688 pages
English language
Published Nov. 11, 1989 by New English Library.
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.
A challenging book with interesting characters and convoluted politicking. While the cover of this edition says it's complete in one volume; I found the ending to be both best part and also open enough for the story to continue on.
Sometimes my journey through a book takes long enough that I think I'll never finish it. It is punctuated with long breaks, sometimes so long that I give up and start over. For a sad few books, I start reading with high hopes and they never grab hold of me. My reflex is to not let the book beat me, but sometimes lack of interest in the story is enough to kill that reflex. Cyteen is one of these fallen. I feel guilty about it, and can't explain why it couldn't capture my interest. It's especially confusing to me when I loved Downbelow Station. I'll revisit this someday, maybe... and leave it unrated in the meantime.
This is a collection of the three original books.
I found the book to be "dated": a style of science fiction writing that does not stand well to the passage of time.
The verbosity was extreme and mostly pointless: the good ideas in the book could have been rendered in a couple of hundred pages.
Many interesting plot lines were developed and then dropped.
The purpose of the verbosity is sometimes to develop a feeling for the surroundings and the future universe, but the book did not describe the kind of cities or dwellings (I have no idea of either), or the characters of the people, and none of the characters were convincingly developed.
If you are willing to slog through it, at about page 350 the book will become somewhat more interesting as the pace picks up for the second half, but it is still unconvincing writing.
