Cyteen - Bolha.review

696 pages

English language

Published Sept. 1, 1995 by Aspect.

ISBN:: 978-0-446-67127-9

(1 review)

From back cover Warner paperback February 1989:

ARIANE EMORY IS DEAD. BUT NOT FOR LONG. WHERE IS ARIANE?

For fifty years, Dr. Ariane Emory has dominated politics on Cyteen Station. Because Dr. Emory controls Reseune, a city-sized factory that creates the one item essential to the planet's wealth. Reseune produces people -- computer-trained azi servants and soldiers.

Then Araine Emory is assassinated. Yet her rivals and victims, people like Dr. Jordan Warrick, his cloned son Justin, and Justin's azi brother Grant, are not freed by her death. For Emory's murder has turned Reseune into a vast, tyrannical experiment: an attempt to merge nature -- and nurture... biotech -- and cybernetics... genetics -- and psychology... heredity -- and environment. Cyteen's labs can grow clones, but Ariane Emory's followers want more. Much more. The want to re-create Ariane.

5 editions

Lazyreader@bookrastinating.com reviewed Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh

Uncomfortable but hard to put down

5 stars

This author is brilliant. She's good at portraying complicated and changing relationships between people. She inserts sticky ethical situations without blatant moralizing. By the end of the book I still wasn't sure of the author's own opinion on her azi characters, who are a class of genetically engineered, mind-altered servants (slaves). There's a sexual assault and the rug-sweeping that goes on afterward is sadly too real.

This was published in 1989, so 34 years later some of the 'futuristic' technology is a little off: people still use payphones, for example. There's light-speed travel, but it's also possible to escape detection on a nighttime river boating trip as long as you turn off your running lights. Hilariously, she also kept those sunken living room conversation pits that were popular in the 70s.

My main complaints about this book are that I feel the plot didn't progress much in the third quarter, …

This author is brilliant. She's good at portraying complicated and changing relationships between people. She inserts sticky ethical situations without blatant moralizing. By the end of the book I still wasn't sure of the author's own opinion on her azi characters, who are a class of genetically engineered, mind-altered servants (slaves). There's a sexual assault and the rug-sweeping that goes on afterward is sadly too real.

This was published in 1989, so 34 years later some of the 'futuristic' technology is a little off: people still use payphones, for example. There's light-speed travel, but it's also possible to escape detection on a nighttime river boating trip as long as you turn off your running lights. Hilariously, she also kept those sunken living room conversation pits that were popular in the 70s.

My main complaints about this book are that I feel the plot didn't progress much in the third quarter, one of the two main characters was never given agency (not totally their fault), and I didn't much like the occasional political situation info-dumping. It also ends without resolving everything, but it's a trilogy so that's par for the course.

This would be an amazing work to discuss at a book club.