Review: Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh

The main text below is an edited version of my original review of Cyteen written on 2012-01-03. Additional comments from my re-read are after the original review.

I've reviewed several other C.J. Cherryh books somewhat negatively, which might give the impression I'm not a fan. That is an artifact of when I started reviewing. I first discovered Cherryh with Cyteen some 20 years ago, and it remains one of my favorite SF novels of all time. After finishing my reading for 2011, I was casting about for what to start next, saw Cyteen on my parents' shelves, and decided it was past time for my third reading, particularly given the recent release of a sequel, Regenesis.

Cyteen is set in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe following the Company Wars. It references several other books in that universe, most notably Forty Thousand in Gehenna but also Downbelow Station and others. It also has mentions of the Compact Space series (The Pride of Chanur and sequels). More generally, almost all of Cherryh's writing is loosely tied together by an overarching future history. One does not need to read any of those other books before reading Cyteen; this book will fill you in on all of the politics and history you need to know. I read Cyteen first and have never felt the lack.

Cyteen was at one time split into three books for publishing reasons: The Betrayal, The Rebirth, and The Vindication. This is an awful way to think of the book. There are no internal pauses or reasonable volume breaks; Cyteen is a single coherent novel, and Cherryh has requested that it never be broken up that way again. If you happen to find all three portions as your reading copy, they contain all the same words and are serviceable if you remember it's a single novel under three covers, but I recommend against reading the portions in isolation.

Human colonization of the galaxy started with slower-than-light travel sponsored by the private Sol Corporation. The inhabitants of the far-flung stations and the crews of the merchant ships that supplied them have formed their own separate cultures, but initially remained attached to Earth. That changed with the discovery of FTL travel and a botched attempt by Earth to reassert its authority. At the time of Cyteen, there are three human powers: distant Earth (which plays little role in this book), the merchanter Alliance, and Union.

The planet Cyteen is one of only a few Earth-like worlds discovered by human expansion, and is the seat of government and the most powerful force in Union. This is primarily because of Reseune: the Cyteen lab that produces the azi.

If Cyteen is about any one thing, it's about azi: genetically engineered human clones who are programmed via intensive psychological conditioning starting before birth. The conditioning uses a combination of drugs to make them receptive and "tape," specific patterns of instruction and sensory stimulation. They are designed for specific jobs or roles, they're conditioned to be obedient to regular humans, and they're not citizens. They are, in short, slaves.

In a lot of books, that's as deep as the analysis would go. Azi are slaves, and slavery is certainly bad, so there would probably be a plot around azi overthrowing their conditioning, or around the protagonists trying to free them from servitude. But Cyteen is not any SF novel, and azi are considerably more complex and difficult than that analysis. We learn over the course of the book that the immensely powerful head of Reseune Labs, Ariane Emory, has a specific broader purpose in mind for the azi. One of the reasons why Reseune fought for and gained the role of legal protector of all azi in Union, regardless of where they were birthed, is so that Reseune could act to break any permanent dependence on azi as labor. And yet, they are slaves; one of the protagonists of Cyteen is an experimental azi, which makes him the permanent property of Reseune and puts him in constant jeopardy of being used as a political prisoner and lever of manipulation against those who care about him.

Cyteen is a book about manipulation, about programming people, about what it means to have power over someone else's thoughts, and what one can do with that power. But it's also a book about connection and identity, about what makes up a personality, about what constitutes identity and how people construct the moral codes and values that they hold at their core. It's also a book about certainty. Azi are absolutely certain, and are capable of absolute trust, because that's part of their conditioning. Naturally-raised humans are not. This means humans can do things that azi can't, but the reverse is also true. The azi are not mindless slaves, nor are they mindlessly programmed, and several of the characters, both human and azi, find a lot of appeal in the core of certainty and deep self-knowledge of their own psychological rules that azis can have. Cyteen is a book about emotions, and logic, and where they come from and how to balance them. About whether emotional pain and uncertainty is beneficial or damaging, and about how one's experiences make up and alter one's identity.

This is also a book about politics, both institutional and personal. It opens with Ariane Emory, Councilor for Science for five decades and the head of the ruling Union Expansionist party. She's powerful, brilliant, dangerously good at reading people, and dangerously willing to manipulate and control people for her own ends. What she wants, at the start of the book, is to completely clone a Special (the legal status given to the most brilliant minds of Union). This was attempted before and failed, but Ariane believes it's now possible, with a combination of tape, genetic engineering, and environmental control, to reproduce the brilliance of the original mind. To give Union another lifespan of work by their most brilliant thinkers.

Jordan Warrick, another scientist at Reseune, has had a long-standing professional and personal feud with Ariane Emory. As the book opens, he is fighting to be transferred out from under her to the new research station that would be part of the Special cloning project, and he wants to bring his son Justin and Justin's companion azi Grant with them. Justin is a PR, a parental replicate, meaning he shares Jordan's genetic makeup but was not an attempt to reproduce the conditions of Jordan's rearing. Grant was raised as his brother. And both have, for reasons that are initially unclear, attracted the attention of Ariane, who may be using them as pawns.

This is just the initial setup, and along with this should come a warning: the first 150 pages set up a very complex and dangerous political situation and build the tension that will carry the rest of the book, and they do this by, largely, torturing Justin and Grant. The viewpoint jumps around, but Justin and Grant are the primary protagonists for this first section of the book. While one feels sympathy for both of them, I have never, in my multiple readings of the book, particularly liked them. They're hard to like, as opposed to pity, during this setup; they have very little agency, are in way over their heads, are constantly making mistakes, and are essentially having their lives destroyed.

Don't let this turn you off on the rest of the book. Cyteen takes a dramatic shift about 150 pages in. A new set of protagonists are introduced who are some of the most interesting, complex, and delightful protagonists in any SF novel I have read, and who are very much worth waiting for. While Justin has his moments later on (his life is so hard that his courage can be profoundly moving), it's not necessary to like him to love this book. That's one of the reasons why I so strongly dislike breaking it into three sections; that first section, which is mostly Justin and Grant, is not representative of the book.

I can't talk too much more about the plot without risking spoiling it, but it's a beautiful, taut, and complex story that is full of my favorite things in both settings and protagonists. Cyteen is a book about brilliant people who think on their feet. Cherryh succeeds at showing this through what they do, which is rarely done as well as it is here. It's a book about remembering one's friends and remembering one's enemies, and waiting for the most effective moment to act, but it also achieves some remarkable transformations. About 150 pages in, you are likely to loathe almost everyone in Reseune; by the end of the book, you find yourself liking, or at least understanding, nearly everyone. This is extremely hard, and Cherryh pulls it off in most cases without even giving the people she's redeeming their own viewpoint sections. Other than perhaps George R.R. Martin I've not seen another author do this as well.

And, more than anything else, Cyteen is a book with the most wonderful feeling of catharsis. I think this is one of the reasons why I adore this book and have difficulties with some of Cherryh's other works. She's always good at ramping up the tension and putting her characters in awful, untenable positions. Less frequently does she provide the emotional payoff of turning the tables, where you get to watch a protagonist do everything you've been wanting them to do for hundreds of pages, except even better and more delightfully than you would have come up with. Cyteen is one of the most emotionally satisfying books I've ever read.

I could go on and on; there is just so much here that I love. Deep questions of ethics and self-control, presented in a way that one can see the consequences of both bad decisions and good ones and contrast them. Some of the best political negotiations in fiction. A wonderful look at friendship and loyalty from several directions. Two of the best semi-human protagonists I've seen, who one can see simultaneously as both wonderful friends and utterly non-human and who put nearly all of the androids in fiction to shame by being something trickier and more complex. A wonderful unfolding sense of power. A computer that can somewhat anticipate problems and somewhat can't, and that encapsulates much of what I love about semi-intelligent bases in science fiction. Cyteen has that rarest of properties of SF novels: Both the characters and the technology meld in a wonderful combination where neither could exist without the other, where the character issues are illuminated by the technology and the technology supports the characters.

I have, for this book, two warnings. The first, as previously mentioned, is that the first 150 pages of setup is necessary but painful to read, and I never fully warmed to Justin and Grant throughout. I would not be surprised to hear that someone started this book but gave up on it after 50 or 100 pages. I do think it's worth sticking out the rocky beginning, though. Justin and Grant continue to be a little annoying, but there's so much other good stuff going on that it doesn't matter.

The other warning is that part of the setup of the story involves the rape of an underage character. This is mostly off-camera, but the emotional consequences are significant (as they should be) and are frequently discussed throughout the book. There is also rather frank discussion of adolescent sexuality later in the book. I think both of these are relevant to the story and handled in a way that isn't gratuitous, but they made me uncomfortable and I don't have any past history with those topics.

Those warnings notwithstanding, this is simply one of the best SF novels ever written. It uses technology to pose deep questions about human emotions, identity, and interactions, and it uses complex and interesting characters to take a close look at the impact of technology on lives. And it does this with a wonderfully taut, complicated plot that sustains its tension through all 680 pages, and with characters whom I absolutely love. I have no doubt that I'll be reading it for a fourth and fifth time some years down the road.

Followed by Regenesis, although Cyteen stands well entirely on its own and there's no pressing need to read the sequel.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Some additional thoughts after re-reading Cyteen in 2025:

I touched on this briefly in my original review, but I was really struck during this re-read how much the azi are a commentary on and a complication of the role of androids in earlier science fiction. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were an attempt to control the risks of robots, but can also be read as turning robots into slaves. Azis make the slavery more explicit and disturbing by running the programming on a human biological platform, but they're more explicitly programmed and artificial than a lot of science fiction androids.

Artificial beings and their relationship to humans have been a recurring theme of SF since Frankenstein, but I can't remember a novel that makes the comparison to humans this ambiguous and conflicted. The azi not only like being azi, they can describe why they prefer it. It's clear that Union made azi for many of the same reasons that humans enslave other humans, and that Ariane Emory is using them as machinery in a larger (and highly ethically questionable) plan, but Cherryh gets deeper into the emergent social complications and societal impact than most SF novels manage. Azi are apparently closer to humans than the famous SF examples such as Commander Data, but the deep differences are both more subtle and more profound.

I've seen some reviewers who are disturbed by the lack of a clear moral stance by the protagonists against the creation of azi. I'm not sure what to think about that. It's clear the characters mostly like the society they've created, and the groups attempting to "free" azi from their "captivity" are portrayed as idiots who have no understanding of azi psychology. Emory says she doesn't want azi to be a permanent aspect of society but clearly has no intention of ending production any time soon. The book does seem oddly unaware that the production of azi is unethical per se and, unlike androids, has an obvious exit ramp: Continue cloning gene lines as needed to maintain a sufficient population for a growing industrial civilization, but raise the children as children rather than using azi programming. If Cherryh included some reason why that was infeasible, I didn't see it, and I don't think the characters directly confronted it.

I don't think societies in books need to be ethical, or that Cherryh intended to defend this one. There are a lot of nasty moral traps that civilizations can fall into that make for interesting stories. But the lack of acknowledgment of the problem within the novel did seem odd this time around.

The other part of this novel that was harder to read past in this re-read is the sexual ethics. There's a lot of adolescent sexuality in this book, and even apart from the rape scene — which was more on-the-page than I had remembered and which is quite (intentionally) disturbing — there is a whole lot of somewhat dubious consent. Maybe I've gotten older or just more discriminating, but it felt weirdly voyeuristic to know this much about the sex lives of characters who are, at several critical points in the story, just a bunch of kids.

All that being said, and with the repeated warning that the first 150 pages of this novel are just not very good, there is still something magic about the last two-thirds of this book. It has competence porn featuring a precociously brilliant teenager who I really like, it has one of the more interesting non-AI programmed computer systems that I've read in SF, it has satisfying politics that feel like modern politics (media strategy and relationships and negotiated alliances, rather than brute force and ideology), and it has a truly excellent feeling of catharsis. The plot resolution is a bit too abrupt and a bit insufficiently explained (there's more in Regenesis), but even though this was my fourth time through this book, the pacing grabbed me again and I could barely put down the last part of the story.

Ethics aside (and I realize that's quite the way to start a sentence), I find the azi stuff fascinating. I know the psychology in this book is not real and is hopelessly simplified compared to real psychology, but there's something in the discussions of value sets and flux and self-knowledge that grabs my interest and makes me want to ponder. I think it's the illusion of simplicity and control, the what-if premise of thought where core motivations and moral rules could be knowable instead of endlessly fluid the way they are in us humans. Cherryh's azi are some of the most intriguing androids in science fiction to me precisely because they don't start with computers and add the humanity in, but instead start with humanity and overlay a computer-like certainty of purpose that's fully self-aware. The result is more subtle and interesting than anything Star Trek managed.

I was not quite as enamored with this book this time around, but it's still excellent once the story gets properly started. I still would recommend it, but I might add more warnings about the disturbing parts.

Re-read rating: 9 out of 10

Review: The Dragon's Banker, by Scott Warren

The Dragon's Banker is a self-published stand-alone fantasy novel, set in a secondary world with roughly Renaissance levels of technology and primarily alchemical magic. The version I read includes an unrelated novelette, "Forego Quest." I have the vague impression that this novel shares a world with other fantasy novels by the same author, but I have not read them and never felt like I was missing something important.

Sailor Kelstern is a merchant banker. He earns his livelihood by financing caravans and sea voyages and taking a cut of the profits. He is not part of the primary banking houses of the city; instead, he has a small, personal business with a loyal staff that looks for opportunities the larger houses may have overlooked. As the story opens, he has fallen on hard times due in part to a spectacular falling-out with a previous client and is in desperate need of new opportunities. The jewel-bedecked Lady Arkelai and her quest for private banking services for her father, Lord Alkazarian, may be exactly what he needs. Or it may be a dangerous trap; Sailor has had disastrous past experience with nobles attempting to strong-arm him into their service.

Unbeknownst to Sailor, Lord Alkazarian is even more dangerous than he first appears. He is sitting on a vast hoard of traditional riches whose value is endangered by the rise of new-fangled paper money. He is not at all happy about this development. He is also a dragon.

I, and probably many other people who read this book, picked it up because it was recommended by Matt Levine as a fantasy about finance instead of the normal magical adventuring. I knew it was self-published going in, so I wasn't expecting polished writing. My hope was for interesting finance problems in a fantasy context, similar to the kind of things Matt Levine's newsletter is about: schemes for financing risky voyages, complications around competing ideas of money, macroeconomic risks from dragon hoards, complex derivatives, principal-agent problems, or something similar that goes beyond the (annoyingly superficial) treatment of finance in most fantasy novels.

Unfortunately, what I got was a rather standard fantasy setting and a plot that revolves mostly around creative uses for magical devices, some conventional political skulduggery, and a lot of energetic but rather superficial business hustling. The protagonist is indeed a merchant banker who is in no way a conventional fantasy hero (one of the most taxing parts of Sailor's occasional visits to the dragon is the long hike down to the hoard, or rather the long climb back out), but the most complex financial instrument that appears in this book is straightforward short-selling. Alas. I was looking forward to the book that I hoped this was.

Given my expectations, this was a disappointment. I kept waiting for the finances to get more complicated and interesting, and that kept not happening. Without that expectation, this is... okay, I guess. The writing is adequate but kind of stilted, presumably in an effort to make it sound slightly archaic, and has a strong self-published feel. Sailor is not a bad protagonist, but neither is he all that memorable. I did like some of the world-building, which has an attention to creative uses of bits of magic that readers who like gadget fantasy may appreciate. There are a lot of plot conveniences and coincidences, though, and very little of this is going to feel original to a long-time fantasy reader.

Putting some of the complexity of real Renaissance banking and finance systems into a fantasy world is a great idea, but I've yet to read one that lived up to the potential of the premise. (Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle comes the closest; unfortunately, the non-economic parts of that over-long series are full of Stephenson's worst writing habits.) Part of the problem is doubtless that I am reasonably well-read in economics, so my standards are high. Maybe the average reader would be content with a few bits on the perils of investment, a simple treatment of trust in currency, and a mention or two of short-selling, which is what you get in this book.

I am not altogether sorry that I read this, but I wouldn't recommend it. I encourage Matt Levine to read more genre fiction and find some novels with more interesting financial problems!

"Forego Quest": This included novelette, on the other hand, was surprisingly good and raised my overall rating for the book by a full point.

Arturus Kingson is the Chosen One. He is not the Chosen One of a single prophecy or set of prophecies; no, he's the Chosen One of, apparently, all of them, no matter how contradictory, and he wants absolutely nothing to do with any of them. Magical swords litter his path. He has so many scars and birthmarks that they look like a skin condition. Beautiful women approach him in bars. Mysterious cloaked strangers die dramatically in front of him. Owls try to get into his bedroom window. It's all very exhausting, since the universe absolutely refuses to take no for an answer.

There isn't much more to the story than this, but Warren writes it in the first person with just the right tone of exasperated annoyance and gives Arturus a real problem to solve and enough of a plot to provide some structure. I'm usually not a fan of parody stories because too many of them feel like juvenile slapstick. This one is sarcastic instead, which is much more to my taste.

"Forego Quest" goes on perhaps a bit too long, and the ending was not as successful as the rest of the book, but this was a lot of fun and made me laugh. (7)

Rating: 6 out of 10