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jasonmehmel 's review for:
The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas
by Gene Wolfe
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!
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!