"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" (SPOILERS)

Mike Godwin · 14 Jun 1990, 04:21 · from rec.arts.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: <31623 at ut-emx.UUCP>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers
References: <2D0KNTL at xavier.swarthmore.edu>

In article <2D0KNTL at xavier.swarthmore.edu> 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

Mike Godwin, UT Law School  |"No interest is good unless it must vest,
Just another bar-exam nerd  | if it all, not later than 21 years after

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