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The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

This story is part of the The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction group collection discussion.

★★★★★

I've read it as part of The Fifth Head of Cerberus which is a cycle of three novellas starting with this one. I fully recommend reading the whole book instead of only the first novella, because they add a lot. I've reviewed the whole thing on GR.

The novella is a coming-of-age story with a narrator called “Number Five” written from a first person point of view. He looks back at his youth on planet Sainte Croix, the murder of his father and his way to freedom. He was brought up in a luxurious brothel, which financed his father’s genetical experiments on him and his brother David. He meets anthropologist Dr. Marsch and gets to know that he is a descendant of a “family” of clones. Sick of the terrible experiments, he decides to kill his father, gets caught, is imprisoned. Free again, he returns to his old home, only to repeat his father’s history, because he cannot change.

This is a brilliantly narrated Gothic Mystery, a pivotal story in Gene Wolfe’s writing career and one of the high points of 1970s Science Fiction.

It starts with “When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were tired or not.”

The first sentence echoes Proust and is the beginning of a masterpiece in prose, world-building, and engaging riddles. The setting of this coming-of-age novella is a future turned to past: slavery friendly Fin de Siècle, post-colonial French town called Port-Mimizon on planet Sainte Croix. The narrator’s home remembers me a bit of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast with its grotesqueness.

You can read the novella as a straight-forward story, but revisiting it leads to the included riddles. Just to name a few: Number Five’s real name, his relation to his girl-friend Phaedria, the nature of the five heads of Cerberus. I won’t point out the solutions here, but if you’re curious, there is a great Wiki resolving all those riddles.

The novella is one of the SF genre’s early discussions of cloning, evolution theory, and human identity: Identity is not only a matter of genes and environment, but also of the soul. By duplicating his father’s life, he denies his individuality.

Besides of the intellectually interesting details, the novella is exciting, emotional, wonderfully Kafkaesque, and full of great ideas. But it is also ambiguous and leaves some elements unresolved – so, if you’re a friend of clear words and fixed endings, then Wolfe might not be your preferred author.

Knowing I would be busier later in the month, I started reading when the collection was announced. ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’ triggered my desire to devour the rest of the collection. Yes this story is creepy and uncomfortable, but it is also thought-provoking and memorable.

But I am not sure how to talk about the novella without mentioning potential spoilers.

So (view spoiler)[Nature vs nurture arguments, when raised among clones, gets interesting. I think nurture would still play a role because with the addition of every new clone you cannot help but change the environment to some extent. But Wolfe is making a more basic point about the nature of life. To evolve, every organism must have the ability to pass along genetic information and have the potential for variations in response to environment. If the goal is to replicate yourself, asking questions only to ask questions, you do not evolve. You get stuck. Or as in the oft-repeated line, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.

Then there is the issue of selling your clones into slavery. It is a horrendous concept, but no more so than humans selling humans in general. And wasn’t Five as much a slave as those sold at the market? (hide spoiler)]

So much more I could say about this story, but a storm is moving in and I should shut off my computer.