"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (SPOILERS)

Zorn of Zorna · 13 Jun 1990, 21:40 · from sf-lovers.1990.mbox

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: hartman at cs.swarthmore.edu (Zorn of Zorna)
Subject: "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (SPOILERS)
Date: 13 Jun 90 21:40:15 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v15-227-9 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V15 #227
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-15a

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

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net