Books like The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Three linked novellas set on twin colony worlds where the native people may have been shapeshifters, and where colonisers and colonised can no longer tell their own stories apart.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Embassytown
Avice Benner Cho grew up in Embassytown, a human outpost on Arieka, whose Hosts speak a language that cannot lie and can be addressed only by paired human Ambassadors. Back home after years away, she sees a new Ambassador arrive whom the Hosts respond to as never before.
Stations of the Tide
A bureaucrat pursues a shapeshifting rebel across a terraformed world where technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The Shadow of the Torturer
Severian, an apprentice in the guild of torturers on a far-future, dying Earth, is exiled for showing mercy to a prisoner, and begins the journey that opens The Book of the New Sun.
A Time of Changes
On the planet Borthan, where custom forbids anyone to say I or reveal the self, Kinnall Darival, an exiled prince, takes an Earth drug that lets minds merge, and sits down to write his autobiography.
The Martian Chronicles
Human colonists on Mars encounter the ghostly remnants of a dead civilisation, and the planet slowly remakes them in its image.
Lord of Light
A man who is also a god wages war on heaven using the stolen technology of the gods against them, in a far-future Hindu-Buddhist mythology.
The Word for World Is Forest
Human colonists on the forest world of Athshe log its trees and enslave its small, peaceful people, until one of them, Selver, learns to kill, in Le Guin's novella shaped by the Vietnam War.
Solaris
Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives at the research station hovering over the ocean planet Solaris to find one of its three scientists dead, the other two barely holding together, and people walking its corridors who should not be there.
Revelation Space
On Resurgam, a barely settled world, the archaeologist Dan Sylveste digs up evidence of the Amarantin, an alien race wiped out nine hundred thousand years ago, while a vast lighthugger crewed by cyborgs crosses the dark to find him.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Everyone who ever lived wakes up naked and young again on the banks of an endless river on an unknown world, and the explorer Richard Francis Burton sets out to find out who put them there.
A Case of Conscience
Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit biologist on a commission to the planet Lithia, finds an alien race living in perfect reason and goodness without any God, and decides it must be the Devil's work.
Dark Eden
On Eden, a sunless planet lit and warmed by glowing trees, the five hundred members of Family, all descended from two stranded humans, huddle in one valley waiting for rescue from Earth, until a teenager named John Redlantern decides to leave.