Ari looked at the world. At first, I thought the whole horse bit was rather extraneous, but having grown up around horses myself, and remembering the remarks that Ari-senior thought such animals brought people more in touch with their humanity, taught people how to be human, I can see how the horses were a major influence on Ari. There's also her circle of friends, her fascination with Justin and Grant, as well as her interaction with her uncles and Ollie.
Another level of tension was created when Ari became sexually active, and her attraction to Justin uncapped the secret he'd been punished for his whole life: that his father murdered Ari-senior because of Ari-senior's sexual blackmail of Justin. Ari understood the root of what her predecessor did with Justin, and despite her attraction to him, reached out and helped him, started fixing him. This is why I rooted for Justin to side with her at the end, even though she had to employ a few dirty tactics of her own. There's something about their chemistry, something that's sexual and not, that linked these two characters together, and made me want to see them succeed together. Justin and Grant were definitely the OTP of the book, and it was really cool to see that relationship and partnership play out, but what Justin has with Ari is entirely different, and I don't mean in terms of them as a couple. I can't put my finger on it, but it's fascinating.
Which is why the ending left me so unsatisfied. We hit the climax and the book simply ends. Loose ends are brought together, but not tied. There's still a lot of psychological tension unresolved, and we only have the hope that because things are starting to come together, that things will work out-not necessarily happily, but somewhat sanely, above all the zany politics that've ruled these characters their whole lives.
I'm disappointed that by the end, there's so much we're left to assume from the text. We're never told how Ari-senior REALLY died. We know Jordan didn't do it and is taking the fall, and we hear Ari's theory that perhaps she simply just died, that it was an accident and murder had no role in it. Certainly, the text provides strong clues in that direction, but you know me, I want answers. I wanted answers because I kept thinking it was one of the Nyes who murdered her. That one of the Nyes didn't like the direction Ari-senior was taking and needed to intervene, and that agreeing to her PR was a necessity in order to recapture her genius, but not necessarily her goals. Certainly, that Denys tried to have Ari assassinated at the end proved that young Ari didn't end up the way they'd hoped, but even that turn of events left me unsatisfied in that even though there are answers in the book we have to infer, I wanted something a little more clear-cut, a definite motive for Denys other than what appeared to be a grieving last resort for power.
I think that my having to infer so much from the text is yet another reason I had a hard time getting through this book. This book, despite my criticisms of the third-person not being as tight as it should be, is in another way SO TIGHT that when we're in a character's head, they don't explain their assumptions because they have the knowledge to connect the dots, but the reader may not. I think a little bit more of a nudge in the right direction would've helped in this regard, because I don't feel confident in the things I inferred simply because there was so much of the book, scientifically at least, that I simply couldn't grasp.
Still, I enjoyed this book very much. It fascinated me on a level that I find myself following in Cherryh's footsteps even though this is really the first of her major works (second overall) that I've ever read. That's cool, but scary, but not surprising, given that authors I do love and admire have found such a strong influence is Cherryh's work. I think, sometime when I really want to study the entanglement of science and plot and character, I may re-read this beast and really study it. Not for the writing style, because as I mentioned, there's a lot of flaws that I think are mostly due to the time it was written, but for just about everything else. Because it is fascinating, it is complex, and the characterization has a way of singing by time the book is over. I enjoyed this enough that I'm willing to give her other Hugo-award winner, Downbelow Station a shot, but even though I just picked up my copy, I probably won't get to it for a while. I need time to process the beast first.
Next up: Amberlight by Sylvia Kelso