For sale is The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a collection of three novellas by masterful fantasist Gene Wolfe

The Fifth Head of Cerberus - 1972, Ace Books 1976. Stated 1st printing.

The collection is an expansion of the first novella, originally published in the Orbit 10 anthology edited by Damon Knight in 1972. The following novellas, "A Story" by John V. Marsch and V.R.T. expand on the plot and themes of the first.

These works are set on two colony worlds, 20 light-years from Earth, the double planets of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, originally settled by French-speaking colonists, but lost by them in a war with an unnamed enemy. Sainte Anne was (perhaps) once home to an indigenous aboriginal culture (at an apparently pre-paleolithic level of technology) of shapeshifters, who may – or may not – have been wiped out by the human incomers.

The title of this collection of novellas is a play on words which refers to Cerberus, a three-headed dog from Greek mythology, which guarded the gate to the Greek underworld, Hades. In the first novella the protagonist explains that Cerberus represents his own family, its three heads being his father, aunt and Mr. Million, adding that its "unseen" heads are his brother David as fourth and, by implication, the fifth and final the narrator's own. Following this logic, the title of the novella therefore refers to the narrator himself, whose story we read.