Did you warner-offers find it irritating? I really enjoyed it.Īlso, while The Shadow of the Torturer won the World fantasy award in 1981 and has the trappings of fantasy (young man, long sword, mysterious destiny), surely it's really science fiction? Set a million years in the future on a world with a dying sun, where the moon is green and irrigated, daylight is red, and 'rotting jungles' circle 'the waist of the world', it follows the story of Severian, a torturer in the decaying Citadel who shows mercy to a prisoner he's fallen in love with. But I found this all added to the other-ness of the world Wolfe has created I didn't exactly understand some words until I looked them up but I knew what he meant by them, and I loved his 'note on translation' at the end of the first book, when he tells us how he went about 'rendering this book - originally composed in a tongue that has not yet achieved existence – into English'. Yes, there's plenty of odd words – 'fuligin' for black, 'carnifex' for torturer, 'destriers', which are sort of super-horses. I imagined that I'd be glooping along through olde worlde syntax, but Wolfe isn't like that at all.

A few of you (JamesWMoar, MaxCairnduff, RobKill, AddisonSteele) had warned me not to tackle Wolfe while I was still reeling from the intense Elizabethan-style English of The Worm Ouroboros (or his 'linguistic porridge', as AddisonSteele put it – true, but I do like porridge).

Shadow of the torturer review