5HC

One thing that has always struck me about 5HC is this: I think one of Wolfe's central ideas in the work is that a man is more than the sum of his genes and his environment, more than merely nurture or nature. Most writers, I think, would make this point by showing a clone raised like the others before him and breaking free of the strangling pattern, finding a way to set the ship in motion again. Wolfe, somehow, I think, manages to do it in an utterly bleak way--Number Five is no automaton, and his inheritance is not impossible to reject. This seems to me to be a great example of how perilous the gift of choice is in Wolfe's work. It is infinitely desirable, and those things that lack it clamor for it and demand it, but it's misuse is terrifying.