Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head Of Cerberus (1972) SFMW 8

Gene Wolfe's 1972 sequence of three linked novellas ('The Fifth Head of Cerberus', '"A Story," by John V. Marsch', and 'V.R.T.') is simultaneously a murder/mystery story, post-colonial allegory, and a cautionary tale concerning cloning and the impact such technologies could have on a theoretical human intergalactic diaspora.

The first and third tales are presented sequentially, although not in temporal succession, and both feature the character Dr. John V. Marsch, an anthropologist supposedly from Earth. The title of the intervening tale suggests that its author is also Dr. Marsch, but its subject matter (the tribulations of a group of aboriginals from the plant Sainte Anne, twin planet to Sainte Croix) offers an adjacent look at the work's thematic interests.

At the core of the mysterious mediations that occur between characters (who may be clones), versions of characters (who may be aboriginals), and their clones (recessing, near-infinitely), lies the hypothesis that Marsch is interrogating, posited by Dr. Aubrey Veil who is, as the reader discovers, a suitably shady individual herself:

“Veil’s Hypothesis supposes the abos to have possessed the ability to mimic mankind perfectly. Veil thought that when the ships came from Earth the abos killed everyone and took their places and the ships, so they’re not dead at all, we are.” (Loc. 385-87)

She believed, though she pretended not to, that the Annese have devoured and replaced homo sapiens—Veil’s Hypothesis, and she is Veil; it has been used for years to discredit other heterodox theories about the original population of Sainte Anne. But who, then, Tante Jeannine, are the Free People? Conservatives who would not desert the old ways? The question is not, as I once thought, how much the thoughts of the Shadow children influence reality; but how much our own do. (Loc. 3282-85)

Despite its relative brevity, the text possesses an exceptional semantic density which invites, but also purposefully challenges, interpretation through its panoply of narrators, indeterminate chronology, and textual filters. 'V.R.T.,' for example, is presented as a series of textual fragments, diary entries, and interrogation reports.

Collectively, these devices can enrich the text's enjoyment for those who take pleasure from such equivocal and enigmatic writing, but equally it could frustrate readers who seek a simple tale, well told. The observation 'Let me see if I can cure my habit of skipping back and forth and give everything of interest in the order in which it occurred' (Loc. 2237-38) broadly describes how Wolfe stands in relation to his text.

To be fair, Wolfe (who's narrative voice is a (G)ene-splice away from that of the narrator 'Number Five') does offer the reader fair warning that The Fifth Head Of Cerberus is going to offer more in the way of spirals of indeterminacy than it will provide in deductively-reasoned facts:

You wish to find what is true, and I’m afraid you’re going to find damned little; I want what is false, and I’ve found plenty. (Loc. 2083)

Among his many other authorial accomplishments, Wolfe is technically commanding, a builder of compelling worlds, and a master-craftsman of plotting. For this reader, The Fifth Head Of Cerberus stands as a high-water mark of speculative fiction, and is a obvious and worthy candidate for inclusion in the SF Masterworks list.

“We wish to discover why we fail, why others rise and change and we remain here.” (Loc. 1007-08)

Note: the second, alternate cover to the numbered (I think) sequence of SF Masterworks only came to my attention when seeking images for this post. I do not own a copy of the alternate cover version, but if anyone who does has any more details that I can add in this regard, please feel free to forward them on, and I will amend this entry accordingly with a credit.

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Gene Wolfe, Peace (1975) FMW 28

"The familiar corridor, on which lay all the great rooms of my life, was gone" (p. 244)

Ostensibly the chronologically asynchronous memoirs of Alden Dennis Weer, Peace is a meditation on fabulation. Through the narrator's examination of his own life and the contingent tales and anecdotes that he and other characters relay, the reader comes to reflect on the ways in which their own lives are stories, imperfectly told, incompletely remembered, and perhaps like Gold the antiquarian bookseller's artifacts, forgeries.

Like memory itself, the book is incomplete. For example, the reader concludes the relatively short work knowing a good deal about Weer's childhood and middle age, but cannot say with any precision how it came about that the forty year old engineer became the rich fifty year old entrepreneur of an orange juice analogue made out of potatoes. Weer not only remembers, but appears to relive his past, seemingly without changing it, although the recurrent trope of revenance, the ghost that returns, stalks the work and is significant symbolically. The work does have an historical present of sorts, with the narrator wandering from room to room of a house which is familiar to him within which he continues to write his memoirs (which are contiguous with the book the reader holds in their hands) and which he appears to have had built, although ultimately this construction is perhaps no more than the prison house of memory.

The narrator is a sense a 'hungry ghost' archetype, haunting his own life but destined never to enjoy the book's titular repose, and spectral forms figure widely in the work. Weer revisits but never lives again fully within his own experiences, and through his drifting from recollection to recollection Wolfe conveys an arresting sense of how memory can precipitate strong emotions and near-experiential, almost hallucinatory sensations, but nevertheless cannot temporally return to the event in question to live through it again, either to savour the experience anew or amend its outcome.

Peace is a work which invites its decipherer to read more into it than it is perhaps trying to say. Our lives are stories, but unlike Alden Dennis Weer's they will end. Life is, like the cover of this Fantasy Masterworks edition, arborescent. It can only grow upwards and outwards, and to torture the boughs of experience by binding them together or attempting to influence their development is not only an exercise in frustration but in a sense an aberration, a denial of the fact that the past cannot be fixed, and a failure to acknowledge that the future can be shaped by our actions in the present. Even if we can no longer accurately discern it, our pasts remain immovable as the notes Weer frequently encounters within the work which he wishes to take up, only to find that they are nailed to the furniture.

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