I just finished rereading Cyteen by CJ Cherryh. If you didn't know, it was a Hugo winner, and reading it again reminds me why. The book is about psycological cloning, raising someone's clone with the same sorts of influences the original person had in order to make their mind capable of the same pattern of thought.
It's in the same universe as another of her Hugo winners, Downbelow Station, and makes reference to another book, 40,000 in Gehenna. Downbelow Station is a great read and also highly recommended, but I actually have never read 40,000 in Gehenna for some reason. I'll have to correct that eventually. But not reading it doesn't affect appreciation of this book (there are no shared characters).
The universe these are all in is the Alliance-Union universe; Downbelow Station is about the war between Earth, its star colonies (including the fledgling breakaway republic Union--based on the planet Cyteen--which has soldiers grown in artificial tanks and trained from birth using subliminal tapes, and which also was the home of the scientist who invented FTL in Cherryh's universe), and the merchanter ship families who just want to make an honest living trading from station to station. The book Cyteen happens a few decades after the end of the war and involves the scientists and politicians of the company on Cyteen that's responsible for the tank-gestated and tape-taught people. It probably doesn't matter which order you read them in. They're very different and don't have overlapping characters either.
I only have one problem with Cyteen the book, and that is that there is only about half a page of denouement at the end. It just builds and builds up to a final bang, and what happens next is left entirely up to our imagination. It gives hints of possible sequels directly involving these characters, but there's been no sign of such a book coming since then. Cherryh has written many books after that, some of them in the same universe, but none from the Union point of view. Currently she's been writing sequels to her novel Foreigner, which is not connected to the Alliance-Union universe (though I think she could have connected it without too much difficulty; many of her other books are more loosely connected to the universe though perhaps thousands of years along the timeline); I think she's on the 8th book in that series right now--you can follow her blog with "today's word count" at cherryh.com (though it seems she's spending more time learning to ice skate right now than write). But I do hope she revisits it in the future.
Cherryh is one of my two favorite writers (the other being Lois McMaster Bujold) and the writer who is most represented among my collection of hardback books.
