Cyteen

Cyteen is a science fiction novel by the American writer C. J. Cherryh, published in 1988 and set in the same universe as her earlier Alliance-Union books. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1989 and was followed by a sequel, Regenesis, twenty years later.

The star system of Cyteen was founded by dissident scientists and engineers and declared its independence from Earth in the twenty-third century. Its capital world is barely habitable, so its population lives in enclosed city-states, and its central institution is Reseune, where human cloning is developed and applied. The cloned azi who provide much of the workforce are educated from infancy by tape, a combination of conditioning and biofeedback.

Ariane Emory runs Reseune and, through it, a great deal of Union's politics, and her interests include the psychology of the gifted people around her, among them the scientist Jordan Warrick, his cloned son Justin and Justin's azi brother Grant. Her murder does not release them. Instead the institution she built becomes the instrument of a long experiment in how a particular mind and a particular life are made.