# "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (SPOILERS) *The SF-Lovers list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 13 Jun 1990* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Zorn of Zorna *13 Jun 1990, 21:40* I finally read Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" a week or so ago. I vaguely remember there being a full-length novel version, but this was a shorter version, in one of the Year's Best anthologies. And I just don't get it. Or rather, I followed the surface story without too much trouble, but when I got to the end I had a strong feeling that there was a lot going on that I was missing. The story seemed to be very straightforward in plot; as far as I could tell, it was mostly a mood piece. It did a good job of characterization and depiction of this future alien society, but I couldn't help feeling that that wasn't all there was to it. Can anyone help me out? I couldn't even figure out if Veil's Hypothesis (I think that was what it was called) was supposed to be true, or exactly why the protagonist was imprisoned (there's an obvious reason for him to have been imprisoned (killing his father), but I thought there were implications that it WASN'T for the obvious reason). Hm. Just realized that that story was what I was reminded of by the Prologue to _Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand_ (which I'm reading now). Interesting similarities. Anyway, I tend to have that feeling about most of Wolfe's stuff that I've read. Haven't started on the Book of the New Sun (?) books yet, but the stories of his that I've read (and _Free Live Free_) have often left me wondering what I'm missing. Jed hartman at campus.swarthmore.edu hartman at swarthmr.bitnet --- ### Mike Godwin *14 Jun 1990, 04:21 · follows Zorn of Zorna* hartman at cs.swarthmore.edu (Zorn of Zorna) writes: > I finally read Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" a week or so > ago. I vaguely remember there being a full-length novel version, but this > was a shorter version, in one of the Year's Best anthologies. And I just > don't get it. Or rather, I followed the surface story without too much > trouble, but when I got to the end I had a strong feeling that there was a > lot going on that I was missing. The story seemed to be very > straightforward in plot; as far as I could tell, it was mostly a mood > piece. It did a good job of characterization and depiction of this future > alien society, but I couldn't help feeling that that wasn't all there was > to it. Can anyone help me out? > > I couldn't even figure out if Veil's Hypothesis (I think that was what > it was called) was supposed to be true, or exactly why the protagonist was > imprisoned (there's an obvious reason for him to have been imprisoned > (killing his father), but I thought there were implications that it WASN'T > for the obvious reason). Well, since Wolfe was trying to create a certain amount of ambiguity in his story, you should be warned that there's no real "answer" to many of your questions. Nevertheless, you'd probably enjoy the "novel" FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, which is actually the story you read followed by two related stories. The book will give you a lot of background on the Hypothesis and other questions you may have about Wolfe's fictional society. Wolfe can be troubling to those who read more traditional SF, since he feels no great need to wrap up his works with tidy solutions. Of course, this is part of his strength as a writer, since life itself has no great fondness for neat solutions. Mike Godwin UT Law School ---