Cyteen
by C. J. Cherryh
Summary
Union is a human civilisation built on azi: people grown in vats and educated by deep tape, psychologically conditioned rather than raised, legally property, and comprising most of the population. Reseune, the laboratory that makes them, is effectively a sovereign state, and Ariane Emory runs it.
Emory is a Special, one of fourteen certified geniuses given extraordinary legal protection, and she is a monster: brilliant, political, and a sexual predator of the adolescents in her care. Early in the book she is murdered.
Because Union cannot afford to lose her, Reseune replicates her. A clone is produced and then the far harder work begins: reconstructing the childhood, the tutors, the traumas and the exact emotional injuries that produced the original mind, on a living child who knows what is being done to her and why. Ari the second grows up reading her predecessor's private files, being deliberately hurt on schedule, and working out how to become someone the programme did not intend.
Around her, Justin Warrick, the son of the man accused of the murder, is kept at Reseune for twenty years as a hostage in everything but name.
The azi are the deeper subject. Florian and Catlin, bodyguards designed and raised for Ari and psychologically incapable of wanting anything else, are written with total sympathy and no sentimentality, and the novel keeps asking whether a contented manufactured person has been wronged.
At roughly seven hundred dense pages of laboratory politics, tape design and committee manoeuvring, this is demanding and almost entirely interior. Whole chapters are meetings. Nothing is explained on arrival.
What it delivers is a genuinely frightening portrait of a child raised as an experiment who becomes formidable enough to take the experiment over.
Best for readers who want a serious novel about how a person is manufactured, and who do not need action to keep going.
Historical Context & Significance
Cyteen won the 1989 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, seven years after Downbelow Station took the 1982 Hugo. Both belong to C. J. Cherryh's Alliance Union future history, which now runs to more than twenty books.
Cherryh trained as a classicist and taught Latin before writing full time, and her method, dropping the reader inside a viewpoint with no explanation of terms and letting the world assemble itself, is unusually demanding and unusually rewarded here.
It was published in three volumes in some editions, which has confused its bibliography ever since. The azi, conditioned by tape into contentment with their own status, are one of science fiction's most uncomfortable devices, since the novel refuses to let them be simply slaves or simply happy. Cherryh was named a Grand Master in 2016.