Subject: (SPOILER) FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (was Sentient Computer Novels)

From: Dan Tilque;1893;92-101; <dant at mrloog.la.tek.com>
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 1988 05:03:40 +0000

There's a lot of SPOILERS in this article, Cave Canem ... I mean Caveat
Lector.

Alan Bostick writes:
>Dan Tilque (that's me) writes:

>>The Wolfe book did not have direct human-computer access in it.  The
>>closest it got was human personalities stored on mobile computers (not
>>exactly robots, but close).  The stored personality was not a main
>>character, nor was storing personalities a major theme of the book.
>
>Not true!  The stored personality was, in fact, the personality of the
>narrator!  (You have to read the story very carefully to get this, almost
>as carefully as you do to figure out what the narrator's name is.)

Yes and no.  The stored personality was that of an earlier clone of the
narrator.  The reader gets no first hand account of how the computer-human
interface felt or operated.

[real SPOILERS follow]

The book is really about serial clones and how they would tend to get into
a rut and the increasingly drastic attempts to escape the rut.  Also about
how the clones unconsciously sabotaged those attempts.

Dan Tilque