looking at Reseune from Boskone
Feb. 19th, 2009 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleFriday evening at Boskone, there was supposed to be a panel on Cyteen and Regenesis. I think they scheduled it for Jo, because she was so exuberantly excited about Regenesis coming out, and wanting to talk to people about it. A couple of minutes before the panel was going to start, the panelists were gathering in the hallway, with one of them trying to explain why she really didn't feel comfortable talking about the subject. (I wasn't sure if she hadn't read the second book, or didn't remember the first clearly, or had something else demanding her attention.) Anyhow, Jo asked me to fill in, on the strength of a flip comment I made here a few weeks ago.
I've been intending to post comments on Regenesis for weeks, and having gotten my act together well enough to actually write them down. But that's nothing. I've been intending to post comments on Cyteen for YEARS. I've fallen so far behind on posting comments on things I read in 2005 that I've essentially given up on them. So it was kind of nice to have people interested in what I could come up with off the top of my head, rather than waiting for the right words at the right time.
Unfortunately, most of the fans in the room had not read Regenesis. Despite the announcement in the program booklet and on the wall outside the door, saying we would be discussing the sequel to Cyteen, they did not want to hear about spoilers. {Polite turtle makes an effort to be polite about spoilers.} If you don't want to read spoilers for Cyteen or Regenesis, you should probably stop now. I'm not sure if my comment about The Jewel In The Crown/The Raj Quartet counts as a spoiler (it might for sticklers.) Commentary refers to sexual abuse, among other things. If any of you are still with me:
In Cyteen, most of the plot pivots around Ari's murder. That's what pushes the shifting focus of narrative back and forth through time. It's very uncomfortable to leave the question of her who killed her unresolved at the end of the book--it feels like something so central and important ought to be known. Having it be unknown makes it be a different kind of focus. (I will stop putting in and removing "black hole," elliptical narrative," "orbit," and "other focus," and just move on. These do not need to be the right words.)
It was uncomfortable to have the murderer unknown, but it made narrative sense. Regenesis names the murderer, breaking the structure that had made sense. It's just disappointing. The Cyteen narrative structure seems retroactively broken when I look back at it now, and it isn't replaced by some other satisfying structure--I'm not sure it can be. The first Ari isn't a character in the second book, and the whole younger generation is obsessed with looking back at their predecessors. I don't recall who said they were disappointed the second book picked up so soon after Cyteen, that it would be more interesting to see what happened to Ari IV, or Ari XV. I'm mildly curious about that, but I also wonder what would happen to the rest of Cyteen, the rest of Union, after many generations of trying to keep an undying Special* in charge. Would historical fiction be popular?
So. The murder plot was resolved very badly, but I didn't really care. I liked Regenesis because of how well it resolved the rape plot. Just as the murder was the pivot for timing in the first book, the rape was the pivot for motive. The structure reminded me of Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, which also has a complicated set of narratives going back and forth in time around a rape and a murder, entangled with international politics and more levels of power struggle than you could shake a stick at. They were written decades apart, but I read them within a year or so of each other. I recognized the structural similarities right away, which makes me feel a bit silly now about not recognizing the similarities in some key motives.
When I read Cyteen, I didn't know for certain why Ari had raped Justin, but I thought I had narrowed it down to a couple of reasonable possibilities. Maybe she lusted for Jordan's body, and this was a convenient (or in their terms, elegant?) way of taking it from him. She was trying to satisfy herself or to hurt Jordan, and didn't care if Justin got hurt in passing. Or maybe she really believed her words about sex and affection, and thought it would be to Justin's long-term advantage to take such good advice to heart. (What we know of her history makes it plausible that she does believe something more or less like that.) So she worked him open on all available channels and deep-taught him what she wanted him to believe. I thought she had broken Justin because she was selfish and callous to the point of sociopathy, because he was not so real to her that she cared if she hurt him. It didn't really occur to me that she had done it on purpose, until the explanation in Regenesis.
At the Boskone panel on Cyteen, one of the panelists said something about the difficulty of suspending disbelief for tape learning. (Er. The reader suspending disbelief, without taking kat.) When I read the first book, it seemed perfectly obvious that tape learning would work like trauma learning. An article in The Esteemed Journal of I Read It Somewhere said something about how traumatic memories were laid down differently, biochemically. That was why they stick so persistently after a single repetition (when spelling lessons won't seem to get into some people's memories after thousands of attempts), and are so hard to erase. We're told tape learning is emotionally comfortable, which makes azi more secure. Grant and Justin don't seem to quite believe it--is that because they were raised by amadman Special*?
*See also Orbital Resonance.
I've been intending to post comments on Regenesis for weeks, and having gotten my act together well enough to actually write them down. But that's nothing. I've been intending to post comments on Cyteen for YEARS. I've fallen so far behind on posting comments on things I read in 2005 that I've essentially given up on them. So it was kind of nice to have people interested in what I could come up with off the top of my head, rather than waiting for the right words at the right time.
Unfortunately, most of the fans in the room had not read Regenesis. Despite the announcement in the program booklet and on the wall outside the door, saying we would be discussing the sequel to Cyteen, they did not want to hear about spoilers. {Polite turtle makes an effort to be polite about spoilers.} If you don't want to read spoilers for Cyteen or Regenesis, you should probably stop now. I'm not sure if my comment about The Jewel In The Crown/The Raj Quartet counts as a spoiler (it might for sticklers.) Commentary refers to sexual abuse, among other things. If any of you are still with me:
In Cyteen, most of the plot pivots around Ari's murder. That's what pushes the shifting focus of narrative back and forth through time. It's very uncomfortable to leave the question of her who killed her unresolved at the end of the book--it feels like something so central and important ought to be known. Having it be unknown makes it be a different kind of focus. (I will stop putting in and removing "black hole," elliptical narrative," "orbit," and "other focus," and just move on. These do not need to be the right words.)
It was uncomfortable to have the murderer unknown, but it made narrative sense. Regenesis names the murderer, breaking the structure that had made sense. It's just disappointing. The Cyteen narrative structure seems retroactively broken when I look back at it now, and it isn't replaced by some other satisfying structure--I'm not sure it can be. The first Ari isn't a character in the second book, and the whole younger generation is obsessed with looking back at their predecessors. I don't recall who said they were disappointed the second book picked up so soon after Cyteen, that it would be more interesting to see what happened to Ari IV, or Ari XV. I'm mildly curious about that, but I also wonder what would happen to the rest of Cyteen, the rest of Union, after many generations of trying to keep an undying Special* in charge. Would historical fiction be popular?
So. The murder plot was resolved very badly, but I didn't really care. I liked Regenesis because of how well it resolved the rape plot. Just as the murder was the pivot for timing in the first book, the rape was the pivot for motive. The structure reminded me of Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, which also has a complicated set of narratives going back and forth in time around a rape and a murder, entangled with international politics and more levels of power struggle than you could shake a stick at. They were written decades apart, but I read them within a year or so of each other. I recognized the structural similarities right away, which makes me feel a bit silly now about not recognizing the similarities in some key motives.
When I read Cyteen, I didn't know for certain why Ari had raped Justin, but I thought I had narrowed it down to a couple of reasonable possibilities. Maybe she lusted for Jordan's body, and this was a convenient (or in their terms, elegant?) way of taking it from him. She was trying to satisfy herself or to hurt Jordan, and didn't care if Justin got hurt in passing. Or maybe she really believed her words about sex and affection, and thought it would be to Justin's long-term advantage to take such good advice to heart. (What we know of her history makes it plausible that she does believe something more or less like that.) So she worked him open on all available channels and deep-taught him what she wanted him to believe. I thought she had broken Justin because she was selfish and callous to the point of sociopathy, because he was not so real to her that she cared if she hurt him. It didn't really occur to me that she had done it on purpose, until the explanation in Regenesis.
At the Boskone panel on Cyteen, one of the panelists said something about the difficulty of suspending disbelief for tape learning. (Er. The reader suspending disbelief, without taking kat.) When I read the first book, it seemed perfectly obvious that tape learning would work like trauma learning. An article in The Esteemed Journal of I Read It Somewhere said something about how traumatic memories were laid down differently, biochemically. That was why they stick so persistently after a single repetition (when spelling lessons won't seem to get into some people's memories after thousands of attempts), and are so hard to erase. We're told tape learning is emotionally comfortable, which makes azi more secure. Grant and Justin don't seem to quite believe it--is that because they were raised by a
*See also Orbital Resonance.
