Product Description

Far from Earth two sister planets, Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, circle each other. It is said that a race of shapeshifting aliens once lived here, only to become extinct when human colonists arrived. But one man believes they still exist, somewhere out in the wilderness. In The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe brilliantly interweaves three tales: a scientist's son gradual discovery of the bizarre secret of his heritage; a young man's mythic dreamquest for his darker half; the mystifying chronicle of an anthropologist's seemingly-arbitrary imprisonment. Gradually, a mesmerising pattern emerges.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120557 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
A brothel-keeper's sons discuss genocide and plot murder; a young alien wanderer is pursued by his shadow double; a political prisoner tries to prove his identity, not least to himself. Gene Wolfe's first novel consists of three linked sections, all of them elegant broodings on identity, sameness and strangeness, and all of them set on the vividly evoked colony worlds of Ste. Croix and Ste. Anne, themselves twins delicately poised in mutual orbit. Marsch, victim in the third story, is the apparent author of the second and a casual visitor whose naïve questions precipitate tragedy in the first; the sections dance around each other like the planets of their setting. Clones, down-loaded personalities inhabiting robots, aliens that perhaps mimicked humans so successfully that they forgot who they were, a French culture adopted by its ruthless oppressors--there are a lot of ways to lose yourself, and perhaps the worst is to think that freedom consists of owning other people, that identity is won at the expense of others. It is easy to be impressed by the intellectual games of Wolfe's stunning book, and forget that he is, and always has been, the most intensely moral of SF writers. --Roz Kaveney

About the Author
SALES POINTS * #8 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written * 'A subtle, ingenious, poetic, and picturesque book ... Wolfe is so good he leaves me speechless' -- Ursula Le Guin * 'A truly extraordinary work. One of the most cunningly wrought narratives in the whole of modern SF, a masterpiece of misdirection, subtle clues and apparently casual revelations' -- Science Fiction: 100 Best Novels

Customer Reviews

Gene Wolfe's First Masterpiece
How does one even begin to describe The Fifth Head of Cerebrus. Needless to say, very few authors have ever had a first novel that good. In fact, very few authors have ever written any novel that good. A lot of people found the book strange and complicated...well so did I, and that's the whole allure of this book.

Mr. Wolfe has an amazing imagination, as you will immediately see upon reading any of his novels. Fifth Head is filled with haunting visions of a distant colony in the far future; technology is advanced in some areas but antiquated in many others. The society and culture are masterfully rendered.

The second novella is about a young man finding his twin; the viewpoint of these people is so strange and alien that I should have quickly become confused or bored. And yet I didn't; such was Wolfe's mastery of the writing style. No matter how strange things got, you read right along as if you had no other option.

The third novella consists of a military captain reading a prisoner's diary, returning to the society of the first novella. Again, the pure imagination is astounding. The characters seem like real, tangible people, not prefabricated creations placed down for our amusement. They are real people coping with impossibly strange situations.

If you're looking for a good book to read, then read The Fifth Head of Cerebrus. No, it's not light reading, but it's worth every minute. After reading this book, I immediately became a Wolfe fan. Great, amazing stuff.

Oh, and if you liked this book, I recommend Frank Herbert's "Dune" and Dan Simmons' "Hyperion." These books also have outlandish and amazing scenes, worlds, people, technology, etc.

Quickly became one of my favourite books...
This is by no means an easy book to fully understand, but it's phenomonally rewarding if you put in the effort.

It's a lyrical meditation on identity and the self; some of the passages in the second of the three novellas which make up the body of this work are particularly beautiful, and to my mind at least it's a joy to read.

It's complicated, though. The three novellas are interlinked but not particularly similar; each has its own style and identity (or is that too loaded a word to use in the context of the ideas contained in the book?). Despite this, you won't understand completely what is going on in any until you've read all three, and even then it's a matter of putting together clues that are not always obvious. they are there though, and careful study reveals them.

When you finally manage to put it all together and step back, you see the book as the complex and magnificent clockwork it is, with gears and cogs from each of the novellas turning harmoniously within their story and without - interacting with the themes and events of the other novellas to allow a fuller comprehension of the frightening implications of the events of the entire book.

you can't trust the narrator in any of the stories, because the narrators can't trust themselves. they don't know who they are.

A True Classic of the Genre
Having just finished this novel, I can honestly say I am stunned. It is one of those tours de force that leave you unable to decide exactly what was going on. It is a novel that leaves you to draw your own conclusions. Are all the characters aliens who think they are humans? or do the humans and aliens co-exist without ever realising it? or were there never really any aliens, just degenerate human survivors from and earlier era? Were the aliens figments of human imagination, or are all these speculations red herrings?

In short, this novel does what all great works of art do - it gives you plenty of room to shape your own meanings out of the text rather than impose them on you. In fact it is not really a novel at all - the three interlinking stories stand alone in themselves, but each one only becomes complete in light of the other two.

You will either love this, or hate it. If you like your endings neatly tied together, with all the mysteries explained in a strong dénouement, then avoid this book, and everything else by Wolfe. If you enjoy an intellectual and moral puzzle, then read this, not once, but over again (I am putting in my agenda to re-read in a year, to see if I come up with other conclusions than I did the first time round). A true classic of this or any genre.