The Dispossessed
Hugo, Nebula and Locus winner; the standard against which all political SF is measured, taught in politics departments as readily as literature ones.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Fifth Head of Cerberus about?
Three novellas, one planet-pair, every certainty optional. On Sainte Croix, a boy in a brothel-mansion discovers why his father's experiments concern him so intimately; in the second panel, an anthropologist's romance of the shapeshifting aborigines of Sainte Anne may be myth, memoir or camouflage; in the third, an officer shuffles the prison file of a man who may be that anthropologist, his son, or one of the aborigines who — if they ever existed — could imitate humans perfectly. The colonial question (did the settlers exterminate the natives, or become them?) is also the book's method: identity as an unreliable document.
Why it matters
Wolfe's first masterpiece and the standard demonstration text for unreliable narration in SF; its post-colonial hall of mirrors anticipated discussions the field took decades to catch up with.
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Downward to the Earth
Widely rated among the finest SF novels about colonialism; its sacramental aliens and penitent imperialist predate (and arguably outclass) several famous successors, Avatar included.
Behold the Man
Nebula winner and the New Wave's most notorious provocation: time-travel paradox as theology, handled with a seriousness that outlasted the scandal.