Reviews of The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) and related work
- Sequel: The Claw of the Conciliator (1981)
- Sequel: The Sword of the Lictor (1982)
- Spin-off: “The Cat” (1983)
- Sequel: The Citadel of the Autarch (1983)
- Spin-off: “The Map” (1984)
- Sequel: The Urth of the New Sun (1987)
- Spin-off: Nightside: The Long Sun (1993)
- Sequel: Lake of the Long Sun (1994)
- Sequel: Caldé of the Long Sun (1994)
- Sequel: Exodus from the Long Sun (1996)
The Shadow of the Torturer (1980
)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2020.
There’s some of Jack Vance’s sterile and ostentatious pageantry in here, and some of mainstream pseudo-medieval fantasy’s sexism, with one hot woman after another chasing Severian, the incurious protagonist. He has little to recommend him beyond a rudimentary conscience and a gruesome skill set that seems designed to appeal to brooding teenagers.
Wolfe’s perspective on more ordinary people is similarly dark. The city of Nessus is full of poison, decay and greed, with people clinging to largely meaningless traditions in service to a corrupt and absent government. There’s a contrast to this cynicism from the very beginning, in Vodalus the revolutionary, followed by a few humble folk like Jolenta shining a light on social problems that seem ultimately fixable rather than comfortingly static. It turns out, later in the series, that Vodalus is doomed and the authority of the Autarch is vindicated rather than challenged, so that the social problems are actually static, but Wolfe is careful to modulate the cynicism of the ultimate conclusions.
Perhaps this was one of the first books to learn from the ideas of Dhalgren (1975). Wolfe does a good job keeping the world and story coherent and reasonably deep, rejecting Delany’s hollowness but keeping some of his darkly organic playfulness. Wolfe is a less typical poet but uses entertaining neologisms a cut above the genre standard. His diction is easy to like, with frequent unexpected turns of phrase that fit right in, instead of trying to jar the reader as Delany did. The city library, which is built like a reified memory palace, is a weird and striking image, just the right mix of literary symbolism and worldbuilding. As an example of science fantasy, The Shadow of the Torturer is lacking in extrapolation but solidly crafted. It has all the emotional appeal of Elric of Melniboné with a stronger sense of internal logic, which is a fine thing.
‣ The Claw of the Conciliator (1981)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2023.
Continuing to ply his trade and bed beautiful women, Severian travels from the city to the House Absolute.
The first book is a fantasy in an urban setting, but it’s not an urban fantasy in the composite sense of Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), where fantasy creatures are added to modern everyday settings with real-world place names. This second book, with its rural setting, feels more typical for the epic fantasy genre of its time. It reminds me especially of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which started with Lord Foul’s Bane (1977). Severian remains dark and brooding like Donaldson’s anti-hero, but acquires more Jesus-like powers, which is a bad sign. His challenges, which were institutional and interesting in the first book, are replaced by rather vulgar villains and disconnected monsters that read as if a GM rolled 1d100. Wolfe still manages some interesting ideas and turns of phrase, but nothing striking. It’s obvious by this point that the setting is only 2% science fiction and 98% fantasy, built around mythopoeically suggestive set pieces like a giant undine.
‣ The Sword of the Lictor (1982)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2023.
Severian serves as the resident executioner and Master of Chains of the city of Thrax. After the horrors of his work drive his lover, Dorcas, into a deep depression, he goes back on the long road.
Less sex—though not zero—and more operatic worldbuilding. The geography becomes more important as Severian approaches the equator in his picaresque travels. He encounters an old dictator who provides a fun view of history, and the mystery of Dr. Talos is resolved, which qualifies as plot progression. Severian starts feeling chosen to wear the claw which, given the magical powers of that item, aligns the main character with the Christian figure of Jesus. This alignment was deliberate on the writer’s part, and perversely funny because Severian works as a torturer, while Jesus was tortured. Wolfe’s angle on that is that the mythical Jesus was a carpenter, killed on a cross, a product of carpentry. Unsurprisingly, Severian suffers increasing torments of his own on the hero’s journey.
‣ “The Cat” (1983)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2025.
Read in the collection Endangered Species (1989).
There’s an interesting kernel here, not connected to the cat but to the pornography-adjacent male gaze of secondary-world genre fantasy. Wolfe doesn’t quite work it out.
‣ The Citadel of the Autarch (1983)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2023.
Still starving, Severian walks out of his second-to-last encounter with Dr. Talos into the equatorial war between his country and the Ascians of far-future North America.
This book was an unexpected delight. At first it seems like a very low-power coda at the tail end of Severian’s quest, including days of inactive chit-chat in a field hospital, and the returning of the Claw to the order of nuns. Then it walks through the stereotypical climax event of any major genre fantasy, which is a war, but Wolfe doesn’t stop there. Out of the stereotypical climax, Wolfe pulls the real climax, weird and wonderful, like the true claw inside the gem that Severian carried. The main character is promoted to Autarch by consensual cannibalism, ascending to a plane of Dune-like intrigue, gaining a pleasing overview of the setting. The language is more beautiful, Ascian sociology is fun, the loose ends are tied up as promised; it’s all better than I expected. The only obvious blemish is a fantasy sequence in chapter 21 where Severian reimagines all the hot women he’s met as warrior women; that fantasy is Wolfe’s own.
References here: “Darmok” (1991).
‣ “The Map” (1984)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2025.
Read in the collection Endangered Species (1989).
A man looking for a partner pays for a trip.
Severian’s head is on the currency and Eata the boatsman is an old friend of his, but this story is just a short dip back into a familiar world; it’s of no particular significance.
‣ The Urth of the New Sun (1987)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2024.
Final judgement, apocalypse, and good cups of mate.
The opening chapters, before Severian’s return to Earth/Urth/Ushas, are the strongest. From them, Wolfe turns away from the larger universe and toward revisiting familiar people and places, with very little plot, character, or real answers.
‣ Nightside: The Long Sun (1993)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2025.
23-year-old Silk is a priest specializing in animal sacrifice at a polytheistic temple in a poor neighbourhood. Silk seems pious and diligent, living by the dictum that the best way to earn trust is to be honest. However, when Silk’s temple defaults on its taxes and is bought by the criminal captain of a local kingpin, it takes only two days for the desparate young man to sacrifice his own virtue.
This is the first book in a spin-off series called The Book of the Long Sun. It requires no prior knowledge of the setting. This first entry is a strong textbook example of 1990s “speculative fiction”, blending familiar motifs from fantasy and science fiction with a bourgeois novel of character development.
As in Count Zero (1986) and many other books, it is computer technology that gets conflated with divinity. This does not happen in the manner of “The Last Question” (1956), but rather as charlatanry: Gods, identified vaguely as founders of the generational ship, appear unreliably on video screens through “sacred” cables, and live in a “mainframe”.
Thankfully, Wolfe nails the foreground character portrait. Silk, the main focalizer, has the self-critical yet grasping personality of a medieval Catholic priest. His sincerity, in a society where sincerity is otherwise lacking, is a consistently touching contrast to Severian. Silk’s polytheism is not a broad satire of ancient Christianity, but a surprisingly credible analog of ancient belief systems from pre-Yahwist Canaan to the Roman Republic. In the scene of a formal exorcism apparently interrupted by a god, Wolfe is careful to note how Silk studies and uses the crowd, exactly as a real priest would, whether gods were real or not.
The worldbuilding is sketchy thus far, not unpleasant but unoriginal and marred by puns presented as etymological developments from the reader’s time, to cultivate a sense of the fantasy genre’s familiarity. Other cities on the same ship dot the sky in Viron, the environs of the story. The ship is known to its denizens as the whorl, or the Whorl; that is, the world. Silk’s title is “Patera” and his sibyls’ is “Maytera”, from the Latin for father and mother, and so on.
‣‣ Lake of the Long Sun (1994)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2025.
Silk investigates an island in the Lake of Limna.
Old Jack Vance’s hand is heavy on this novel. Silk kills, using the authorial conceit of self-defence, but it still bothers him. He’s now caught up in a clearly Campbellian adventure, still limited to the span of a few days, where the underground section of Campbell’s wheel turns out to be a literally submarine base of the local oligarchy, in a lake, on a giant O’Neill cylinder of sorts where the “long” sun is a pillar of artificial light that runs through the main chamber and where tunnels are dug into “shiprock”. It’s a fun set piece, but Wolfe does not write the action of the climax well. He also seems surprisingly disinterested as he begins pulling away the curtain to reveal a series of Great Hackers of Oz in the place of the gods. The male gaze on the women does not improve, despite the promise of a peripheral matriarchy.
‣‣ Caldé of the Long Sun (1994)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2026.
Shortly before Silk’s return to the city, his raging popularity as a prophet and presumptive religious leader (“caldé”) has overfilled his temple. The two remaining sibyls of that temple lead a ritual of animal sacrifice that sends the people to war.
The science-fantasy worldbuilding hinted at in the first volumes is solidified and pans out well. It leans heavier on the side of science fiction than The Book of the New Sun, as The Shadow of the Torturer and its direct sequels are called. The criminal Blood explains himself, which includes an explanation of Mucor. Before that, Quetzal, the clerical head of the religion and its de-facto leader in the absence of a caldé, explains a lot, including why there hasn’t been a known caldé for a while, and confirms the murder of Pas. Some more light even shines on the physical economy, where military vehicles run on fish oil because the world is artificial and has no fossil exergy, like Ringworld (1970).
Wolfe uses the worldbuilding to explain why his character writing often borders on archetype, with results that are interesting but ambiguous. The opening above-ground scene, in particular, is very strong: Shy little Maytera Mint has to take charge of the situation, and through some combination of stress, the receptive crowd, Maytera Rose’s personality, the influence of the false gods, and her own strengths, she does. Auk is a brute who cannot even remember the primary epithet of Tartarus, but who nonetheless becomes that god’s prophet. Oreb the bird provides comic relief for both Auk and Silk. The male-gaze sexism is still there and some of the mystery is inseparable from the author’s convenience, but it works.
References here: Blame (1997).
‣‣ Exodus from the Long Sun (1996)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2026.
Finally letting more time pass, Wolfe attempts a sfnal rug-pull ending with the sudden disappearance of the protagonist after a time skip and an apology by the intradiegetic narrator. I don’t mind having some mysteries left to the third (Short Sun) sub-series of his “Solar Cycle”, and I don’t mind the fragmentary plot of the ending, but we’re left with only commonplace SF motifs (the generational ship, the colonization of sinister exoplanets, the digitization of personalities, big guns, etc.) mixed with commonplace fantasy motifs, including the religion, still with no effective link between them.
I am glad to be rid of the random capital-R Romanticisms of the New Sun, but my impression from the first book, of unoriginal worldbuilding, still stands. The character writing is still good, but there is no drama here like that of Mint’s development.