The Shadow of the Torturer

Volume one of four in The Book of the New Sun. Severian is an apprentice in the guild of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence — torturers, plainly — on an Earth so far in the future that the sun is dying and the technology left over from earlier ages reads as magic. He breaks his guild’s rules, is expelled, and walks out of the city of Nessus, narrating the whole thing himself and not telling you everything.

Context: a16z put the whole series in its Fantasy section and called the prose “among the best ever written in sci-fi/fantasy,” describing the books as “kind of a puzzle by design” — far-future setting, medieval surface, technology never explained, narrator you cannot fully trust. Start here; the four volumes are one continuous story.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from; Fantasy section, Book of the New Sun series entry.
• Gene Wolfe — the author.
• The Claw of the Conciliator — volume two.
• The Sword of the Lictor — volume three.
• The Citadel of the Autarch — volume four.
• Science Fiction — the genre, though the series sits deliberately on its border with fantasy.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates the list.