Reading Smart with Gene Wolf

I finally finished The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I must say, I was surprised by the ending. I didn't see it coming until maybe the last 10 pages. Gene Wolf effectively kept me guessing. The best description for the book would be "anthropological science fiction." It's definitely a book about colonization but not in the usual way--hopefully knowing that won't give it away. I don't think it will.

While it's hard to adjust to the shifts, the form was brilliant. Wolf writes three different tales with three different narrative strategies to create one cohesive book. At first the elements seem disjointed and only loosely connected, but everything came together in the end so perfectly. It was genius, and the synthesis of such variance into a whole couldn't be more appropriate of an "anthropological science fiction."

I give it three out of four stars.