# 5HC *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 15 Nov 2000* > 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. --- ### Alex David Groce *15 Nov 2000, 02:44* 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. ``` "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32 -- Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu) Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department 8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce ``` ---