Thoughts on Cyteen
I just finished a reread of CJ Cherryh's Cyteen. That is an impressively large novel, over 800 pages in my SF Book Club hardback and I still think it is one of the strongest entries in Cherryh's expansive catalogue. I believe that this is my third time through Cyteen in the last 10 years or so, and I've done hardly any rereading of Cherryh's other work. I think that the primary reason I revisit this more than most is probably because I can identify with Ari 2 a lot, and Justin and Grant a bit less. Ariane Emory is a fascinating character, we get a much better sense of who she is in her second incarnation, but the older Ari is also fascinating. I find her recorded advice to her successor to be especially interesting, and I'll also admit that I find the problems she is concerned with to be challenging and engaging. I don't have the right background to really evaluate her approaches (and of course it is a fictional universe), but I still think they are worth pondering.
The book has a number of themes, but those concerning how parents mold and fail to mold their offspring are especially prominent. For those of you who haven't read it, I should explain that most of the action in the book is concerned with an attempt to not just clone the first Ariane Emory (a technology that the book treats as routine), but to recover her aptitudes, and skills in the clone. To do this, they do their best to recreate the environment and relationships that characterized the original's childhood, as they don't know what is and isn't important. The book is also extensively concerned with the life of Justin Warrick (another parental replica) whose father/original is still alive. Part of the background concerns a previous failed attempt at this replication, with Estelle Bok, a brilliant physicist of ~150 years before the book. Her clone became a musician of middling success instead of a physicist.
As you probably know, we are a long way from human cloning being a viable possibility. We have cloned mammals, but there are still significant problems, and the famous Dolly (the sheep) suffered from extensive health problems during her short life. Nonetheless, parents often want to pass along skills, attitudes and more, and in the more extreme cases there is a sense that their offspring can somehow make up for any failings the parent has had. It is easy to see that if human cloning were viable, this struggle between parents and children over the children's identity could easily become much stronger. Cyteen takes this idea and runs with it for much of the length of the novel.
A related theme is that of social transmission of information from one generation to the next. This is something that Cherryh has returned to more than once in her work. It is most prominent here, but also plays a role in 40,000 in Gehenna and The Faded Sun trilogy. It eventually turns out that this is the longest term and perhaps most important problem that Emory is concerned with, as at that point in the Merchanter's universe humanity is undergoing the greatest diaspora in history as FTL travel allows them to spread throughout the galaxy. Cherryh only hints at the direction Emory might go, but the question remains an important element of the novel regardless.
Another aspect of interest is that even though Cyteen was written a bit over 20 years ago and features "tape" as an important information storage tool, it feels less dated than one would expect, perhaps because the setting is so different from our own. I also suspect that it helps immensely that Cherryh is content to handwave the details of how most of her technology works in favor of the moving the story along. It is interesting that the theme of educating the next generation is also prominent in another of my favorite SF novels, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Perhaps I should put that next on my reread stack as I haven't revisited it in several years.
The book has a number of themes, but those concerning how parents mold and fail to mold their offspring are especially prominent. For those of you who haven't read it, I should explain that most of the action in the book is concerned with an attempt to not just clone the first Ariane Emory (a technology that the book treats as routine), but to recover her aptitudes, and skills in the clone. To do this, they do their best to recreate the environment and relationships that characterized the original's childhood, as they don't know what is and isn't important. The book is also extensively concerned with the life of Justin Warrick (another parental replica) whose father/original is still alive. Part of the background concerns a previous failed attempt at this replication, with Estelle Bok, a brilliant physicist of ~150 years before the book. Her clone became a musician of middling success instead of a physicist.
As you probably know, we are a long way from human cloning being a viable possibility. We have cloned mammals, but there are still significant problems, and the famous Dolly (the sheep) suffered from extensive health problems during her short life. Nonetheless, parents often want to pass along skills, attitudes and more, and in the more extreme cases there is a sense that their offspring can somehow make up for any failings the parent has had. It is easy to see that if human cloning were viable, this struggle between parents and children over the children's identity could easily become much stronger. Cyteen takes this idea and runs with it for much of the length of the novel.
A related theme is that of social transmission of information from one generation to the next. This is something that Cherryh has returned to more than once in her work. It is most prominent here, but also plays a role in 40,000 in Gehenna and The Faded Sun trilogy. It eventually turns out that this is the longest term and perhaps most important problem that Emory is concerned with, as at that point in the Merchanter's universe humanity is undergoing the greatest diaspora in history as FTL travel allows them to spread throughout the galaxy. Cherryh only hints at the direction Emory might go, but the question remains an important element of the novel regardless.
Another aspect of interest is that even though Cyteen was written a bit over 20 years ago and features "tape" as an important information storage tool, it feels less dated than one would expect, perhaps because the setting is so different from our own. I also suspect that it helps immensely that Cherryh is content to handwave the details of how most of her technology works in favor of the moving the story along. It is interesting that the theme of educating the next generation is also prominent in another of my favorite SF novels, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Perhaps I should put that next on my reread stack as I haven't revisited it in several years.