The Fifth Head Of Cerberus

What Hacker News says

1. atombenderFeb 2026
   Wolfe is one of my favourite writers, and I highly recommend New Sun.

   That said, it is a challenge for a lot of readers. It's a single, very long novel that introduces a complicated and mysterious cosmology that is rarely fully understood until the second or even third reading. A common saying among fans is that you don't read Wolfe, you re-read him. It requires a certain amount of patience.

   An easier intro is The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is also one of my favourite novels. It's very short, but its puzzle box structure is no less satisfying or challenging than New Sun. Parts of the fun is figuring exact out who is narrating the three different stories that make up the book — it's probably not who they claim to be — and exactly what happened.

   Thinking about the article's reference to Herman Melville, Ursula LeGuin actually called Wolfe "our Melville", "our" meaning science fiction writers as a group.

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2. viccisNov 2025
   I'll add some recommendations to the author's list, as I have found that reading difficult literature (both fiction and non-fiction) has been like exercising a muscle for me. For example, I read Blood Meridian before doing this and then again after doing it for a few years, right after McCarthy passed away, and it was a night and day difference in how "difficult" the prose was.

   A few things I think fit into the "short little difficult books":

   Borges is not someone I consider too difficult, but many do for the same reason the author mentioned people finding Calvino to be difficult. His works require that you invest some curiosity into thinking about the scenarios in his fiction. He also plays with the nature of the narrative of the story in a sometimes postmodern way that is still accessible. None of his works are longer than 20 pages or so, so not a huge time investment. I would recommend buying the Penguin "Collected Fictions" edition. It contains a collection of books of stories, and I would recommend prioritizing reading the Fictions and The Aleph collections first. Some of his popular stories to start with would be "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Lottery in Babylon", "The Library of Babel", and "The Immortal". If you want slightly more sentimental, "The Circular Ruins" is wonderful. If you want dryer, more satirical and postmodern, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is hilarious.

   If you want a book that plays with the basic structure of a "novel", Nabokov's Pale Fire is a great read and a good introduction into what the technique of an unreliable narrator can truly achieve. No matter how out-there you think your interpretation of it is, if you look into published literary analysis of it, the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than you might think.

   Gene Wolfe is highly regarded among science fiction fans, and for good reason. While he's best known for his Solar Cycle, a set of a dozen novels, I think that the best introduction to him can be found in his short stories. They might not seem difficult at first, but some of them, especially Seven American Nights, Forlesen, and the trio of stories in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, are similar to Pale Fire insofar as they are far more than they seem on the surface. They require some degree of scrutiny and interpretation from the reader. I wish I had read them before his bigger novels, as I found reading those novels was so much more rewarding after learning how to read Wolfe from his short stories. If you want to buy a few short story collections, there's going to be some unavoidable overlap, but I would recommend "The Best of Gene Wolfe" (for The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, The Death of Dr. Island, Forlesen, Seven American Nights, Death of the Island Doctor), "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories" (Tracking Song, The Doctor of Death Island), and "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" for its three novellas.

   If you want something much more difficult, try J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. He was influenced by Burroughs (Naked Lunch would be another recommendation here if you can stomach the Beatnik depravity within) and wrote a novel that will challenge its reader in many ways. It's very interesting to go straight from this into Crash, which covers a lot of the same material in a less difficult structure. Baudrillard praised Crash with "After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation", but I would say The Atrocity Exhibition deserves this praise(?) just as much, even if it's much rougher around the edges. Certainly, the political stunt pulled using one of its sections (called Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan) belong more to the Situationists' games than Baudrillard's universe of simulation, but the stunt relies just as much on the hyperreal breakdown of signifiers as anything Baudrillard even pointed to.

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3. jacquesmNov 2023
   To save you some scripting:

     Alan Moore - dystopian graphic novel V for Vendetta (serialized 1982–1989)
     Alejandro Jodorowsky Jean Giraud (Moebius) - graphic novel The Incal (1980–1988)
     Anna Kavan - Ice (1967).
     Anne McCaffrey - The Ship Who Sang (1969)
     Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Пикник на обочине (1972; Piknik na obochine; translated as A Roadside Picnic)
     Barry N. Malzberg - Beyond Apollo (1972)
     Brian Aldiss - Barefoot in the Head (1969)
     Brian Aldiss - Greybeard (1964).
     Chester Anderson - The Butterfly Kid (1967)
     Christopher Priest - Inverted World (1974)
     Cordwainer Smith - Norstrilia (1975, in complete form).
     David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)
     Frank Herbert - Dune (1965)
     Frank Miller - graphic novel Rōnin (1983–1984)
     Gary Panter - comic Jimbo (serialized 1977–present)
     Gary Panter - comic strip Dal Tokyo (1983–2007)
     Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)
     Harlan Ellison’s (ed.) Dangerous Visions (1967)
     Jack Kirby - Fourth World comics (1971–1974).
     Jack Kirby - pre-Fourth World sci-fi comics (1964–1970)
     James Tiptree Jr. - Up the Walls of the World (1978)
     Jane Gaskell - A Sweet, Sweet Summer (1969)
     J.G. Ballard - Crash (1973)
     J.G. Ballard - High-Rise (1975)
     J.G. Ballard - The Atrocity Exhibition (written 1967, published 1970)
     J.G. Ballard - The Burning World (1964)
     J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World (1966)
     Joanna Russ - We Who Are About To… (serialized 1976; in book form, 1977)
     John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar  (1968).
     John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up (1972)
     John Crowley - Engine Summer (1979)
     John Crowley - The Deep (1975).
     John Sladek - Roderick at Random (1983)
     John Sladek’s - The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970)
     John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977)
     John Wagner, Alan Grant, and Carlos Ezquerra - Judge Dredd adventures Block Mania (serialized 10/31/1981 to 12/26/81) and The Apocalypse War (1/2/82 to 6/26/82).
     Josephine Saxton - The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969)
     Katsuhiro Otomo - manga series Akira (1982–1990)
     Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969)
     Michael Moorcock - The English Assassin (1972)
     M. John Harrison - The Pastel City (1971)
     Moebius-s Le Garage Hermétique (The Airtight Garage, 1976–1979)
     Octavia E. Butler-s Kindred (1979)
     Octavia E. Butler - Wild Seed (1980)
     Philip K. Dick - A Maze of Death (1970)
     Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly (1977)
     Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
     Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).
     Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip (1964)
     Philip K. Dick - Now Wait for Last Year (1966)
     Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
     Philip K. Dick - The Unteleported Man (1966)
     Philip K. Dick - Ubik (1969).
     Philip K. Dick - VALIS (1981)
     Richard Brautigan - In Watermelon Sugar (1968).
     Robert Heinlein - Friday (1982).
     Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside (1972)
     Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light (1967)
     Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker (1980)
     Samuel R. Delany - Babel-17 (1966).
     Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren (1975)
     Samuel R. Delany - Nova (1968)
     Samuel R. Delany - The Einstein Intersection (1967)
     Samuel R. Delany - Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976)
     Stanislaw Lem - Ze wspomnien Ijona Tichego Kongres futurologiczny (The Futurological Congress, 1971)
     Thomas M. Disch - Camp Concentration (1968)
     Thomas Pynchon - Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
     Ursula K. Le Guin - Rocannon's World (1966)
     Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed (1974).
     Ursula K. LeGuin - The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
     Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
     Vladimir Nabokov - Ada, or Ardor (1969)
     Vonda N. McIntyre - Dreamsnake (1978)
     Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins (1971)
     William Burroughs - Nova Express (1964)

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4. briankellyNov 2023
   I particularly like The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Dangerous Visions covers.
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5. smogcutterOct 2023
   “Book of the New Sun”, beginning with Shadow of the Torturer, is his major work but can be unapproachable at first. The narrator/protagonist is a terrific character, but a IMO difficult one to spend time with.

   The Fifth Head of Cerberus is also a great entry point. It’s a set of three interconnected novellas that, for my part at least, were more immediately engaging than BotNS. It’s got all the Wolfe-isms you want: unreliable narrators, unconventional settings, and puzzle-box stories that slowly open themselves.

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6. kovrikDec 2022
   Gene Wolfe.

   The whole Solar Cycle (The Book of the New Sun, Urth of The New Sun, The Book of The Long Sun, The Book of The Short Sun), Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, There Are Doors, The Sorcerer's House ... .

   Wolfe is a genius.

   Before that I also finished Malazan.

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