Cyteen
I tried. I really tried.

I acquired this novel from C.J. Cherryh called Cyteen. This is the 1989 Hugo Award Winner and getting lots of good reviews (comparing it to, of all things, Frank Herbert's Dune), so I thought, what the hey, right?

I'm now about 1/4 of the way and I am dropping this novel.

It's just the way my brain works. I already have brain cells tied up in my work, and for a novel to start making me think really hard to just follow the story, it has to be very good indeed. To be fair, the novel is very thorough in the exploration of the idea of bioethics gone bad, and I did get the basic storyline, but the nuances are lost on me and after awhile everything just kinda fell apart in a big jumbled mess and big blocks of text I don't even bother to read. It doesn't help that I don't really care for any of the characters depicted so far.

The warning flags were up when she started going into political intrigue and my brain shuts down halfway through the first chapter. Even after going through the next few dozen pages I still don't know everyone involved. I'm sure if I read through the whole book I may get an idea of who's who and what's what, but honestly there is not enough going on for me to care about doing that.

The Amazon reviews were full of people giving this book 6/5 and mocking those who can't get through the first 100 pages ("I'm 13 and I'm better than you because I can finish this book, neener neener!"). Sorry. Some of us have brain cells we'd rather dedicate somewhere else than to go through 700 slow pages.

So my introduction to Cherryh ended up in a disaster, especially since this won a Hugo. That's bad. I have her Faded Sun trilogy and Morgaine Saga, basically two sets of trilogy, still waiting to be read. I will give them a chance but Cyteen simply lowered the bar very low indeed.

The chances are not good. Another book I didn't drop but didn't quite enjoy as much as I probably should was The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin, a Hugo/Nebula Award winner of 1969. It actually has plot that moves along enough to sustain my interest and allows me to enjoy, but it does get too slow at times. Then again, I had similar complaint about Lord of the Rings trilogy when I first read it, and looking back, it wasn't bad and I am even thinking it's high time I reread it. The Left Hand of Darkness isn't bad, it's just... not memorable enough for me to remember, unlike another double Hugo/Nebula like, say, Ender's Game.

But Cyteen is not The Left Hand of Darkness.



On a personal side, I had the proverbial rug pulled from under my feet when I realized a critical mistake my research predecessor have made that has propagated even to this point. Luckily, so far, it seems that only the numbers changed and the results stay the same. But it does change graphs and texts...