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Jan 11, 2012

Keely rated it:

Wolfe has an almost legendary status amongst fellow authors; Gaiman called him 'a ferocious intellect', Swanwick said he's "the greatest writer in the English language alive today", and Disch called this series "a tetralogy of couth, intelligence, and suavity".

You can rarely trust the popular market to single out good authors, but it's usually safe to listen to the opinions of other writers (especially an assemblage of Nebula and Hugo winners in their own right). More...

8 comments like (17 people liked it)

Jan 26, 2012

Dan rated it:

The Shadow of the Torturer: Apprentice torturer Severian shows mercy for an imprisoned woman and helps her commit suicide rather than endure weeks of torture. For his crimes, Severian is sentenced to travel too the village of Thrax and take up the post of carnifex. Will Severian make it to Thrax alive?

The Shadow of the Torturer isn't your grandmother's fantasy. The tale of Severian isn't the hopeful quest story that's been written and re-written umpteen times in the past fifty ye More...

1 comment like (32 people liked it)

Dec 26, 2011

Rob rated it:

My first pass through Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer/Claw of the Conciliator was summed up with a status update I made about two-thirds of the way through:

Flashes of brilliance between swaths of tedium.

I did not dislike the book, and I expect to re-read it and enjoy it even more some day; but it did not strike me thus. Not on this first reading.

Aerin said it well:

Reading these books is like trying to watch a foreign movie without subtitles -

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3 comments like (6 people liked it)

May 27, 2008

Bess rated it:

Update 5/26: finally finished. Man, this is an intense book. I was tempted to give up on it at various points because it's so thoroughly dick lit -- I mean, the hero carries around a sword that he unsheathes, oils, and re-sheaths routinely throughout his travels, and he sleeps with nearly every woman he encounters, but usually in the most patronizing way imaginable (there's actually an extremely painful, cringeworthy attempt at some sort of epiphanic look into the male psyche, wherein it is br More...

6 comments like (24 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Ross rated it:

Forming the first half of Gene Wolfe’s dying earth tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, Shadow and Claw collects the series’ first two books, Shadow of the Torturer and Claw of the Conciliator. The conceit of the The Book of the New Sun is fairly unique, presenting itself as Gene Wolfe’s translation (also the case with Wolfe’s Latro in the Mist) of a memoir from the far future, forming a sort of bildungsroman of a torturer’s apprentice named Severian (which sounds so much like Severin from Leopold More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 28, 2011

Lepton rated it:

Gene Wolfe is not a misgynoist??!!

Before all the sensitive types start in on Gene Wolfe's treatment of women in Shadow and Claw, I thought I would head off such criticisms by exploring women's freedom in Wolfe's Urth.

On Urth, women are:

1. Permitted to learn to read. There are actually a number of women in the narrative that not only can read but also can read and understand something akin to Latin. But, don't you dare call it Latin, because it's not. Gene Wolf More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 14, 2010

Aerin rated it:

When I was about halfway through the second part of this book, I started writing a review of it. Here's the first part of what I wrote:

Wow. I think I'm starting to get what all the big deal is about Gene Wolfe.

Claw of the Conciliator is Part Two of the alleged GREATEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL OF ALL TIME, The Book of the New Sun. Last month, I wrote a fairly negative review of Part One, The Shadow of the Torturer; I complained that it seemed pretty similar to most Hero

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6 comments like (24 people liked it)

Feb 23, 2011

Chris rated it:

Gene Wolfe, the poetically accented writer of intricate fantasy/science-fiction hybrids like this exquisite tetralogy, was inspired by that other pen-wielding magician Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth: Wolfe's series also takes place on a radically altered Earth in the far, far future when the Sun's fuel is running dangerously low. Amidst the wreckage of past civilizations lies the sprawling, endless city of Wolfe's protagonist torturer-apprentice Severian. Beginning as a gauzy, haunting bi More...

5 comments like (4 people liked it)

Apr 18, 2008

Agnieszka rated it:

My three favorite novels in the world are Dune by Frank Herbert, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, and The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. I bet that many of you have read, and many more have heard of, the first two, but I wonder how many have read the last. The Book of the New Sun is less accessible than The Name of the Rose and weirder than Dune. The mind-bending future world, where the sun is so close to dead that you can see the stars in the daytime, is on par with Dune in its richness More...

1 comment like (8 people liked it)

Mar 16, 2011

John rated it:

This is a handy volume, with the first two books of the series together. That's especially useful to someone new to Gene Wolfe since the first book (Shadow of the Torturer) does very little to establish a plotline and ends extremely abruptly. Your curiousity for what happened after the end is sated by flipping over to the second book (Claw of the Conciliator), which does more with plotlines, though it is still a wildly tangential book. This is not a plot-hound's series. It's not even a particula More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

Feb 11, 2008

Tt rated it:

This is the book that I saved the five stars for. Because I have never read anything that compares to this (except the sequels), and probably never will.

Wolfe is in a class of his own. The writing, the imagination, the world, the events, the characters, everything is beyond anything I have ever encountered in literature. So many times was I left with total amazement at the vistas Wolfe reveals, or the events he portrays. Reading this is full of the purest sense of wonder, the joy of More...

1 comment like (5 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Chris added it

I just couldn't finish it, and I don't know why! I made it through Dhalgren, often declared the most unreadable sci-fi novel ever; I made it through every one of M. John Harrison's Viraconium books, even when it felt like I was slogging waist deep through a bog of words; and yet somehow I just couldn't stay interested in this meandering, surrealistic plot.

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jul 01, 2009

Henrik rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

5 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2008

Christopher rated it:

Gene Wolfe's four-volume Book of the New Sun must rank among the finest works of literature of the past quarter-century. SHADOW AND CLAW is an omnibus consisting of the first half, the volumes THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER and THE CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR.

The Book of the New Sun is shelved among science-fiction, but it is much more. Wolfe draws on Christianity, the works of J.L. Borges, medieval morality plays, and a thousand elements of "Spritus Mundi." It is essentially a Chr More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Sep 22, 2007

Michael rated it:

(reviewing this edition for book club purposes; the main entry is under the omnibus volume)

Neil Gaiman has called Wolfe the "greatest living fantasy writer" and I for one agree with him. I have read through Wolfe's New Sun sequence twice and haven't come close to truly appreciating all of the many layers to the story and the world therein. This edition comprises the first two books of the sequence, _The Shadow of the Torturer_ and _The Claw of the Conciliator_. This is the More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jun 10, 2008

Grace rated it:

I must say that when I picked up the book I was not expecting this. Assasin's guild sounds interesting, but it was the worst book I have ever read.
The world Gene Wolf created is great, but the characters...Bleck. Severian is just this random kid who falls in love with every single woman he sees; I though it was so stupid that I continued on with the story. Now, I don't know why I wasted my time.
What was with the greenhouse that took up most of the book? And the flower to fight peopl More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2009

Zinta rated it:

Science fiction and fantasy are literary genres that I doubt will ever rank among my favorites. However, I am always open to a stretch from my usual reading fare, so when a bookish colleague stated with impassioned conviction - "this is the best book I've ever read!" - I had to peer inside the covers of "Shadow & Claw".

Gene Wolfe is inarguably a highly skilled and richly talented author. I had already read Wolfe's "There Are Doors" and was decidedly und More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 11, 2008

tim rated it:

First off, I always seem to have to defend my choice of science fiction reads from the judgment of my friends, especially my wife. And then I always explain that the best science fiction is all about the satire or parable of current real life -- and this one does it in a way that I have not seen in SF in a long time. It is subtle. After reading far too many SF books that are so overly blatant in their imagery and so unimaginatively formulaic (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, the Dark Tower, e More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 02, 2007

K rated it:

Collects Shadow of the Torturer and Claw of the Conciliator, the first two volumes in Gene Wolfe's four book series, The Book of the New Sun. First person narrator, Severian, recalls his life starting from the time he was a youth growing up in the Guild of Torturers, to when he's exiled for showing mercy to a prisoner, and the people he meets and adventures he has as he travels to the hinterlands.

This might be my first fantasy book(s) that does not have widespread readership among More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 11, 2009

Carl rated it:

Have now finished this first volume (two novels) in the New Sun series of Wolfe's-- great stuff! Well, you have to be someone who doesn't need to be catered to. I notice that with a lot of Wolfes' books those who don't like them complain about them being hard to get into, dragging, not going anywhere, that sort of thing-- but I think we can attribute this to different kinds of reading, the sort of which CS Lewis talks about in his Experiment in Criticism, if I remember correctly-- I believe it More...

10 comments like

May 28, 2008

Katie rated it:

Gene Wolfe is a great fantasy writer. Given that so much of the genre is neat ideas with poor writing and good writers often don't venture into such a stigmatized genre, Wolfe is a great combination.
Wolfe has lots of neat ideas and expresses them with a literary style (and more than a little literary pretention, which I felt actually added to the book) that is quite unusual and refreshing. The ideas are pretty great too; reading the beginning, you think this is pretty crazy. But great! An More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 26, 2008

Tami rated it:

The book is gorgeously written, and the prose pretty intense... Yet, somewhere between symbolism, philosophical meanderings, and interpersonal musings of the main character, the plot on this became intensely difficult to follow. I found myself having to read and re-read certain passages because I wasn't quite sure how the scene had changed. I know that's in part due to the entire story being a (fairly linear) series of recollections by the torturer Severian, but sometimes it felt more than a More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 06, 2011

Terry rated it:

Shadow and Claw packages The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator which are books 1 and 2 of The Book of the New Sun.

I had heard vague rumours about the science fiction author Gene Wolfe and heard writers, whom I very much admire, referring to his work at Worldcon 2009. But I didn’t do anything about it until after I joined an online SF writing critique site where I was made curious about the background of one of the critiquers. The site that gained my attention was f More...

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Jul 23, 2011

Poopoo rated it:

Well. This is a damn hard book to review. I'm not sure I can even try to be objective here, because Wolfe... defies objectivity. This is not necessarily a good thing.

Set on Earth, millions of years in the future under the red light of a dying sun, Book of the New Sun chronicles the journey of Severian, a charming young multiple rapist apprenticed to the equally charming Guild of Torturers. Severian encounters the rebel Vodalus, who seeks to restore "Urth" to the glory of i More...

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Sep 16, 2010

Parksy rated it:

Very creative world, really indepth. you have to really pay attention when you read. Very cool.

Amazon.com
One of the most acclaimed "science fantasies" ever, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is a long, magical novel in four volumes. Shadow & Claw contains the first two: The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, which respectively won the World Fantasy and Nebula Awards.

This is the first-person narrative of Severian, a lowly apprentice More...

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Jun 20, 2010

Cyfyguy rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Apr 10, 2010

Aaron rated it:

This is the first half (two books) of The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe. What can I say about this that hasn't already been said by others, and with more eloquence? A masterpiece, plain and simple, this is the story of Severian, apprentice torturer in a guild called the "Seekers for Truth and Penitence". It unfolds on the planet Urth, our Earth a million or so years in the future.
Told in first-person by Severian, this work is rich with allusions, puzzles, and m More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 14, 2009

Tama rated it:

This rather weighty volume of nearly 500 pages is a collection of the first two volumes of the Book of the New Sun being Shadow of the Torturer, and Claw of the Concilliator. I can't remember where I read about this series, but it was mentioned in the same breath as Lord of the Rings, and other landmark fantasy novels. But I'd not heard of it, curious.

Essentially, this series is set millions of years into Earths future, so far ahead in fact that the setting has become fantasy. It fol More...

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Jun 23, 2009

Bovineinversus rated it:

Simply fantastic. The whole series is great. Wolfe is like the Nabokov of science fiction writers. Nothing in the book is as it seems. Clues are dropped everywhere (in random, seemingly casual phrases; in the chapter titles; in the names of the characters).
The book is narrated by a member of a torturer's guild set in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic Earth. Despite claims to the possession of a highly developed memory, the narrator (Severian, aptly named) is somewhat unreliable. Major ev More...

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Dec 13, 2011

Kevin rated it:

These books are beautifully dense with cryptic, ornate symbolism. They're not quick, easy reads - most of the time you have no idea where the plot is going, even the narrators hardly ever understand what's happening around them (sometimes lying to the reader), and the slew of semi-invented vocabulary further muddles these wonderfully catastrophic books.

At length the golden autumn wore away, and Winter came stalking into the land from his frozen capital, where the sun rolls along the edge

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