One writer who has not neglected cultural variables in his flights of fancy is Gene Wolfe, whose The Fifth Head of Cerberus … draws great power from a deceptively simple device: the original settlers on his twin planets of Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne were French, not American. The societies that they founded are deliciously decadent, in a manner reminiscent of the French Algeria depicted by Camus….

Wolfe's prose is appropriately resonant, hinting at layers of meaning behind each apparently straightforward statement of fact. The reader who falls under Wolfe's spell soon learns to be as wary as the principal characters, who live in a culture where every "truth" is suspect because every "truth-teller" has something to conceal, for personal or political reasons. Under such circumstances, the search for self-knowledge—difficult at best—becomes truly heroic. Within a beautifully realized science-fiction setting, Wolfe shows what happens to those who...