# Linked short stories *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 17 Apr 1998* > 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. --- ### adam louis stephanides *17 Apr 1998, 11:01* > On Thu, 16 Apr 1998 William H. Ansley wrote: > One may excuse Wolfe (and I am well aware that he needs no excuse from me) > by saying that his stories hold up by themselves and the references to > other of his works are a reward for careful readers. This is certainly > true, but Wolfe seems to have mastered writing a set of related pieces that > complement each other so well that their whole is very much greater than > the sum of their parts better than any other writer I can think of. (In > fact, does anyone else know of *any* other writer who does this?) It seems > a shame then that these stories or novellas are first published separately. > _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_ is a perfect example of this at its best. The > novellas all work separately quite well but together they form a most > remarkable work. A recent example of this (though on a lesser aesthetic plane than Fifth Head) is two short stories, "Bluesberry Jam" and "Ain't You Most Done?" The first of these appeared in an anthology whose title I forget, whose theme was music in science fiction IIRC; the second appeared in an anth- ology of Sandman (the Neil Gaiman comic character) prose stories, entitled "The Sandman: Book of Dreams" or something like that. The two stories depict, in part, the same events from the perspective of two different characters; but they give quite different pictures of what is "really" going on. --Adam ---