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The Fifth Head of Cerberus (S.F. Masterworks) (Paperback)

by Gene Wolfe (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz; New Ed edition (8 April 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1857988175
  • ISBN-13: 978-1857988178
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 73,738 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #3 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > W > Wolfe, Gene

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Product Description

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


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.
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Customer Reviews

21 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.6 out of 5 stars (21 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Gene Wolfe's First Masterpiece, 2 Jun 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The 5th Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas (Paperback)
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.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Quickly became one of my favourite books..., 18 Sep 2007
By Niall Mc Cann (Dundalk, Ireland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A True Classic of the Genre, 11 Jun 2000
By A Customer
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.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Magical, but not an airplane novel
Not everyone will like this book; in the same way as not everyone will like (or, more simply, have time for) Joyce or Proust. Read more
Published 20 months ago by giraudtheunwilling

5.0 out of 5 stars MUCH better than I expected
I kept glossing over this book in the library, despite the fact that I had read the Book of the New Sun previously and loved it, because it had some lousy-sounding synopsis on the... Read more
Published on 28 Nov 2006 by IL

1.0 out of 5 stars Lost in Space
I purchased this as I'd heard so much about Wolfe's writing and the books qualities. Unfortunately the experience left me totally lost when I read it. Read more
Published on 24 Sep 2005

2.0 out of 5 stars Too clever
I bought this novel (first pub. 1973) because it was in David Pringle's "Science Fiction the 100 Best Novels". Read more
Published on 4 Dec 2002 by Mr. R. J. Hole

2.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps an interesting excercise
One might say that using short stories to build a novel was a brave attempt to break the mould, but I couldn't help getting the feeling that this work was more like an exercise... Read more
Published on 16 Sep 2002 by amdarley

5.0 out of 5 stars A measured work of genius
Upon first reading this novel you may well be left bemused by all the accolades that this work has received. Don't let that worry you. Read more
Published on 5 Sep 2002 by Mr Stephen J Gaskell

1.0 out of 5 stars Nearly Made Me Give Up SF
As you can probably ascertain from other reviews on this site, this book isn't for everyone. I personally found the three vaguely interconnected stories uninteresting and... Read more
Published on 19 Mar 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars absolutely wonderful
this book is nothing that i expected it to be. it blew me away. the three novellas connect to hint at a story that is not there. Read more
Published on 4 Mar 2002

2.0 out of 5 stars Leaves you lost
When I got hold of this book, I had already read the New Sun books by Wolfe which I absolutely adored, especially because they deserve the characterization "literature"... Read more
Published on 20 Dec 2000

3.0 out of 5 stars Unfinished tales leaving you to make your own story.
After reading this book, my first thought was, "What am i suppose to feel?". I have to admit the concept of shape-changing aliens has a very high potential, but it is... Read more
Published on 9 Sep 2000

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