Frobozz's Journal

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Review: Regenesis, by C.J. Cherryh

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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