The whole series may turn out to be only another quest-story got up with metaphysical trappings this first installment, however, certainly has its strengths-and we'll hope for the best. until he falls in love with one of his victims, a. Wolfe, who has seldom failed to tell a good story with tantalizing intelligence, is in characteristic form here, investing banal materials with elliptical intimations of portent but somehow this vein seems hollower in a long narrative than in his many splendid short stories and novellas. Severian is a torturer, born to the guild and with an exceptionally promising career ahead of him. The apprentice Severian of the Torturers' Guild, exiled for helping a noble prisoner to kill herself before the completion of her sentence, is setting out for a new appointment in a distant city when the mysterious sword he carries precipitates him into a duel waged with poisonous extraterrestrial weapons at the same time he comes into possession of a strange jewel (to be the subject of the second book).

Exiled, he begins his phantasmagoric odyssey through the perilous world of the deep, distant future. In the great Citadel of the City Imperishable, Severian - apprentice to the torturers guild - betrays his oath. Under a strictly maintained oligarchy whose precise nature is never very clear, various ancient guilds in an immense ''Citadel'' somewhere in the erstwhile South America piously attend the still-functioning machines of a legendary interstellar civilization. The first volume of The Book of the New Sun. I picked it up not knowing anything about it, intrigued as much as anything by the fact that even though it was called science fiction it had a cover that looked like a fantasy novel: a masked and.

The first volume of a projected tetralogy set on a wintry post-technological Earth beneath a dying sun.

The shadow of the torturer review