C. J. Cherryh won her first Hugo in 1982 for 'Downbelow Station', a novel in her expansive 'Alliance-Union' series, which now numbers twenty-seven novels, if we count all the sub-series, with another due in 2024. I found it a fascinating novel that I admired deeply, not least for its vast worldbuilding and worthy characterisations; and not to forget a glorious sense of place right in the middle of a space war that it wasn't really part of but which affected them deeply. However, I didn't really enjoy the book and I found it heavy going. It took me three weeks to finish.

Almost everything I said about 'Downbelow Station' in that review holds true here, but doubled or even tripled. It's a long book, running 680 trade paperback pages of small print in my New English Library edition, and it took me a long time to get through, an entire month reading maybe twenty or thirty pages a night. It's dry stuff, full of admirable detail about the Union world of Cyteen and especially its politics. Most of the book is intrigue rather than action, making it very talky, but the author also dips deeply into science, admittedly one of the most interesting things about Cyteen, but so deeply that we're almost in textbooks at points. There are whole chapters written in italics.

It's a daunting read that should not be tackled lightly, which makes it unfortunate that my edition frames it as a murder mystery in its brief back cover blurb. Ariane Emory runs the bio-engineering labs at Reseune that's the heart of Cyteen, which in turn is the capital planet of the Union. It was initially founded by dissident scientists and they found a need, when threatened by Earth, to grow a much larger population. That was largely done through cloning, performed at Reseune, much of it designed and guided by Emory. She also represents Science on the Council of Nine that governs Union and has for half a century, being a hundred and twenty when she's murdered.

In one sense this is a murder mystery, because there's a murder, albeit not until a hundred pages in, and the character who confesses to the crime and accepts exile as a punishment probably didn't do it. However, everyone accepts his confession and moves on. After all, both Emory, the body, and Jordan Warrick, the apparent murderer, are specials, a select group of geniuses deemed so crucial to Union that they're exempt from pesky things like laws. They spend what seems like every waking hour working, so people are OK with that. So the only people wondering whodunit are the readers and we wonder why Cherryh doesn't even attempt to explore the subject. In fact, while revelations in the final few pages suggest who the real killer might have been, we're never really told. It's not what this book is about.

What it's about is science, because Emory is clearly the most important character in the book and to Union. Not only has she effectively been running the place for decades but she has plans, wildly detailed plans that will frame the future of Union as much as she's framed its past. In many ways, I would happily compare her to Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' books, but she's far more hands-on and, unlike Seldon, she doesn't stay dead.

As soon as she's murdered, she's reborn in the form of a PR, a Parental Replicate, a clone with full rights to inherit from her former self. And she continues to be the primary character in the book, merely as Ariane Emory II. Ariane Emory I isn't quite gone either, because she's a genius who has coded every contingency she can think of into her computer, with access reserved to her PR so that she can advise her from beyond the grave, literally a ghost in the machine.

This is all fascinating stuff and, thinking back at just how deeply Cherryh extrapolated the culture of Union from its scientific base, with levels of rights afforded to PRs and CITs and azis that echo a caste system or a culture of indentured servitude, if not outright slavery, I'm stunned at just how much she achieved here. There's worldbuilding and there's worldbuilding. People could read this, and presumably the rest of the 'Alliance-Union' series and write history and psychology books all about planets and cultures that have never existed. In a way, Cherryh has, merely framing them as fictional novels.

The problem is that, as endlessly fascinating as Arianne Emory is, both I and II, and as thoroughly important as she is to Reseune, Cyteen and Union, she's not particularly likeable. We could argue about the morality of cloning and azis and psychsets and so on, but moral lines are crossed all the time here and some far more clearly than others. The supposed trigger for Jordan Warrick to kill Emory I is his discovery that she's been sleeping with his son, Justin. Given that she's 120 and he's a still underage PR of Jordan, we're hardly on her side from the outset. That there turn out to be reasons for why she did this and sexual satisfaction may not even be the main one isn't much of a help. And that's just the beginning.

A couple of hundred pages in, we learn about Gehenna because it's come to light in the press and the politicians are a making a huge deal of it. Regular readers of Cherryh would have known about it already through the 1983 novel 'Forty Thousand in Gehenna', an earlier work in the sub-series of 'Alliance-Union' that 'Cyteen' belongs to, 'The Era of Rapprochment'. It's a planet to which a colony comprised mostly of clones was sent by Union, with heavy involvement and planning by Emory, not for their own benefit but to become a later problem for the enemy when they discover it. Location, location, location.

And it isn't just Emory. She and her political faction may be more palatable than their opposition, especially given that some are terrorists who plant bombs, but that doesn't mean that they're at all palatable. Emory II is created in her image, a full clone, but nurture is as important as nature, so she's raised as closely as possible to the original, just in case. That means involving people who probably didn't want to be involved, then exiling them at the appropriate point just to replicate a life event in Emory I's background. Valued members of the community with decades of service are tossed aside like garbage just to mirror the past of one clone.

As you might imagine, there's no real warmth here. Effectively, by reading this book, we're tuning in to an ongoing experiment over twenty-odd years. Everything is intrigue and suspicion. The fear of failure is palpable and omnipresent. The stakes seem high to begin with and we only learn more about them as Cherryh piles on the detail. We gradually become experts on the planet Cyteen, its history, politics and culture, and the science that framed it and continues to shape it. And yet we'd not likely to choose to go there even if we could. To be fair, we probably wouldn't want to go to the future Earth at this point either, but at least there were some sympathetic characters in residence at Downbelow Station. There aren't here. There are predators and prey.

Talking of 'Downbelow Station', that won the Hugo but wasn't even nominated for the Nebula, an interesting scenario ironically replicated here. The 1989 Nebula went to Lois McMaster Bujold for a 'Vorkosigan Saga' space opera novels, 'Falling Free'. The difference is that Hugos are voted for by fans, those who attend the annual Worldcon convention, while Nebulas are voted on by members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, so fellow authors. I wonder why the former like Cherryh more than the latter.

One factor that probably didn't affect anyone voting in 1989 but certainly seems notable today is a constant focus on tape. The digital revolution was well under way at this point, but this far future civilisation still uses tape for everything, including programming clones with psychsets, which are their induced educations. It felt as jarring to me in 2023 as William Gibson's use of payphones in a cyberpunk dystopia in 'Neuromancer'. What's more, computers record everything, but Emory II is unable to find out anything about her former self, because she's been kept from the news. How? I guess Cherryh failed to predict the internet, which, of course, already existed in 1989. Gibson built his entire genre around it, but Cherryh still talks about timesharing on computers and tapes, but not the instant accessibility of information.

And so here's another Hugo-winning novel that I appreciated but didn't enjoy. I can acknowledge just how immense it is not just as a physical object but as an example of deep worldbuilding. It can generate discussion on any one of a hundred topics. But is it fun, engaging and worthy of investing emotion? Not at all. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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