Review:
Regenesis, by C.J. Cherryh
| Series: |
Cyteen #2 |
| Publisher: |
DAW |
| Copyright: |
January 2009 |
| ISBN: |
0-7564-0592-0 |
| Format: |
Mass market |
| Pages: |
682 |
The main text below is an edited version of my original review of
Regensis written on 2012-12-21. Additional
comments from my re-read are after the original review.
Regenesis is a direct sequel to
Cyteen, picking up very shortly after the end of that book and
featuring all of the same characters. It would be absolutely pointless to
read this book without first reading
Cyteen; all of the emotional
resonance and world-building that make
Regensis work are done
there, and you will almost certainly know whether you want to read it
after reading the first book. Besides,
Cyteen is one of the best SF
novels ever written and not the novel to skip.
Because this is such a direct sequel, it's impossible to provide a good
description of
Regenesis without spoiling at least characters and
general plot developments from
Cyteen. So stop reading here if
you've not yet read the previous book.
I've had this book for a while, and re-read
Cyteen in anticipation
of reading it, but I've been nervous about it. One of the best parts of
Cyteen is that Cherryh didn't belabor the ending, and I wasn't sure
what part of the plot could be reasonably extended. Making me more nervous
was the back-cover text that framed the novel as an investigation of who
actually killed the first Ari, a question that was fairly firmly in the
past by the end of
Cyteen and that neither I nor the characters had
much interest in answering.
Cyteen was also a magical blend of
sympathetic characters, taut tension, complex plotting, and wonderful
catharsis, the sort of lightning in a bottle that can rarely be caught
twice.
I need not have worried. If someone had told me that
Regenesis was
another 700 pages of my favorite section of
Cyteen, I would have
been dubious. But that's exactly what it is. And the characters only care
about Ari's murderer because it comes up, fairly late in the novel, as a
clue in another problem.
Ari and Justin are back in the safe laboratory environment of Reseune,
safe now that politics are not trying to kill or control them. Yanni has
taken over administration. There is a general truce, and even some deeper
agreement. Everyone can take a breath and relax, albeit with the presence
of Justin's father Jordan as an ongoing irritant. But broader Union
politics are not stable: there is an election in progress for the Defense
councilor that may break the tenuous majority in favor of Reseune and the
Science Directorate, and Yanni is working out a compromise to gain more
support by turning a terraforming project loose on a remote world. As the
election and the politics heat up, interpersonal relationships abruptly
deteriorate, tensions with Jordan sharply worsen, and there may be moles
in Reseune's iron-clad security. Navigating the crisis while keeping her
chosen family safe will once again tax all of Ari's abilities.
The third section of
Cyteen, where Ari finally has the tools to
take fate into her own hands and starts playing everyone off against each
other, is one of my favorite sections of any book. If it was yours as
well,
Regenesis is another 700 pages of exactly that. As an
extension and revisiting, it does lose a bit of immediacy and surprise
from the original.
Regenesis is also less concerned with the larger
questions of azi society, the nature of thought and personality, loyalty
and authority, and the best model for the development of human
civilization. It's more of a political thriller. But it's a political
thriller that recaptures much of the drama and tension of
Cyteen
and is full of exceptionally smart and paranoid people thinking through
all angles of a problem, working fast on their feet, and successfully
navigating tricky and treacherous political landscapes.
And, like
Cyteen but unlike others of Cherryh's novels I've read,
it's a novel about empowerment, about seizing control of one's
surroundings and effectively using all of the capability and leverage at
one's fingertips. That gives it a catharsis that's almost as good as
Cyteen.
It's also, like its predecessor, a surprisingly authoritarian novel. I
think it's in that, more than anything else in these books, that one sees
the impact of the azi.
Regenesis makes it clear that the story is
set, not in a typical society, but inside a sort of corporation, with an
essentially hierarchical governance structure. There are other SF novels
set within corporations (
Solitaire comes
to mind), but normally they follow peons or at best mid-level personnel or
field agents, or otherwise take the viewpoint of the employees or the
exploited. When they follow the corporate leaders, the focus usually isn't
down inside the organization, but out into the world, with the corporation
as silent resources on which the protagonist can draw.
Regenesis is instead about the leadership. It's about decisions
about the future of humanity that characters feel they can make
undemocratically (in part because they or their predecessors have
effectively engineered the opinions of the democratic population), but
it's also about how one manages and secures a top-down organization.
Reseune is, as in the previous novel, a paranoid's suspicions come true;
everyone is out to get everyone else, or at least might be, and the level
of omnipresent security and threat forces a close parsing of alliances and
motivations that elevates loyalty to the greatest virtue.
In
Cyteen, we had long enough with Ari to see the basic shape of
her personality and her slight divergences from her predecessor, but her
actions are mostly driven by necessity.
Regenesis gives us more of
a picture of what she's like when her actions aren't forced, and here I
think Cherryh manages a masterpiece of subtle characterization. Ari has
diverged substantially from her predecessor without always realizing, and
those divergences are firmly grounded in the differences she found or
created between her life and the first Ari's. She has friends, confidents,
and a community, which combined with past trauma has made her fiercely,
powerfully protective. It's that protective instinct that weaves the plot
together. So many of the events of
Cyteen and
Regenesis are
driven by people's varying reactions to trauma.
If you, like me, loved the last third of
Cyteen, read this, because
Regenesis is more of exactly that. Cherryh finds new politics, new
challenges, and a new and original plot within the same world and with the
same characters, but it has the same feel of maneuvering, analysis, and
decisive action. You will, as with
Cyteen have to be comfortable
with pages of internal monologue from people thinking through all sides of
a problem. If you didn't like that in the previous book, avoid this one;
if you loved it, here's the sequel you didn't know you were waiting for.
Original rating: 9 out of 10
Some additional thoughts after re-reading
Regenesis in 2025:
Cyteen mostly held up to a re-reading and I had fond memories of
Regenesis and hoped that it would as well. Unfortunately, it did
not. I think I can see the shape of what I enjoyed the first time I read
it, but I apparently was in precisely the right mood for this specific
type of political power fantasy.
I did at least say that you have to be comfortable with pages of internal
monologue, but on re-reading, there was considerably more of that than I
remembered and it was quite repetitive. Ari spends most of the book
chasing her tail, going over and around and beside the same theories that
she'd already considered and worrying over the nuances of every position.
The last time around, I clearly enjoyed that; this time, I found it
exhausting and not very well-written. The political maneuvering is not
that deep; Ari just shows every minutia of her analysis.
Regenesis also has more about the big questions of how to design a
society and the role of the azi than I had remembered, but I'm not sure
those discussions reach any satisfying conclusions. The book puts a great
deal of effort into trying to convince the reader that Ari is capable of
designing sociological structures that will shape Union society for
generations to come through, mostly, manipulation of azi programming (deep
sets is the term used in the book). I didn't find this entirely convincing
the first time around, and I was even less convinced in this re-read.
Human societies are a wicked problem, and I don't find Cherryh's computer projections any more
convincing than Asimov's psychohistory.
Related, I am surprised, in retrospect, that the authoritarian
underpinnings of this book didn't bother me more on my first read. They
were blatantly obvious on the second read. This felt like something
Cherryh put into these books intentionally, and I think it's left
intentionally ambiguous whether the reader is supposed to agree with Ari's
goals and decisions, but I was much less in the mood on this re-read to
read about Ari making blatantly authoritarian decisions about the future
of society simply because she's smart and thinks she, unlike others, is
acting ethically. I say this even though I like Ari and mostly
enjoyed spending time in her head. But there is a deep fantasy of being
able to reprogram society at play here that looks a lot nastier from the
perspective of 2025 than apparently it did to me in 2012.
Florian and Catlin are still my favorite characters in the series, though.
I find it oddly satisfying to read about truly competent bodyguards,
although like all of the azi they sit in an (I think intentionally)
disturbing space of ambiguity between androids and human slaves.
The somewhat too frank sexuality from Cyteen is still present in
Regenesis, but I found it a bit less off-putting, mostly because
everyone is older. The authoritarian bent is stronger, since
Regenesis is the story of Ari consolidating power rather than the
underdog power struggle of Cyteen, and I had less tolerance for it
on this re-read.
The main problem with this book on re-read was that I bogged down about
halfway through and found excuses to do other things rather than finish
it. On the first read, I was apparently in precisely the right mood to
read about Ari building a fortified home for all of her friends; this
time, it felt like endless logistics and musings on interior decorating
that didn't advance the plot. Similarly, Justin and Grant's slow
absorption into Ari's orbit felt like a satisfying slow burn friendship in
my previous reading and this time felt touchy and repetitive.
I was one of the few avid defenders of Regenesis the first time I
read it, and sadly I've joined the general reaction on a re-read: This is
not a very good book. It's too long, chases its own tail a bit too much,
introduces a lot more authoritarianism and doesn't question it as directly
as I wanted, and gets even deeper into Cherryh's invented
pseudo-psychology than Cyteen. I have a high tolerance for the
endless discussions of azi deep sets and human flux thinking, and even I
got bored this time through.
On re-read, this book was nowhere near as good as I thought it was
originally, and I would only recommend it to people who loved
Cyteen and who really wanted a continuation of Ari's story, even if
it is flabby and not as well-written. I have normally been keeping the
rating of my first read of books, but I went back and lowered this one by
two points to ensure it didn't show as high on my list of recommendations.
Re-read rating: 6 out of 10
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Historically the primary way to contribute to Debian has been to email the Debian bug tracker with a code patch. Now that 
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