Black Gate

Reading The Fifth Head of Cerberus, I was struck by the way the book seemed eminently suited to the internet age. Never mind that it was written in the early 1970s. Like many of Gene Wolfe’s fictions, it’s a text whose nature is in harmony with the way the internet allows a text to be scrutinised; its depths, its meanings, its allusions — or at least some of them — can produce multiple readings, any of which can be valid, but which deepen the work as a whole the more of them you can think of and hold in your head at once. And can any one reader imagine as many different readings as a community of readers will produce?

The internet’s helped change the way an audience interacts with a story. Fan communities discuss and break down details on blogs and message boards; it’s most obvious with TV shows and serialised comics, where analysing past stories may help predict future plot developments, but it’s there also for stand-alone narratives like movies and novels. To an extent it was always there, whether in the form of literary criticism or of things like fanzines and APAs, but the internet’s made that degree of interaction and communal scrutiny far more common.

On one level it’s obvious why Wolfe’s writing thrives under this sort of analysis. A typical Wolfe story will seem simple on the surface, with a few odd gaps or apparent contradictions in the narrative; but, when investigated, those gaps or contradictions will seem to suggest a different way of reading the story, suggest that what’s actually happening is something larger and perhaps more disturbing than what appears to be going on, suggest perhaps that the story that’s actually being told is completely other than it appears at first glance to be. A lively critical community — and Wolfe has an active mailing list and a wiki dedicated to his work — can help unpack these subtleties, and clarify some of the possibilities confronting the reader. The Fifth Head of Cerberus, though, is an example of how a community of readers can be even more useful.

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“Come bards from the north, elves off the moor
Gamers off work get down to the store
Scratch your neighbor what’s underneath?
A wizard or a cleric or a thief!”

Musician S.J. Tucker (of whom I have spoken at length) has released a FREE SONG on her website, entitled “D&D.”

And it has orcs and elves and paladins in it (oh, my!), ’cause she’s just that cool.

She writes in her LiveJournal:

This is my first time writing and releasing a parody: “D&D” is sung to the tune of “The Napoli” by Mr. Steve Knightley of British folk group Show of Hands. …Definitely give a listen to the original as well as to my parody version–it’s every bit as cool for different reasons, being about a (relatively recent) shipwreck…there’s piracy.

…This is very exciting for me, guys, not least because I have proof now that my years of filling out character sheets has, in fact, paid off…or it will, if you help me spread the word. Please download the song and share the link with others–encourage friends to explore my other available downloads as well; you know how it works, every little bit makes a difference!

Check it out! It’s way fun. And I’ve never even played Dungeons and Dragons in my life!

I wonder if elementary school children today have as inspiring a model on animated television shows as I did when I was ten years old. My hero was Penny Gadget from the syndicated series Inspector Gadget.

Why? Because somebody my age, armed with a computer (a proto-laptop disguised as a book) and an amazing wristwatch (able to fire lasers and tracers and whatever else the plot needed) was stopping a massive global criminal enterprise on a weekly basis while the adults around her achieved nothing except looking like buffoons.

Admittedly, in the long view MAD is an incompetently run Evil Secret Organization, staffed exclusively with dingbats who constantly fail to kill an opponent who can’t tell the difference between his own dog and his own dog wearing a wig. Perhaps MAD’s leader, the Blofeld-in-Steel villain Dr. Claw, has some intelligence — he has a Ph.D., apparently, although maybe it was through a diploma mill — but this “evil genius” regularly sees his world conquest plans collapse because of a ten-year-old. A ten-year-old he occasionally captures but never recognizes. Yeah, I’m going to go with “diploma mill.”

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