Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'
One of the most acclaimed "science fantasies" ever, Gene Wolfe'sThe  Book of the New Sunis a long, magical novel in four volumes.Shadow &  Clawcontains the first two:The Shadow of the TorturerandThe  Claw of the Conciliator, which respectively won the World Fantasy and Nebula  Awards.This is the first-person narrative of Severian, a lowly apprentice torturer  blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through  the marvels of far-future Urth, and who--as revealed near the  beginning--eventually becomes his land's sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it's a  colorful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex,  betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters, and mysteries to be solved. (Only  well into book 2 do we realize what saved Severian's life in chapter 1.) For  lovers of literary allusions, they are plenty here: a Dickensian cemetery  scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges, and  familiar fables changed by eons of retelling. Wolfe evokes a chilly sense of  time's vastness, with an age-old, much-restored painting of a golden-visored  "knight," really an astronaut standing on the moon, and an ancient citadel of  metal towers, actually grounded spacecraft. Even the sun is senile and dying, and  so Urth needs a new sun.The Book of the New Sunis almost heartbreakingly good, full of riches  and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece.--David Langford, Amazon.co.uk