A powerfully weird book, and a great example of Wolfe's style.

Most other sci-fi would explicitly show off the setting and landscape very early on, and make the internal conflicts clear.

Not so with Wolfe; he throws you in to the memoirs of someone starting as a small boy, and at first you're not sure where you are... it feels like a European French city or colony, but it becomes clear that we're on another planet (that has been colonized) and that all kinds of changes are a regular part of this world. Sentient computers, cloning, genetic manipulation, and a mystery or myth surrounding the people who may or may not have lived on the planet before earthlings came along.

That's just the first of three novellas inside this book, and there's a LOT I'm not covering there.

I won't synopsize the other two, because uncovering those stories and figuring them out is part of the appeal with this book. It's also not easy to synopsize! It ends definitively, but without a concise moral or lesson, requiring you to process what you've read and how it impacts you.

Regarding the setting and it's connection to colonization: reading this in 2022 in Canada, where we are grappling with reconciliation and transforming settler culture to engage ethically with indigenous culture, there is a lot to chew on here... the absorption of one culture by another, but the possible twists within that, are useful questions today.

Perhaps the need to uncover it's details, the shifting perspectives of narrators, and it's less-obvious setting are why this book isn't as famous as his New Urth series, but it's worth your time and effort! ( )

A set of unreliable narrators recount three histories from the sister planets Saint Croix and Saint Anne, where colonizing humans search for evidence of an indigenous alien race.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus comprises three interwoven novellas: "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," "'A Story,' by John V. Marsch," and "V. R. T." The three stories are not exactly linked, as they concern three separate protagonists in three different stories, but they occasionally encroach upon one another. They can easily be read in isolation, but they function better as a unit. Each complicates its neighbor. Issues you thought simple or settled in one story are suddenly muddled by the revelations in the next.

In "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," a young man returns to his childhood home after a period in prison. Driven by an oblique terror, he writes out his autobiography. In passing, he recounts his brief acquaintance with John Marsch, an anthropologist who has come from Earth to discover the vanished (or non-existent) "aborigines" of Saint Anne. The next story in the collection recounts the first contact between humans and aborigines, and it explains all the tantalizing rumors of that indigenous group -- but its title ("'A Story,' by John V. Marsch") signals that it is a conscious work of fiction by an anthropologist who is trying to fit all those tantalizing fragments into a workable whole. It explains everything, but its explanation is suspect. In the third story, "V. R. T.," a bored bureaucrat shifts through journal entries and field reports from a state prisoner -- one John Marsch -- who stands accused of being an agent provocateur. Marsch contends that he is an Earth anthropologist, but the government of Saint Croix argues that he has no proof of his identity. And it becomes increasingly clear -- although the bureaucrat never recognizes the full truth -- that there are certain holes and inconsistencies in Marsch's story that suggest he may not be John V. Marsch at all...

The stories rattle against one another like billiard balls. In "V. R. T.", John V. Marsch answers (in passing) the central unanswered question that terrorizes the unnamed protagonist in "The Fifth Head of Cerberus." In "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," a crime is committed that will lead to an arrest in "V. R. T." "'A Story,' by John V. Marsch" is just a story, unless you believe the coinciding accusations in the other two novellas, in which case it becomes a true story. Characters in all three stories keep offering different suggestions on the fate of the (possible) aborigines, but the most alarming theory is that they were shape-shifters who mimicked the human settlers so successfully that they forgot their original existence...

The core issues at the heart of The Fifth Head of Cerberus are identity and instrumentality. Its stories are populated by doppelgangers struggling for agency apart from their oppressive partner: rival twins; human-like robots; sons and fathers; slaves and owners; clones and creators; natives and colonists; anthropologists and their dehumanized subjects. It is a struggle not to be subsumed. In each novella, there is a space -- a gap, a slip, a pause -- where the narrator has been (possibly) replaced by his double without any acknowledgment (or realization) of the substitution. The characters of The Fifth Head of Cerberus resist looking in mirrors, lest they find a ghost looking back. ( )

I found the first story very good, but a little boring and not very credible in the mix of 19th century future (in the New Sun series there are good reasons to make that believable, but here they are not). The second story is utterly uninteresting and unreadable; the third just very boring.
I love GW in his Sun series, but this book was a big let-down for me. ( )

Well written, immersive, alienating. And a bit of a puzzle box that doesn't really go anywhere, but is atmospheric, engrossing, and memorable. It's the Gene Wolfe experience!

After "The Book of the New Sun" and "The Book of the Long Sun", I’ve finished re-reading “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” once again! And thought about it for a long time after as usual. Everything came together so beautifully. I loved how different mini-stories, with their characters not knowing what the reader knows from previous segments, build a tone without knowing what they're seeing. And at the very beginning (hence not a spoiler) when someone reminiscing comments that as a child they were blown away with amazement by a mundane thing like the library, but didn’t bat an eyelid at the incredible things like the slaves.

There are some suggestions, not entirely fanciful, that "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" can be read as a prequel to “The Book of the New Sun”, although it's more a case that certain elements in the one are perhaps echoed in the other - just as Long Sun contains elements that link it to New whilst being a radically different work. It's as much a case as enjoying the additional richness of the tapestry if you spot a linking thread.

Vance for example has a deep-seated suspicion of moralism and hypocrisy. I think the appearance of profundity in Wolfe is that Vance's psychology is rather more straightforward: characters in Vance generally know what they want. Wolfe's characters generally aren't fully aware of what they want any more than they're fully aware of anything else. One reason why none of them are capable of telling a story straight. The critical consensus seems to be that Wolfe has taken Vance as his starting point and superseded him. Some people argue, though, that while Vance doesn't play the same kind of narrative games as Wolfe, his lightness of touch and range of tone mean that it's Vance, not Wolfe, who is the neglected genius.I’m not sure I buy into this. Or perhaps I'm justifying my own lightweight intellect in saying that I should take Vance's Wodehousian brio over Wolfe's tricksiness every time, but I just can’t.

Book Review Gene Wolfe Jack Vance SF = Speculative Fiction Vance ( )