(urth) Overthinking/Underthinking "The Fifth Head of Cerberus"

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

I like your explanation for the "two" species, at least as a "surface" explanation (which really is a subsurface explanation, but then this is Wolfe). It's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of.

And your point about "entertainment" is exactly correct. Of course, what entertains us and what entertains Gene Wolfe appears to be not entirely the same. 


As you say, you do have to stop and consider what he was trying to do. We have a standard sc-fi-as-retelling-of-20th-century-history, which is completely fake. It feels like the old joke of a movie set for a Western that consists entirely of facades that fall down when you shoot at them. It's so fake it doesn't even work as a fake. Then we have a sci-fi under-story which is itself quite shaky. And so on.



On Wednesday, August 13, 2014 8:45 AM, Lee <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:
 

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>>David Stockhoff: But were there not two waves of colonization on the planets?
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>I think the first human contact in the system was the crash of one starship. I think the first human source material the native imitative creatures had to work with was dying or even dead humans. (perhaps only their spirits?).
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>Hence the massive imperfection of Shadow Children as imitative copies of humans. They struggle with
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>even the basic (to us) concept that a person = one individual.  When Sandwalker and the Old Wise One are in the pit together, they try to touch each other at different times and each time the Shadow Child proves too insubstantial and passes right through Sandwalker's body.
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>We are given a story that chewing a certain weed has changed humans into Shadow Children. Maybe we can accept that stunted growth an bowed legs could be the result of such a thing. Shining eyes and telepathic powers are a lot more questionable. And intangibility seems too much of a task to ask of any weed.
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>Conversely, if Shadow Children are indeed the offspring or product of shadowy, native beings, everything about Shadow Children makes sense to me. Their name, their imperfect human form, their telepathy, their pluralism and their intangibility are all explained.  
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>The Old Wise One also makes a comment about them being there when men first arrived. He then admits he is confused and doesn't know which story is true. With this, I think Wolfe is clearly giving his readers the choice of which story to believe. And, as this discussion demonstrates, some of his readers prefer one story and others prefer the other.
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>>We see French colonizers and think of European seizure of the NewWorld; what do the natives see? Prey?>Gods?
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>A bit of both? The most sincere form of flattery is imitation?
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>Colonization is criticized for imposing a foreign culture on native peoples. But then we notice the British have the habit of drinking tea and eating curry and the whole Euro-centric world eating Asian and Latino inspired foods and dancing to music based on African rhythms, not to mention the massive waves of 
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>direct immigration of people from the Third World" to the "First World". Who and what do the Abos represent in our modern world?
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>>Marc's mites theory is factually compelling and has the requisitestory-twisted-to-the-fourth-power, but>I admit I can't stand it.
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>I think Marc often zooms so far ahead we are all left eating his dust. Sigh...I admire him, even if it is only his tail lights I am able to see, sometimes.
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>>This leaves me stuck in the same limbo where the did-inhumi-really-fly-between-worlds problem left me:>I'm sentimentally attached to an interpretation that yields some scrap of meaning for me.
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>I hope I am allowed some license to be a cynic here. Is it "meaning" or "entertainment" you receive when you think about those cool hordes of Inhumi soaring across the void between planets?
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>I ask because I will recognize one of my own personal biases here. Many people (around the world) enjoy the antics of "The Trickster", the fictional (and sometimes real world) character who is able to tell an implausible story so entertainingly that it becomes fun to believe it. My bias is that I am not so entertained by "The Trickster". And when I feel the deceit is being done to hurt or take advantage of others, I react rather violently against the process. Even fictional characters in this vein can get me boiling a bit.
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>Thus, once I had identified the Inhumi as tricksters and liars I was primed to disbelieve anything about them that smelled fishy. For me, the story of flying between planets isn't harmless fun. It is part of the disguise of their "stowaway" transportation strategy, which facilitates the galactic spread of a harmful, manipulative parasitic, blood-sucking species. Like the Abos, they will infiltrate your family and your society and take over, without you knowing it. Given that, I just can't find the fun in the lies of the Inhumi..(okay, okay, settle down...it's just a story.....)                           
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