The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Three novellas that tie together as one story.

1. Distant twin worlds are colonised by humans. The narrator is a boy growing up on one world in a strange house that turns out to be a high-end brothel run by his scientist father. They are visited by an anthropologist from Earth named Marsh who is researching the view that one of the worlds was populated by shape shifters who killed the colonisers and took their identities.

2. A dreamlike hypnotic tale of the original inhabitants told by Marsh as if by a shaman. There are conflicts between marsh-people, hill-people, and shadow-people who may or may not even be corporeal beings. Hidden in the story is the coming of the colonisers.

3. A Kafkaesque story of Marsh being arrested, imprisoned, and questioned by an unidentified bureaucrat. The story switches without notice between direct narration, transcripts of recorded interrogations, and Marsh's notes from his journey to find the original inhabitants. His notes, by the way, have fallen apart and are picked up and read by the interrogator in any order. Luckily for us, there is one notebook intact.

The book ends abruptly and without explanation. Wolfe has scattered bits of information throughout the whole but the reader won't even see them until realising the meaning of the final few paragraphs. It's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where all the hidden stuff is on the wrong side of each piece. A bit like Kafka's The Trial, you could read the stories in any order and be just as mystified until you sit and piece it all together afterwards.

The first time I read this I was like "okay, weird". Now, the second time I've read this, I think it's probably one of the best things I've ever read? Uncanny and eerie and frightening, and so deft that you don't even realize what's happening until after it's over. How the hell did this guy do this. Pisses me off.

This is my first Wolfe novel outside of Book of the New Sun (which I loved). I was warned that rest of his works are mostly “crazier”.

I'm not sure what I've just read, though to be honest after the second part of the “novel” I expected even something more experimental.

The “novel” (Is it really a novel? I don't think so.) is split into three stories that are vaguely tied together. The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a story about a boy who discovers he's a clone of his father. ‘A Story' by John V. Marsch (this is the whole title) is about an alien? A human among aliens? Alien adopting human identity? In a desert. Talking to human spirit. Or the spirit thinks it used to be a human. It's full of dreams. I don't know... Don't make me read it again.

The third story is called V.R.T. and it's the longest and probably the most standard one of them all, written mostly in diary entries of a political prisoner, and frankly what saved the book from getting worse rating. I actually enjoyed this one. With the other two I got lost sometimes, in ‘A Story' I was lost basically all the time.

I think there was some criticism of colonialism, exploration of identity and I guess satire of big government though with this one I'm not so sure because it wasn't as much satirization as accurate depiction of socialist government in Eastern Europe. Plumber one day, horseshoe maker another, high government security official the next. Prisoner rotting in a cell because both execution and release would be politically inconvenient. Seems about right.

I'm sure Alzabo Soup Podcast will explain “everything”. My favorite quote from The Sword of the Lictor comes to mind: “Think well on all the things we have not told you, and remember what you have not been shown.”

I will.

Interesting somewhat experimental sci-fi. I liked its obsession with memory and identity and it has a bit of a puzzlebox nature, though it's not clear the thing as a whole has clear answers.

Your face in many
distorted and repurposed
recognizable?

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.

Wow. This must be one of the most original, intelligent and mind-bogglingly confusing books I have read lately. Its three novellas loosely interconnect to form a puzzle whose pieces don't always fit together, or maybe it's just me who's not clever enough to realise how they're supposed to fit.

But I'm okay with that, honestly. I'm fine with not getting a completely coherent narrative or anything even remotely close to proper answers to all the questions raised here. Because whether I understand this book or not, reading it has been one hell of a ride.

I've been told that second and third readings of Wolfe's stories allow you to find layers of interesting meaning; my intent with reading this for a book club was to do two readings, but I'm not sure I'm up for a second reading of it–we'll see.

I get it. He's a genius. I just think he's not my flavor of genius. Interesting themes here, a puzzle-that-maybe-isn't-meant-to-be-solved sort of structure. Deep examination of colonizers becoming colonized (and vice versa!), of identity, of how stories are told. This is the kind of thing that sci-fi is made for, in my mind. And yet.

And yet, I like my stories interesting on the surface first, with all of the deep stuff there as well; instead, these stories aren't particularly interesting on the surface, with one-dimensional characters and some 40-year old sci-fi tropes that feel 140 here (ooooooh! cloning! it's so weird!). Yes, yes, yes, the deeper themes are explored in a wonderful way, but only if you dig pretty deeply in the text. Sure, that can be fun, but I'd rather read something like The Left Hand of Darkness, which explores similar themes in a deep way, but which can also/instead be read for its plot alone. I'd even rather read Dhalgren, which has a crazy, non-linear structure but at least is a wild ride, even if you set the themes to the side.

Maybe my thoughts will shift on a second reading? We'll see...