Urth Net
(SPOILER) FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (was Sentient Computer Novels)
There's a lot of SPOILERS in this article, Cave Canem ... I mean Caveat Lector.
Alan Bostick writes:
3 quoted lines · 1–2 deep
Dan Tilque (that's me) writes:
The Wolfe book did not have direct human-computer access in it. The closest it got was human personalities stored on mobile computers (not exactly robots, but close). The stored personality was not a main character, nor was storing personalities a major theme of the book.
Not true! The stored personality was, in fact, the personality of the narrator! (You have to read the story very carefully to get this, almost as carefully as you do to figure out what the narrator's name is.)
Yes and no. The stored personality was that of an earlier clone of the narrator. The reader gets no first hand account of how the computer-human interface felt or operated.
[real SPOILERS follow]
The book is really about serial clones and how they would tend to get into a rut and the increasingly drastic attempts to escape the rut. Also about how the clones unconsciously sabotaged those attempts.
Dan Tilque