/lit/ - Literature

Everything written by C.J. Cherryh is basically about really smart people who have to figure out ways to survive completely impossible situations.

Even when the "good guys" lose so to speak, that's never the end, the story goes on the way History keeps going on. Downbelow Station is about a Civil War in space between two factions of humanity, and it's told from the perspective of the Earth faction, painting the Deep Space faction as a bunch of mad scientists terraforming worlds and building clone populations to develop them and clone armies to defend them. And the idea of "tape-trained" humanity is presented as the most horrifying thing imaginable.

The book ends on a major downnote for the Earth faction, but then the story continues in Cyteen from the other side's perspective and you come to find out that the cloned humans aren't really mindless, soulless automata, they're just super autistic. And the genetic engineers who designed them aren't evil psychopaths either, they have their own problems and their own solutions and their own values and culture, it's just different.