1989 Hugo and Locus - CYTEEN by C. J. Cherryh

Cyteen takes place in Cherryh’s expansive Alliance-Union universe, the same universe that was home to the 1982 winner, Downbelow Station. It focuses on Cyteen, an important Union planet and the home of radical genetic and psychological engineering. As I said with the earlier Alliance-Union novel, I have a lot of respect for Cherryh, but again, I was disappointed.

Cyteen is the longest winner I’ve covered so far (my edition was 680 dense pages), and it took me, by far, the longest to read. Frankly, this was a trudge.

Cyteen focuses on Ariane Emory, a supergenius “Special” who had steered Cyteen society through political and scientific challenges for almost a century at the novel's beginning (circa 2400 AD). Cyteen consists mostly of clones divided into two castes – CITs are citizens while the azi are closer to proprietary people, almost slaves. Both groups learn through an artificial programming method called “tape,” though the azi are much more heavily programmed and therefore have a hard time with free will. The elderly Ari (though not that outwardly elderly due to rejuvenation treatments) has overseen this system’s development, and she has grand plans for keeping her society stable. These plans happen to involve molesting the teenage son of one of her chief rivals, Jordan Warwick. Shortly thereafter, Ari is killed. The rest of the novel follows the attempts of Ari’s allies to raise her clone and to guide her development so that she is just as brilliant and ruthless. So, it’s sort of a twisted bildungsroman.

It’s also fascinating world, and the characters are very rich and complicated. The themes are certainly intriguing as well, as the book uses the technology of cloning to examine the concept of free will. Will Ariane II end up as cold and ruthless as the original? How immoral is it to control the pre-programmed azi? These are fascinating questions, though Cherryh doesn’t offer much in the way of answers. There are also some big problems here. First, there’s a lot of dense exposition, and Cherryh throws way too many concepts and characters at the reader in the first chapter. I also had this problem with Downbelow Station, but I did manage to catch up with the myriad characters and factions more quickly here. Nonetheless, I think it would have helped to have more familiarity with the Alliance-Union universe. The Chanur stories come up a few times, and another novel, 40,000 in Gehenna, is quite heavily referenced and becomes a central plot point.

Speaking of plot, there isn’t much of one. Characters have a lot of tense, manipulative conversations, and that’s about it. There are two or three major turning points, and a quick action sequence in the final chapter (which, ironically considering the novel’s length and general interminability, feels rushed), but most of the time, people are talking - usually about the same couple of political issues (azi and foreign relations). The novel is short on plot and long on words. Things are just getting moving when the book finally ends; a year or two ago, Cherryh actually published a sequel, Regenesis, that sounds more interesting, though I think I’ll skip it. As I said, it’s a richly developed world, but perhaps Cherryh is too wrapped up in it. She seems to think that every word her characters speak to each other is important. Instead, most of their discussions are redundant and concerned with cultural subtleties and minutiae. And the prose is dry as a bone. There’s a lot to like here, and at three-hundred pages this could have been a dense, thematically rich and relevant thriller. Instead, it’s mostly bloat.

Grade: C+

1982 Hugo - DOWNBELOW STATION by C. J. Cherryh

I really wanted to like this novel. I’ve heard nothing but good things about C. J. Cherryh, and this was one of the novels I’ve been most looking forward to. Unfortunately, this novel felt a bit “by the numbers.” The ‘80s are the peak of the space opera subgenre, and this may be the most traditional space opera I’ve ever read.

Downbelow Station portrays a pivotal event in the history of Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe. In that universe, the cultural differences between Earth (the Alliance) and its numerous interstellar colonies (the Union) have become so vast by the 24^th century that a civil war has broken out. The planet of Pell, also known as Downbelow, and its orbiting space station have attempted to remain neutral, but as the war comes to its climax and refugees begin to pour in, neutrality becomes harder and harder to maintain.

Cherryh juggles a lot of plots and characters here very well. There’s the war itself, and we learn about Signy Mallory, the female captain of the Alliance ship Norway. She’s a stern disciplinarian, but also a pragmatist with a strong code of honor. On the station, there’s a rivalry between the Konstantin family who have long run the station and the Lukas family, who have long assisted. There’s a level of dislike and betrayal and as clear a division between good and evil between the two families as there was between the Atreides and Harkonnens in Dune. There are also a few Union spies working in the background. Finally, there’s a sentient (though not especially intelligent) species from Pell called the Hisa. We get some hints of a fairly compelling culture for the Hisa, but they can also be a bit cutesy – they’re small, furry, and like to say “I love you.” Should we blame Cherryh for the Ewoks?

All of these plotlines run in parallel throughout the book and come together quite neatly at the climax. The plotting is fantastic. The characters are very clearly drawn, though maybe just a tad too clearly, as they tend towards cartoonishly good or evil (the one big exception is Mallory, but even she has a very clear and consistent moral stance – just one that can lead to some fairly awful things). That was my biggest problem with the novel – everything was a little too clean and clear. Even the prose, which is perfectly readable, came off as very dry to me. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been reading so much Gene Wolfe lately. Claw of the Conciliator was nominated against Downbelow Station, and I have to say that it was the better novel (and I think this is the first time I’ve taken a Nebula winner over a Hugo winner). Either way, Downbelow Station is a well-executed novel that still left me cold. I’m still looking forward to Cyteen though.

By the way, C. J. Cherryh is really Carolyn Cherry. Like J. K. Rowling, she used her initials to disguise her gender, which further illustrates that the James Tiptree effect hasn’t entirely left us. Unfortunately, I can see why a female writer of this sort of hard science fiction with military sf elements might not want to advertise that they were a woman.

Grade: B-