 The short of it is, this is a complex and challenging text addressing a distinct tension about the consequences of human cloning, while also touching on post-colonial and post-modern issues. One is three and three is one, and five is not as you might think it is. The long of it. Gene Wolf creates a complex, Mose, whose description is at least in part subject to the reader's ability to put clues together. I won't pretend to have understood everything going on in the fifth head of Cerberus, but I'd like to think I've grasped enough to tell you why this book is worth reading. After writing it, I realise there are some spoilers in this review, but this isn't a book worth talking about without touching on all the text. I don't discuss too much, that doesn't become evident fairly early on, but you've been warned. Some background first. Cerberus, as I will be referring to the book, is not a novel but three distinct novellas. The first one, after which this collection is named, reads as a first-person memoir in a voice reminiscent of Gene Wolf's Severian, the protagonist of his much-beloved and critically acclaimed Book of the New Sun sequence. If you've picked that up, you know what to expect. Penetrative intelligence, unreliability, allusions to what's to come, the reader's dramatic irony on a reread. Here of course, Wolf doesn't have the hundreds and even thousands of pages he does in telling Severian's story. That doesn't mean that number five, as we may refer to the protagonist, is less interesting. In fact, Wolf's stylistic mastery shines all the brighter when he has only 70-ish pages to work with. The question Wolf is engaged with throughout this first novella is that of cloning, and the issues of identity that cloning opens up. Number five is a clone of the man he calls father, which I can only imagine complicates an already fraught relationship with a man who spends much of number five's childhood experimenting on him. I have to wonder if the recent adaptation of Isaac Kuzimov's Golden Age era foundation series was not inspired by a concept to be found here, namely a process called relaxation. One secondary character and the protagonist of the third novella, Dr Marsh, describes this process thus. As the levels of approximation between clones progress, the successive sets become more and more similar until there is essentially no change. That is why I said the two of you are essentially one individual. This recalls a quote I came across from the literary theorist and researcher Paul Sheehan's excellent article about the post-human body. Who writes, again, for Soren Holm, a professor of biotics, the widespread belief that genotype, i.e. genetic code, determines phenotype, i.e. personality or psychological makeup, raises the possibility that a cloned individual could be forced to reenact the life of its progenitor to live, in effect, a life that is not its own. This is what number five ultimately does, the reader has led to believe, despite his own arguments to the contrary. When number five's narrative ends, what number five does, the specifics of how he ends up in the place he does it are different, yes, but does that ultimately make a difference? The second novella is one I will struggle to talk about. It masquerades as an anthropological report by the same Dr. Marge, though further speculation on the doctor's role might make this less reportage and more folk storytelling. Anthropological report of what, you ask. You see, one of the core concepts of the fifth head is that the aboriginal populace of one of the twin planets in which the book takes place, Saint Anne, are shape-shifted. The core idea where these unease are concerned is captured in the fictional Veil's hypothesis, which, I quote, supposes the abos to have possessed the ability to mimic mankind perfectly. Veil tells that when the ships came from Earth, the abos killed everyone and took their places in the ships. So they're not dead at all, we are. This is the most challenging part of the collection to read. It engages with questions of memory while taking a different approach to identity. If the previous novella is interested in individual identity, this one is concerned with that of the collective, who is human and who is shape-shifter. How do perceptions play into this question? You'll find no certainty in this strange psychedelic text. The third novella extends the concepts of both the first and the second. It is also the longest of the lot at nearly a hundred pages, an unnamed political officer. Of the government is reading through the daries of Good Doctor Marsh, who has been imprisoned over suspicions that he is a spy for the other world's government, rather than the earth-born anthropologist, he claims he is. Totalitarianism, slavery and more, are hinted at or at the very least discussed here. While the charges of spycraft do not seem likely, the truth is more disturbing. Implied in this text is the possibility that the doctor has been replaced by his guide, a half aboriginal boy. The writing presented in a non-linear way hints at a total melding of identities. This is not, however, a seamless coming together. Instead, uncertainty and confusion create the sense of a distinctly post-modern subjectivity, an individual deeply fractured, fragmented and falling apart at the seams. Throughout each of these novellas, Wolf shows a great degree of anxiety about issues both prevalent at the time of writing and issues he feared society would face in the immediate future. In the first case, the issue at hand is globalization and its new colonial aspects, which the exploitation recreated in ways that, while different from older modes such as slavery, on paper, are all too similar in practice. I trust I don't need to draw parallel to the realities of slave labor half a world over or closer in our own contemporary society. That's when worlds of Saint Anne and Saint Croix have very different conceptions of slavery. One of the most memorable passages in the third novella sees an investigator explain what he sees as the benefits of honest slavery on Saint Croix versus the supposed freedom of many on earth and Saint Anne. It's blood-curdling stuff, of course, as most slavery apologia is. But you can see the terrible logic at work within those who subscribe to this kind of view. Finally, and I cannot stress this enough, the SF Masterworks edition, which might well be the only edition of the Fifth Head of Cerberus, has a stellar introduction of the book, courtesy of Adam Roberts. That introduction, though spoiler-heavy, does a far better job than my own review might of penetrating Wolf's text and bringing to the fore what makes this such a riveting speculative read. A song recommendation, something for your mind by Superorganism because, well, this book certainly is that. You will enjoy the Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolf, if you like. One, speculative fiction that investigates the human condition and how future developments might threaten it, especially those developments have anything to do with cloning. Two, the idea of experiencing three tonally different texts, each of the three nonetheless reinforcing the others in intelligent ways. Three, stylistically exciting writing. Four, if you like intertext, this one has plenty to keep you on your toes. And more, probably. I hope you've enjoyed my review. You'll note I ask more questions than provide answers for in this one. Between the two of us, I think this is the best way to go about it, especially where Wolf is concerned. Don't forget to press the like button and comment down below. Have you ever heard of or read any of Gene Wolf's works? He is one of the finest American authors out there, especially of science fiction and fantasy. No one would deny him that at the very least. And I don't think that anyone who would deny him the mastery over the English language, over a style that he shows, well, I don't think they would be very fair to him at any rate. I'm Philip Magnus. Thank you for watching. Please, don't forget to subscribe and I will see you again next time. Bye!