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    The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas
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    The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas
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    The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas
    Ebook279 pages5 hours

    The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas

    By Gene Wolfe

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Back in print for the first time in more than a decade, Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a universally acknowledged masterpiece of science fiction by one of the field's most brilliant writers.

    Far out from Earth, two sister planets, Saint Anne and Saint Croix, circle each other in an eternal dance. It is said a race of shapeshifters once lived here, only to perish when men came. But one man believes they can still be found, somewhere in the back of the beyond.

    In The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Wolfe skillfully interweaves three bizarre tales to create a mesmerizing pattern: the harrowing account of the son of a mad genius who discovers his hideous heritage; a young man's mythic dreamquest for his darker half; the bizarre chronicle of a scientists' nightmarish imprisonment. Like an intricate, braided knot, the pattern at last unfolds to reveal astonishing truths about this strange and savage alien landscape.



    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 15, 1994
    ISBN9781466801134
    Unavailable
    The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas
    Author

    Gene Wolfe

    Gene Wolfe (1931-2019) was the Nebula Award-winning author of The Book of the New Sun tetralogy in the Solar Cycle, as well as the World Fantasy Award winners The Shadow of the Torturer and Soldier of Sidon. He was also a prolific writer of distinguished short fiction, which has been collected in such award-winning volumes as Storeys from the Old Hotel and The Best of Gene Wolfe. A recipient of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award, and six Locus Awards, among many other honors, Wolfe was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007, and named Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2012.

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    Reviews for The Fifth Head of Cerberus

    4/5

    357 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I just finished reading The Fifth Head of Cerberus and it is one of the best pieces of speculative fiction I've ever had the pleasure of reading. I have to admit, being honest, it took 1/3 of a way through the book for things to start click. There was a moment where I sat up right and had a "wait just a damn second" moment. Imagine my surprise where, in one period, I was just sort of pushing my way through the book, the next I found my self jumping back pages to confirm certain suspicions.

      You may find that I'm being very vague and this is on purpose. If it were up to me I would prefer for users reading this to just grab a copy A.S.A.P. and get to reading. But there are a couple things the would be almost dishonest not to mention:

      This is not easy/light reading

      The book is brain candy at times, poetry at others, and frankly some parts of the book may seem completely pointless when first reading. You may have to fight your brain not to skim. If you are a skimmer you may not get much out of the three novellas.

      With that said this is not an experimental tome like Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. It is a reasonable legnth and it never jumps of the cliff of WTF that Dhalgren(not hating on Dhalgren. I love it) does. In fact, I'd say it's the opposite, it can be reserved in how much it lets you in.

      Minor Spoilers

      Seriously don't keep reading if you don't even like the hint of spoilers

      The use of the unreliable narrator here is astonishing. I actually find some of the stuff hidden in the text horrifying. Some of it is left to the person reading. The idea of identity, what makes us us, how our culture shapes acceptability, and so much more. The final 10 our so pages were absolutely mind blowing. I'm not sure I've read so much crammed into this such a small amount of text in Science Fiction. If I could compare it to anything it would be Dubliners by James Joyce. On the surface you have these dull reserved stories but anyone paying attention finds so much more.

      Anyway, sorry for the rambling, but my brain is on fire after reading this one. I wanted to write this while the high of reading it was still set in.
    • 2/5
      Obviously many people like this book a lot, but I found it simply too baffling and too much work to make sense of. MB 7-i-2019
    • 4/5
      These three stories are not an easy read. They are the strangest stories. You never quite know what is going on. There are a number of reviews here on LT and elsewhere who give in depth interpretations and reactions to this book, and do it far better than I could attempt. The title tale reminds me a little of an intricate story by Franz Kafka more than any other comparison I might give. Each story here is very different and you don't breeze through this as a quick read. A sort of a horror story in a puzzle book. This is very twisty and dark. I thought the first part the best.
    • 4/5
      Very dense science fiction, with an anthropological bent.
    • 5/5
      One of the best pieces of fiction ever written. Not just science fiction, or science fantasy, but just fiction. If you only read one work by him, it should be this one.
    • 4/5
      Read this for a group read -- the first time I've managed to get myself organised to do that in a long time. I have a backlog as long as my arm of books that were picked for discussion in that group! And they always pick interesting ones.

      This was my first Gene Wolfe book, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. I don't know whether my brain just doesn't work in quite the right way to fully 'get' the story, or if everyone else is equally at sea. I kind of want to nod wisely and pretend I followed every word, but I didn't -- but I liked it a lot anyway, and I know I'm going to be thinking about it for quite a while. It's all about issues of identity, along with colonial issues, which I find interesting, and it's fantastically written: the plot may be puzzling, but the sentences never are.

      The structure of the book is interesting: three novellas which share themes and come together into a whole. It's a bit difficult to see how they connect at first, other than shared worlds, but don't let that deter you. Normally I'd find it a turn-off, but it's worth just letting the narrative carry you along.

      I don't know if I'm going to read more of Gene Wolfe's work, oddly enough. I liked this very much, and may even reread it, but it wasn't easy. I find myself gravitating to easy reads, lately -- I spend so much time wrestling with Middle English that when I get to my relaxing time, it's hard to settle down with something as nuanced and complex as The Fifth Head of Cerberus.
    • 4/5
      I think this book is absolutely brilliant, but I don't think I care for Wolfe's writing, which makes this difficult for me to rate. If someone whose style I liked better had written it, I might have given it 5 stars, because I do think it's fantastic.

      I can't go too much into the plot, because I do think this book is best read naive.

      Basically, two (twin) planets, Sainte Croix and Sainte Ann have been colonized by humans a long, long time ago. There are mysterious aborigines that may or may not have existed (on Ste Ann). If they did, they were not human but could shape-shift to look and act like humans.

      The book is composed of three stories that pull elements of this twin system, the societies of both planets, questionable aborigines and anthropological study together in interesting ways. There are interesting themes delved into - nature vs nurture (inheritability of traits), evolutionary theories, post colonialism, etc.

      It's good. It's very interesting. I just don't think I'm a fan of Wolfe's style.
    • 4/5
      Three novellas, seemingly not connected but so intertwined as to be inseparable. The prose is simple but effective. Wolfe writes with great economy and precision and makes the narration in all the novellas seamless. All three are narrated in the first person and so it can get a bit disorienting at times especially the very first story about father and son who turn out to be not so and an aunt who turns out to be a daughter instead. (Yeah I know it sounds insane already but it is a strange book and a mind bender)Two planets share the same orbit. Humans came and took over an entire civilization but there is a catch.The catch being that the aliens were shapeshifters. There are stories that claim that the aliens have impersonated the humans and in fact are not extinct.Now where most authors would adopt a slam bam and thank you madam approach for this sort of tale(I can already imagine a heroic protagonist uncovering a prophecy with him as the saviour and the aliens as villainous human eaters) However Wolfe uses these three novellas with great subtlety and by the end without realizing you know somewhere in the back of your mind what has taken placeIts a tough read. Pick it up if you like interconnected novellas and/or science fiction. This is definitely one of the strangest books that I have read.
    • 5/5
      His best work, and I think you can read it as a prelude / epilogue to the new / long / short sun books.
    • 5/5
      As chamber music is to a symphony, so The Fifth Head of Cerberus is to Gene Wolfe's celebrated multi-volume series, such as The Book of the New Sun. In three linked novellas, well described by other reviewers, Wolfe explores matters of identity, freedom and colonisation. His unreliable narrators conceal as they reveal, but the clues are all there - somewhere- in the text. And the prose is beautiful: always deep, but never showy.
    • 4/5
      Story-behind-the-story done right.These are three stories that stand on their own as SF works, but taken together the sidelong glances and allusions and discrepancies add up to another story in the background, making the whole experience much richer.I imagine this was the effect that Jeff VanderMeer was aiming for with City of Saints and Madmen, but he tried too hard: many elements of the city and the stories were obviously only present to hint at the "mysterious" backstory. Wolfe nails it: the odd elements all support their individual stories, indeed are necessary for them to exist, but combine as well into something larger.The worlds Wolfe describes (two sister planets) are present mostly in the corner of the eye, rather than being fully-fledged intricately worked-out creations. One planet is clearly based on the early colonisation of Australia: the original inhabitants are subsistance desert-dwellers, referred to by the colonists as "abos" and apparently driven to extinction by a combination of deliberate hunting and fatal cultural contamination. The assumptions and expectations this resonance sets up give us a sense that we know more of the planet than we do (of course the correspondence is not exact, and some of these expectations are subverted by later discoveries).We get much less sense of the other planet (where the first story takes place); while Wolfe again provides only sparse details out the corners of the eyes, these neither relate to any contemporary stereotypes nor provide any coherent picture. This is the very opposite of world-building, in one sense: the details we get are only those that relate directly to the story, and there's no sense the Wolfe has filled out all the others himself. On the other hand, the result is, paradoxically, to provide a strong sense of a world that does exist, but to give the view of it that a traveller might take away: fragmentary, confusing, incoherent and contradictory in some ways, but definitely a view of somewhere real.In some sense this is the view we get of the story-behind-the-story as well: fragments, individually dubious and collectively incoherent, that nonetheless can (with half-closed eyes) form the shape of something greater. This seems to be the mood Wolfe is building towards throughout; in the third story the narrative takes the same form, a collection of notes and diary fragments read out of order and written by a man (or possibly several) who was (were?) possibly insane and definitely deliberately deceptive at times, so that they cannot be read as a coherent or total narrative. It's at times a frustrating form in the effort it demands from the reader, but Wolfe's writing is good enough and the selection of fragments has enough narrative justification (on top of its puzzle-setting function) to make the whole extremely rewarding.