Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (9 page)

Aside from its merits as a vivid and disturbing study of character under duress, for us in the early decades of the 21st century this novel has a singular and prophetic salience (for all the nits one might pick). Turner characterized our time as plagued, for the authorities, by

the nuclear threat and the world population pressure and the world starvation problem and the terrorist outbreaks and the strikes and the corruption in high places shaking hands with crime in low places, and the endless business of simply trying to stay in power—all to be attended to
urgently.

Sound familiar?

13

C. J. Cherryh

Despite appearing at the apogee of the cyberpunk movement, the book’s title does not refer to a cybernetic adolescent, but rather to the name of a long-settled colony world that rivals ancient Earth in power and status. Cyteen has ascended to its influential position thanks to the business enterprise—really, political player and think tank as well—known as Reseune, which exclusively controls the cloning and “tape education” processes that are capable of turning out lab-grown disenfranchised workers (“azi”) and privileged citizens alike, to meet any needs (including warfare, long before George Lucas’s “Clone Wars”). And controlling Reseune is Ariane Emory, ancient megalomaniacal spider, user, abuser and manipulator at the heart of the web. A genius “Special,” Emory is a combination of Howard Hughes, Rupert Murdoch and Edward Teller.

The first third of the book (a fortunate division that lent itself to a since-overturned publisher’s decision to issue the narrative in three separate parts) sets up the whole current scenario, backstory and vast troupe of players. Its climax is the assassination of Ariane Emory by a disaffected confederate. Desperate to regain Emory’s leadership abilities and brains, Reseune’s executives clone her and undertake her upbringing from infancy, in the book’s middle portion. Seeking to replicate her historical nurture, they embark on a program straight out of
The Boys from Brazil
. This segment ends when Ari II assumes her majority at age fifteen, gets wise to the true nature of her life, and begins to take the reins of Reseune.

“You know why they made me and how they taught me, and you know what I am. And you know my predecessor had enemies who wanted her dead, and one who killed her. The closer I get to what she was, the more scared people get—because I’m kind of spooky, Amy, and I’m real spooky to a lot of people who weren’t half as afraid of my predecessor.”

Indeed!

Cyteen
is, in some deep and truly profitable sense, but not exclusively, a rethinking and updating of Huxley’s
Brave New World
. Casting its spotlight on the genetic tailoring of people to fit into social niches, their artificial education by “tape” means, and the establishment of elites and underclasses, the book echoes and refines Huxley’s dystopia to a certain level of precision. But Cherryh has other themes and tropes in mind. Placing the world of Cyteen in a galactic setting against rival worlds, with all the competition and realpolitik machinations that such a milieu implies, the author exhibits an interest in examining the Darwinian game of “nation” versus nation (Earth versus Cyteen), weighing which political system is best fitted for taking the species to new and productive—if not necessarily safe and fair—places in a hostile universe.

But perhaps Cherry’s deepest concern is the allied realms of identity/consciousness and family. Although the Reseune tech is less godlike than some other fictional constructs and does not permit full identity transplants between bodily shells, her portrayal of shared clonal identities treats of many of the same existential notions found in the works of such writers as David Brin; Greg Egan; Kazuo Ishiguro (Entry 77); Richard Morgan (Entry 69); Dan Simmons; John Varley. As for family, Cherryh riffs inventively about what it means to have subsets of one’s genes distributed throughout a large population, and the limits and possible permutations of consanguinity and blood loyalty. In a sense, she has carnalized Greg Bear’s notion of virtual “partials.”

Cherry’s sprawling yet channeled novel (think of a powerful central river with lazy marshes adjacent, a kind of Everglades of a book) combines the sociopolitical reach of Poul Anderson’s aforementioned
Technic
tales with the Byzantine familial treacheries and alliances of Roger Zelazny’s
Amber
sequence. It blends the weird hothouse domesticity of Gene Wolfe’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” or Le Guin’s “Nine Lives” with the biopunk grotesqueries of Jack Vance’s
The Dragon Masters
. Such a recipe would have resulted in a farrago in the hands of a lesser writer, but Cherryh justifies every bit of Zen master faith that Donald Wollheim placed in her.

14

David Zindell

Ringess recounts his own exploits in a rich language full of neologisms and repurposed words, which some have likened to the methodology of Gene Wolfe. And just as Wolfe was influenced by Jack Vance, so too does Zindell employ some of the stratagems of that anthropologically savvy Grand Master, showing us how social customs and taboos and convoluted etiquette can shape and constrain societies. Ringess’s forays, solo and with his comrades, obviously harken to the great Arthurian cycle of tales (hence “Mallory,” as in Thomas). The “Elder Eddas” secret which they all quest after is thus akin to the Holy Grail. Moreover, the bardic, mythic, roistering
elan vital
on display brings up comparisons with E. R. Eddison’s great
Zimiamvia
trilogy, which, though it soon became indistinguishable from fantasy after its first few pages, commenced as science fiction set on Mercury. Sometimes Zindell’s voice approaches that of David Lindsay in his eccentric
A Voyage to Arcturus
. And Stanislaw Lem’s extravagant techno tall tales in
The Cyberiad
spring to mind as well.

The trope of damaged or specially endowed starship pilots is a rich one in sf, and Zindell has a lark trying to incorporate as many allusions to the great stories of this heritage as possible. Cordwainer Smith, Samuel Delany, Frank Herbert and Anne McCaffrey are the major past peaks he surmounts. Additionally, Zindell makes a nod toward what was at the time the gold standard of space opera, Larry Niven’s
Known Space
future history, with mention of a “ringworld” and employment of the trope of a wavefront of exploding stars that threatens civilization, the Puppeteer’s bane, here called “the Vild.”

Zindell’s story is notable for its unabashed cerebral pleasures, which do not cancel out its vividly physical blood and thunder moments:

My ship did not fall out into the center of the moons. Instead, I segued into a jungle-like decision tree... Each individual ideoplast was lovely and unique. The representation of the fixed-point theorem, for instance, was like a coiled ruby necklace. As I built my proof, the coil joined with feathery, diamond fibres of the first Lavi mapping lemma.

These star pilots, are taking their ships through windows in hyperspace by proving mathematical theorems! How strange! And yet—don’t today’s pilots do something like that already? Mapping a course, by hand or by computer, is the application of mathematics to the shape of the world. These futuristic pilots happen to be doing it (somehow) directly! Feeling these sentences work on you, getting the point, is an audacious and shivery pleasure for those who know that the trick to decoding such sentences is not by way of the conventional dictionary and encyclopedia. Recognizing the fixed-point theorem, which in mathematics governs the transformation of one set of points into an isomorphic set, helps one appreciate a sense of recursion in what is being described/constructed—but it is not crucial.