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Cyteen #2

The Rebirth

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A brilliant young scientist rises to power on Cyteen, haunted by the knowledge that her predecessor and genetic duplicate died at the hands of one of her trusted advisors. Murder, politics, and genetic manipulation provide the framework for the latest Union-Alliance novel by the author of Downbelow Station. Cherryh's talent for intense, literate storytelling maintains interest throughout this long, complex novel.

248 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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About the author

C.J. Cherryh

293 books3,572 followers
Currently resident in Spokane, Washington, C.J. Cherryh has won four Hugos and is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. She is the author of more than forty novels. Her hobbies include travel, photography, reef culture, Mariners baseball, and, a late passion, figure skating: she intends to compete in the adult USFSA track. She began with the modest ambition to learn to skate backwards and now is working on jumps. She sketches, occasionally, cooks fairly well, and hates house work; she loves the outdoors, animals wild and tame, is a hobbyist geologist, adores dinosaurs, and has academic specialties in Roman constitutional law and bronze age Greek ethnography. She has written science fiction since she was ten, spent ten years of her life teaching Latin and Ancient History on the high school level, before retiring to full time writing, and now does not have enough hours in the day to pursue all her interests. Her studies include planetary geology, weather systems, and natural and man-made catastrophes, civilizations, and cosmology…in fact, there's very little that doesn't interest her. A loom is gathering dust and needs rethreading, a wooden ship model awaits construction, and the cats demand their own time much more urgently. She works constantly, researches mostly on the internet, and has books stacked up and waiting to be written.

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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
Profile Image for Jeraviz.
1,019 reviews637 followers
May 13, 2025
No le hace ningún favor la división en tres partes de la novela. Entiendo que en aquella época tal vez un tomo de 1200 páginas era demasiado pero con esta división se han convertido en 3 libros sin principio ni final y poco se puede valorar individualmente.

En esta segunda parte vemos el nudo de la trama, cómo la clon Ari abandona la niñez y llega a la vida adulta y empiezan a revelarle alguno de los secretos que le tenían ocultos.
Cherryh escribe muy bien, con detalle y tratando temas interesantes. La influencia del entorno y la educación en cómo es la personalidad de una persona, en este caso un clon, es lo más atractivo de esta novela y es lo que me mantiene leyéndola. Pero poco puedo valorar porque comienza donde terminó la primera novela y no tiene final.

Continuaré con la tercera y editaré las reseñas de forma general.
Profile Image for Stephen.
1,516 reviews12.4k followers
October 7, 2009
5.0 stars (going on 5.5 to 6.0 stars). This is one of the most brilliantly written books I have ever read and I believe is a work of special genius (no pun intended based on the subject matter of the book). This is not an EASY book to read and is not what I would describe as TONS of FUN. It is a complex, richly detailed, psychological science fiction mystery peopled by characters of vast intellect and extreme cunning. This makes the story one in whiuch the reader must pay close attention. However, the pay off for such attention is well worth it. This is a very important book. In sum this book is BRILLIANT, VERY ORIGINAL AND A SUPERIOR ACHIEVEMENT. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION.

Winner: Hugo Award for Best Novel
Winner: Locus Award Best Novel
Nominee: British Science Ficion Award
Number 30 on Locus list of All Time Best SF Novels.
Profile Image for Laika.
211 reviews81 followers
October 14, 2025
Cherryh might just be my favourite science fiction author of the 20th century. Which is probably just a statement about how malnourished my understanding of the options are, but still; the woman doesn’t miss. This is the second part of the Cyteen trilogy – which is very, very clearly a single very large story split in three for publishing purposes, it is utterly incomprehensible without the context of The Betrayal. With it though – well, assuming the third part of the trilogy sticks the landing, this is almost certainly going to be my favourite piece of genre fiction this year.

Following a multi-year timeskip, the story follows the childhood of Ari Emory II – the clone and successor of an era-defining scientific genius and political potentate. One who before her death had begun throwing herself into the project of how to create and raise a clone to possess the same skills and instincts that had served her, her ideals, and the Union as a whole so well. The story is on the one hand about the great pains and desperate manoeuvring everyone around her is engaged in to try and ensure that Ari II’s childhood matches the (emotionally isolated and less than pleasant, it must be said) one experienced by the original while also keeping her focused, stable and safe; and on the other, Ari herself (and eventually her two azi companions/bodyguards/slaves) discovering the limits and seams of the life they’ve designed and attempting to find out what’s really happening around her.

There’s a bit of The Truman Show about it all, but mostly Ari’s childhood is less comedy and more slowly dawning horror as she gets old enough to realize that if she gets into an actual fight with another child, they and their family will vanish from her life by the end of the week. Combined with the sudden disappearance of her mother (reassigned to another senior post 6 months travel away on schedule with the death of the original Ari’s), and it leaves her mistrustful and a mite paranoid and her personality and development all off-kilter. The futility of aspiring to perfect control is a bit of a running theme.

Aside from Ari, the book’s main POVs are Florian and Caitlin (aforementioned cloned and conditioned bodyguards/companions) and Justin (a deeply traumatized junior psychset designer who was groomed by the original Arianne Emory). All of their internal monologues are enjoyably distinct and it’s always a delight to see different people seeing the same thing through such different (and differently limited) perspectives. All of them are also slightly different angles to approach what feels like this section of the story’s biggest theme – the question of what, exactly, it means to be valuable to society, and how and why different people ‘deserve’ the resources dedicated to them.

Union is a slave society. A liberal, constitutional one, with elected governments on both the central and local levels, but one where the mass-production and industrial-scale conditioning and training of cloned workers, soldiers, colonists and servants is the foundation to all of society. Characters (and the populace as a whole) are genuinely committed to the stated ideals and norms of their government, and legitimately scandalized and outraged at some of the actions taken during the late war that contradicted them in the name of expediency. ‘The abolitionists’ are a fringe pseudo-terrorist movement whose closest political allies find them an embarrassing liability they wish would shut up and stay away from the camera, and the treatment of someone’s azis is generally treated with as much (maybe slightly less) concern than that of pets or farm animals. (I don’t mean to imply any great satirical intent or didactic messaging, but it does seem relevant to note here that Cherryh grew up in the United States of the ‘40s and ‘50s).

I am perhaps focusing a bit much on that theme to exclusion of all others – and there is a real enjoyable warped coming-of-age narrative going on with Ari II – just because of the moments in the book that happened to stick with me. The way Caitlin and Florian clearly identify with and love the first horses successfully cloned to survive Cyteen’s environment, like them ‘working animals’ whose value and future labour justifies the expense and effort to raise and keep them (and unlike the affectionate and clever pigs cloned and fattened for the slaughter); the way Justin is viewed as a dangerous threat and blamed for everything that goes wrong with Ari’s upbringing right up until his own research seems like it will turn out to be valuable, at which point he suddenly has reasonable friends in senior management willing to make an issue of how often he’s getting detained and interrogated; the fact that Ari’s whole existence is essentially one great bet that genius can be replicated, and even if she’s merely very bright and uncommonly talented it will mean the ruin of the whole institution her predecessor built. It’s as-yet unclear where the story’s really going, but the pattern’s struck me more than anything else has.

Beyond that; given how many different thinkpieces and posts I’ve seen talking about modern writers’ overuse of trauma as their one and only theory of characterization, it’s a bit striking how interested the book from the ‘80s is in how formative trauma is on shaping personality. Most strikingly with Grant and Justin (whose early 20s can be summarized as ‘coping with PTSD triggered by most popular therapy techniques, and also your rapist is a tragically assassinated secular saint’), but the exact particulars of what Ari, Caitlin and Florian happen to live through are clearly pushing them on different trajectories from the originals. I really do have no idea quite how things are going to resolve, and I’m incredibly curious.

Stylistically – the book was in fact written during the ‘80s. It actually reads as much more modern than most contemporary works I’ve read, but the vocabulary and diction still jumps out at points, especially in more casual situations (in much the same way the resilience of paper letters and tape cassettes carried freight on interstellar starships does). The narrative’s very introspective and dialogue focused – things are only really described is if it’s important or communicating something about the characters whose head we’re in. Which I generally like as a matter of focus, but the book does take it to the point where a lot of the story can feel like characters walking, talking and working in a featureless void. Though it does make the few points where the story goes all-out describing some particular location or event really stand out.

You do absolutely have to start at book one, but if you enjoy psychological, political and sociological sci fi I thoroughly recommend this.
Profile Image for Tomislav.
1,163 reviews97 followers
May 26, 2020
The first paperback printing of C. J. Cherryh's large Hugo-winning novel Cyteen was in three parts, each one a separate book, and described as a trilogy.
Part 1: The Betrayal
Part 2: The Rebirth
Part 3: The Vindication

Since then, Cherryh has repudiated that format, and will no longer allow it to be published other than in a single volume. I couldn't find anywhere what the reason for that might have been. But after reading the entire novel, I feel that it could be because part 1 was so incredibly slow that no one would buy parts 2 and 3. While parts 2 and 3 do pick up a little, the writing is generally high on intrigue and low on action. It could be just me, as a non-student of 1970s jargon, but I had trouble understanding the innuendo and perceived threats that were motivating the characters in their decision making throughout the novel.

Fortunately, almost by random chance, I had recently read the precursor books in the correct order before this one. Downbelow Station and Forty Thousand in Gehenna provide important context for the setting of this book. It is set entirely on the Union homeworld of Cyteen, about which much is implied in those earlier books but never directly told. The plot begins (after 200 pages) with the assassination of the rich, powerful, sex-abusing scientist/politician Ariane Emory, of a founding family of Cyteen. A clone of her is grown, and as the girl grows she gradually learns to assume her destiny as a replacement for her predecessor. A somewhat more sympathetic character exists in Justin Warrick and his Azi (bio-engineered servant) partner Grant. Justin himself is a clone of another famous scientist now living in exile. While cloning and psychological programming are givens in this setting, the real science of the novel is political science, which unfortunately is not so interesting to me.
Profile Image for Corvidianus.
105 reviews12 followers
March 11, 2025
The concept is really cool, so much so that it haunted me for 20 years after I initially started it and I went on a quest to figure out the name, then track down a copy. Now, years after ruminating on it, trying once again to get through the story - something about the narrative style, while technically "good", makes me feel like I'm being smothered by a plastic bag, as someone whispers horrible things in my ear. I guess there's a subtextual psychological horror to this in that it really feels quite warped, even outside of taboo or scandalous plot topics. I generally quite like avant garde subject matters, dark subjects, but somehow the way the narrator regards it is more chilling than the content of the story itself. It feels really demented, like reading Dianetics or Carlos Casteneda's "Teachings of Don Carlos" or something. Being inside the head of a sociopath.

So, despite *super* wanting to know more about the story and see how it was explored, the clinical & unsympathetic handling of all the characters was too unsettling, emotionally troubling and I bailed.

Never mind that the subject matter is fully f*cked! lol But I actually have been thinking about it all these years, because it was refreshingly f*cked in a new, unique & stimulating way.

Then again, I felt a lesser echo of this same emotional experience reading The Golden Compass (a great story & worldbuilding otherwise) & David Sedaris' Corduroy & Denim book (similar to other formats I've enjoyed by different authors), so if you enjoyed those, maybe you're in for something positively engrossing here.

Look at that cover. You think it's getting you hyped for something deeply disturbing in ways the actual prose can never live up to. Don't worry - they can!
Profile Image for Jersy.
1,206 reviews108 followers
September 13, 2018
I'm not quit sure what to think of that book. It was easy and fun to read but it was lacking a real focus. It was more about a child growing up than about scifi topics, which were there from time to time but more as a background than being the real core of the story, which I thought they were supposed to be.
Since this is the second book in a series I had trouble understanding this world during the first pages since things aren't explained. However, after a while I understood everything I needed to know.

Sometimes I wondered who this book was written for. It handles adult topics and isn't written childishly, but when things like horses or sexuality are explained in the same detail to the reader as to little Ari, I feel like I am not the target demographic. But these were just a few moments.

It was very interesting whenever something nrw about the first Ari, or the way this influences the new Ari, was revealed.
I just wished this would have been focused more on the sci fi aspects and the bigger picture than on the life of a little girl. I will definitely give another book by Cherryh a try some day.
1,525 reviews3 followers
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October 23, 2025
The spying, brainwashing, training tapes, and coercion run amok at Reseune, the city-sized laboratory on Cyteen where almost-human azi are grown and trained. Warped young scientist Justin and his azi, Grant, depend on each other for support. Little Ari Emory depends on her own azi: nursemaid Nellie and bodyguards Florian and Caitlin. In Cyteen: The Rebirth, the second part of the Cyteen trilogy, Ari learns why her life has been more unusual than some and why her mother was whisked away when she was 7 years old. She is a clone; and as if that weren't enough, her whole life is a laboratory experiment, an attempt to recreate the keen mind and cruel personality of the original Ariane Emory by recreating her past in Ari's present. As she grows older and wiser, Ari battles with her politically-minded relatives, Reseune powers-that-be, her responsibility to her azi, and plain old teenaged angst.
Profile Image for Jose.
753 reviews10 followers
July 20, 2017
Much better than the first part, the characters are more fleshed and the story is a lot more fun.
Profile Image for Freyja.
299 reviews
April 6, 2019
More politics. Intrigue. Bureaucracy - weaponized. This and more in a well-paced, rather quick read in the middle book of the trilogy. You develop some sympathy for the protagonist.
Profile Image for Meg.
189 reviews17 followers
July 25, 2019
Whoops! I thought this was the first book in the series. It was great though.
Profile Image for Kathi.
1,068 reviews79 followers
April 30, 2020
9/10
An amazing amount of tension winds through the story of the childhood and early adolescence of Ari Emory’s replicate, with political and military ramifications for Cyteen and Union at stake.
52 reviews
July 17, 2023
I came to understand that I had read the second book first. Highly recommend reading the first book first.
Profile Image for Tofu.
11 reviews
June 12, 2024
En ocasiones sospecho que la traducción tiene sus flaquezas, pero a modo general me parece un libro inteligentemente bien escrito, amable e interesante, que te sumerge en el mundo de Cyteen, su política y su código moral. Es mucho más liviano que su primera parte, sin dejar de lado los detalles y la creación de un contexto sólido.
10 reviews1 follower
January 25, 2014
brilliant. she raises all kinds of fun issues about a society that knows how to prolong life into the hundreds of years, but not indefinitely. Issues like increased inability to deal with one's own mortality. Psychological delusions that one's clone will be their own reincarnation sharply balanced alongside a strong scientific case for the said clone actually HAVING some of their predecessor's memories. Remembering things the original experienced. There is a very strong case made for that. However it gives way to delusions that such a thing is reincarnation. Characters who actually KNOW BETTER than to believe that a clone retaining some of the original's memories is actually the same thing as the original coming back to life in a new body.....STILL BELIEVE THEIR OWN CLONE WILL BE THEM BACK TO LIFE. Confusing the two things DELIBERATELY rather than accept the state of mortality. Bizarre.

Also warns us that the perfection of human cloning will most likely result in the clones being considered property of the company that made them. Definitely makes sense....let's hope not but anyone's gotta admit it's believable.
Profile Image for Julieta Steyr.
Author 13 books26 followers
May 21, 2016
Mucho mejor que su predecesor porque hay más concentración en Ari II.
Oh, la parte de la nueva base de datos me encantó, muy lindo "diálogo". Sin embargo, esta parte es más cotidiana, más centrada en cómo creció Ari y qué hizo mientras crecía, sí, sigue manipulando personas, por suerte.
Definitivamente más digerible que el anterior, menos técnico, quizá con menos aventura, pero me lo leí en un tirón (una noche).
Veremos el próximo que supongo que ahí estará concentrada todas las municiones pesadas.
Profile Image for Ephi.
59 reviews14 followers
June 2, 2010
I've been amazed with Star Trek and Time Trax when I picked up this book in my local bookstore for 5000 rupiahs! And boy it amazed me with all the "adult" interaction between 13-year-old clone and her azis alongside with detailed political discussion and a lot of hard words to figure out, one thing describe it best: AMAZING. :)
Profile Image for Chip.
262 reviews7 followers
July 31, 2013
Writing is only slightly better than the first. So now at the end of the book we are 2/3 of the way through the original and there is still not much explanation of what is going on. Many characters are overly paranoid that someone is going to find out what they are thinking and send them "away". Too much political fighting for my taste.
Profile Image for Xabi1990.
2,129 reviews1,390 followers
February 7, 2019
8/10. Media de los 13 libros leídos de la autora : 8/10

Me llevo yo bien con la Cherry. Casi siempre entretenida de leer, me quedo con “Hermanos de tierra” o “Paladín”. Y de series la de Cyteen (la de Chanur tb está bien). La chica ha ganado creo que 4 Hugos, que no es poco.
Solo me ha defraudado suyo “La puerta de Ivrel”
Profile Image for Miki.
499 reviews24 followers
January 27, 2022
Fairly standard empowered-but-ignorant-superchild fare. The burgeoning Machiavellian mindset is delightful, though. The book has dated somewhat, but is still very readable, and this is certainly more fun than Cyteen: The Betrayal (Cyteen).
Profile Image for Dave.
207 reviews16 followers
September 2, 2012
Excellent fictional future world! Rivals Azimov's Foundation Trilogy. Interesting exploration of applied psychology and the role of masters and slaves, parents and children, protectors and primitives. This is #2 of 3 in the Cyteen series. Glad to find this even 30 years after publication ...
717 reviews
October 5, 2014
I have mixed feelings about this series. Part of my problem is that it is above my head. Part of it is that I don't like where the author is taking the lead character, having her grow up to quickly. Yet, I have to keep reading to see how Ari turns out.
4 reviews1 follower
February 14, 2009
A fine grained tale of intergalactic political machinations and planned genetic manipulation.
Profile Image for Elly.
Author 1 book5 followers
December 31, 2010
Part 2 of Cyteen: a lot faster paced than the first part. The psychologies of growing up with secrets change a person, and those around her might not be ready for those changes....
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Jay.
38 reviews
March 3, 2012
The cyteen series is a favorite from one ofmyfavorite authors.
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