Some Thoughts on Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer

I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna go right ahead. My efforts to introduce game criticism tropes into literary criticism (i.e. me talking nonsense about what I read recently) are finally gonna pay off.

Here it goes.

I read Shadow of the Torturer, and it’s the Dark Souls of Science Fantasy novels.

*sirens*

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My only other experience of Gene Wolfe so far has been his story in Again, Dangerous Visions called Mathoms From the Time Closet. It was, like most of the other stories in that collection, totally bizarre even for my tastes, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it or him. I’d heard good things about The Book of the New Sun and a chance encounter at the library sealed it. Maybe I’d enjoy this slightly more straightforward Wolfe that gets talked about in the same breath as Tolkien?

Yes, oh yes.

Not really straightforward though. The story, at least in the first novel, follows a pretty simple thread encompassing Severian the Torturer, the incident that gets him exiled from his guild, and the adventures he goes on after the fact. I am fully expecting the scope to widen, but this first novel is a little bit like the first section of Final Fantasy 7. The city is huge and seems like it’ll encompass everything, and it only makes the world seem larger when you find out the city has limits. The wrinkle is in the sheer amount of neologisms. As far as I can tell, this novel is set on our “Urth”, but millions of years in the future, and they’ve forgotten more than we’ve ever known as they kind of looped around to a setting that is like medieval Europe with the odd hover car? I think? It’s tough to tell sometimes. Sometimes I get a grasp on something and realise that oh, I know what this thing is, it just has a completely different name. Other things, like the alien Avern plants, have no real correlation with our reality. The inclusion of all this exogenical stuff adds a sense of mystery and wonder to every sentence. It’s just excellent world building. I am hoping I learn the origins of these things, but even if I don’t, my mind will have something to work with.

I tried to put my finger on that feeling for the first hundred or so pages, that disconnect between a medieval setting that’s familiar in western literature, and the sense of strangeness introduced by making it a place where people have forgotten much of history, and even things we the reader recognises are treated as strange by the inhabitants of the world. And I realised that I got this feeling playing Dark Souls.

Lordran is a world which is dying while the new world struggles to be born and the way that friction is obfuscated and fed to the player in drips and drabs makes it just utterly compelling as a setting, disregarding any of the (also excellent) mechanical stuff that people love about that game. Apart from Dark Souls, I think only Fallout has succeeded in having a setting rich enough to spawn its own cottage industry of YouTube analysis and explainer videos.

Wolfe does the obscuring in a slightly different way, but the effect is the same. He does have some fun with it. Severian’s sword is given a Latin name, Terminus Est. Wolfe helpfully explains that the sword isn’t really named in Latin, because these people have forgotten that Latin was ever a thing. No, it was named in some language that is equivalently dead to them as Latin is to us, and he translates it to us in Latin to produce the same effect.

A damn fine novel. I won’t talk about story too much because I really wanna read some of the other before I give any thoughts, but I was struck forcefully by the setting and the way it was presented and wanted to discuss that vibe, because that vibe is real chef’s kiss.

I haven’t read too many dying earth stories before this. I was only somewhat aware it was a genre. I’ve heard A Fire Upon the Deep mentioned in that vein before. They’re on my list. If you can think of anything similar you’d like to recommend, please let me know, because I get the feeling this is going to become a favourite subgenre of mine.