The Fifth Head of Cerberus, by Gene Wolfe is a work of anticolonialist science-fiction published in 1972. Personally, I am suspicious of anti-colonialist fiction of that age. Books may inadvertently take on certain colonialist assumptions and perspectives even while attempting to reject others. (Of course, we continue to do this today.) I was interested to see how Gene Wolfe’s first major book fared.

The book is structured as three novellas taking place in the same universe. There is a pair of twin planets, Saint Anne and Saint Croix, colonized by humans a few generations ago. It’s said that there was an indigenous population on Saint Anne (the Annese). However, there is barely any trace of them left. What’s there is veiled by layers of folklore, hearsay, and charlatanry.

The book poses two major questions about the indigenous Annese. First, were they human? One character argues yes, because they are dead. They are human because it is interesting to say so. And since they are dead, saying that they were human does not burden us with the responsibility to do anything about it.

Second, are the Annese still here? It is suggested, as a fanciful conjecture, that the people currently living on Saint Anne are descended from the Annese. The Annese are said to have been shapeshifters, and could have taken the form of the colonists. So is that what happened? (And would it matter? What is the motivation for asking?)

These are not, I think, the sort of questions you would ask about colonialism if you set about to consider it analytically. These are poetic, evocative questions. The idea that we can only consider the Annese human after they are gone speaks to a bitter injustice. And of course in the real world, indigenous groups are not in fact dead, and so what are we doing about that?

These questions are explicitly posed in the first novella, but the connection to story events is oblique, and the reader is left to draw connections.

The first novella tells the life of a boy on Saint Croix. His caretaker is a robot, his father runs a brothel, and he is embedded in a society full of slavery. Without spoiling anything, it is a story about cycles of violence. Or more precisely, standing waves of violence, patterns that persist even as every individual making up the pattern is replaced. What bearing does his have on colonialism, when the colonized people are long gone, and on a different planet besides?

The third novella follows an anthropologist, John V. Marsch, and his attempt to track down information about the indigenous people. He finds someone who knows someone, who knows another, though those claims are likely fraudulent. And we do not hear directly from Marsch ourselves. We watch a police investigator reading Marsch’s diaries; the investigator does not care much at all about what Marsch discovered.

The fate of the Annesse is unclear. Were they all killed, or did they become part of the standing wave? And for all that people entertain the idea that the Annese were human, why do they not entertain the same for slaves? Ah, well the slaves, they are not dead.

I found The Fifth Head of Cerberus to be a thematically rich experience, one worth discussing and picking apart, but I also did not always enjoy reading it. It became one of those books that took me months and months to read, because I was unenthusiastic about continuing, and then when I found the opportunity, I had to work to refresh my memory. I think some of the moment to moment falls short.

In particular, the second novella felt sloggy and unpleasant. It’s a folkloric story of the Annese, supposedly told by Dr. Marsch. Marsch is an ambiguously unpleasant person, whose role as author casts doubt on the story’s authenticity. That’s kind of the point, as he somewhat embodies the regressive attitudes of old-fashioned anthropology. But the “point” such as it is, is to be enjoyed from afar, not from close up. (Along similar lines, I am not pleased by Wolfe’s habit of writing female characters within the madonna/whore dichotomy, even if there is a “point” to it.)

All in all, this is a surprisingly mature work of anticolonialism.