I’m not a devotee of large novels, and I have to say I approached Cyteen with no little trepidation on this score.
It would not surprise me to learn it’s somewhere in the vicinity of 300,000 words. I have a policy of treating as ‘fair game’ for disclosure in a review any plot point which is revealed less than a third of the way through the book I’m breaking that rule with this review, because I think there are events within the book, even within the first third, that will have more impact if they’re not given away here.)Ĭyteen is a massive book: the edition I read weighs in at 680 pages, and it’s fairly densely-spaced text. (I am well aware that the capsule description of the book’s outline above leaves out a hell of a lot that is important, and that’s deliberate. The majority of the book occupies itself with Ari and Justin striving to come to terms with who they are, and to understand the scope and the limitations of their abilities … as well as to figure out just where they stand in relation to one another. Jordan has been agitating to be reassigned elsewhere, beyond the influence of Ariane Emory as a result of the events precipitated by the revelation of Ari’s interference with Justin, Jordan gets his wish, but at terrible cost to himself and to a good many other people within Reseune. At the start of Cyteen, Ari - a sharp-as-nails centenarian, herself gifted in genetic research, and a persistently shrewd operator - has made an enemy in Jordan Warrick, a rival researcher at Reseaune who has become concerned that Emory has been seeking to appropriate his research efforts for her own ends, a situation which is not helped when Ari initiates an ill-judged and psychologically-damaging dalliance with Warrick’s seventeen-year-old ‘son’ Justin (who is in fact Warrick senior’s personal replicant, or clone). Her awards include the John W Campbell Award, three Hugos, and a Locus (the subject of this review, Cyteen, accounts for the Locus and one of the Hugos) she also has an asteroid, 77185 Cherryh, named in her honour.Īriane Emory is the Councillor for the Bureau of Science, one of the nine supreme political figures in the multiple-world Union Ariane (‘Ari’) is also inextricably connected with Reseune, the dominant genetic-industrial research centre on the planet of Cyteen that is the centre of Union government. C J Cherryh (the terminal ‘h’ is in fact pseudonymous, and also silent) is an American SF / fantasy writer with over sixty novels to her credit.
0 kommentar(er)
