"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (SPOILERS)

Mike Godwin · 14 Jun 1990, 04:21 · from sf-lovers.1990.mbox

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From: mnemonic at walt.cc.utexas.edu (Mike Godwin)
Subject: Re: "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (SPOILERS)
Date: 14 Jun 90 04:21:27 GMT
Message-ID: <sflovers-v15-227-10 at digest.sf-lovers>
X-Digest-Issue: SF-LOVERS Digest V15 #227
X-Urthmirror-Source: https://archive.org/details/sf-lovers-digest-vol-15a

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

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