The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) by Gene Wolfe

The Book Of the New Sun Volume 1: The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) by Gene Wolfe: Nearly 40 years on, The Shadow of the Torturer retains the power to startle with its virtuoso use of language and its detailed world creation. 

The Book Of the New Sun belongs to a relatively small but robust sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy set uncounted millions upon millions of years into the future of Earth, a time so remote that some of the beaches of this Earth are a rainbow of particles, the atomized remnants of the coloured glass bottles of our era. 

Wolfe's possible influences from this sub-genre include William Hope Hodgson's early 20th-century The Night Land, Clark Ashton Smith's 1930's tales of Zothique, and Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories that began in the 1950's. Those who would follow Wolfe into these strange lands would include Michael Shea in his 1980's tales of Nifft the Lean and China Mieville with the far-future Earth of Railsea and even the mysterious, probably non-Terran landscapes of Perdido Street Station and its sequels.

Such stories often nod to Arthur C. Clarke's Law -- any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Hence the tendency to call such stories 'science fantasy.' Are the monsters actually the product of genetic engineering? Are the demons advanced aliens? And so on, and so forth.

This first novel of the tetralogy introduces us to young Severian, a member of the Guild of Torturers on the cusp of his elevation beyond the level of apprentice. We're shown his boyhood in the mostly deserted grounds of the once-thriving complex of the Torturers. All this occurs within the walls of the gigantic capital city of this world, whose walls reach the clouds.

Things change, of course, and a choice made by Severian sends him on his path beyond the Torturers' demesne and into that wider but still enclosed world of the city. He is to pass beyond the city's gates, but the sheer scale of the city will make that passage the odyssey of this first novel.

Wolfe masterfully summons sympathy for Severian, in part by having Severian tell his story from some remote future point, a sort of Great Expectations at the end of time. Severian's world is overflowing with strange and interesting characters, creatures, objects, and events. This is world-building on a massive scale, but world-building that always keeps its eye on the inhabitants of that world.

The Book Of the New Sun isn't an easy read. Wolfe offers a cascade of odd and offbeat and often archaic nouns to name the various oddities of this world at the end of time. It's a bit of a riff on the wild naming practices of Clark Ashton Smith and his stories of Earth's last continent Zothique. Regardless of how big your dictionary is, the names and nouns will soon flow smoothly through your consciousness. Part of Wolfe's magic here is to make the reader comfortably uncomfortable with the world of the far future. Highly recommended.

Book 'em, Cthulhu

The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (2011), containing:

Caitlin R. Kiernan - Andromeda among the Stones
Ramsey Campbell - The Tugging
Charles Stross - A Colder War
Bruce Sterling - The Unthinkable
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Flash Frame
W. H. Pugmire - Some Buried Memory
Molly Tanzer - The Infernal History of the Ivybridge Twins
Michael Shea - Fat Face
Elizabeth Bear - Shoggoths in Bloom
T. E. D. Klein - Black Man With A Horn
David Drake - Than Curse the Darkness
Charles R. Saunders - Jeroboam Henley's Debt
Thomas Ligotti - Nethescurial
Kage Baker - Calamari Curls
Edward Morris - Jihad over Innsmouth
Cherie Priest - Bad Sushi
John Hornor Jacobs - The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
Brian McNaughton - The Doom that Came to Innsmouth
Ann K. Schwader - Lost Stars
Steve Duffy - The Oram County Whoosit
Joe R. Lansdale - The Crawling Sky
Brian Lumley - The Fairground Horror
Tim Pratt - Cinderlands
Gene Wolfe - Lord of the Land
Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. - To Live and Die in Arkham
John Langan - The Shallows
Laird Barron - The Men from Porlock

An excellent anthology of mostly reprinted Lovecraftian stories, all of them dating from 1976 onwards. The Book of Cthulhu is quite heavy on 21st-century Cthulhuiana, which is fine -- most of the stories are excellent, several are harrowing, and many come from relatively small-press magazines and anthologies I would otherwise not have encountered.

There's some thematic grouping here, noticeable from the titles of what I call the Innsmouth Dining section (starting with "Calamari Curls" and running through "The Doom that Came to Innsmouth"), but also apparent in sections devoted to shoggoths, historical Lovecraft, and invasion from space and other dimensions.

The original-to-this-anthology concluding story, Laird Barron's "The Men from Porlock" (Google the title -- it's a literary reference), is one hell of a capper; standouts from writers other than the old reliables like Ramsey Campbell, David Drake, Joe Lansdale, Caitlin Kiernan, TED Klein, and Michael Shea include "Cinderlands", "Flash Frame", "The Oram County Whoosit", "The Shallows", "Bad Sushi" and "A Colder War." Editor Ross Lockhart does a splendid job of selecting a very broad range of approaches to Lovecraftian themes and variations.

Many stories specifically reference the Cthulhu Mythos not at all, instead building upon what Ramsey Campbell has called the first principles of Lovecraft's approach to horror -- the accumulation of telling, often quasi-documentarian detail in service to an overarching concern with the sublimely horrific. Lovecraft's children include all those 'found footage' horror movies currently dominating the marketplace, and stories like "The Oram County Whoosit" present a similar approach, one that's both contemporary and emergent from similar Lovecraftian constructions like "The Colour Out of Space" or "The Whisperer in Darkness."

But we also get some brilliant new takes on familiar themes and creatures in "Shoggoths in Bloom" and "A Colder War", both of which provide a fascinating blend of the Mythos and a fairly 'hard' science fictional approach. The shoggoths in bloom become surprisingly sympathetic; the shoggoths in Michael Shea's nauseating (in a good way) "Fat Face" really aren't sympathetic at all -- but the humans may be worse. A nice juxtaposition of stories using everybody's favourite freight-train-car-sized slaves of the Great Old Ones.

I could quibble with the selection of the stories from some of the writers (I'd pick Gene Wolfe's "The Tree is my Hat" over the already-reprinted "Lord of the Land", which has a somewhat clunky exposition section towards the end; the Lumley story is too much of an early, Lovecraftian pastiche from a writer who improved remarkably over his long career). I could quibble with the selection of some of the stories, though there's really only one clunker here. I will quibble with the copy editing, which is strangely awful in a handful of stories and perfectly fine in others. Weird!!! Highly recommended.

Unnerved

New Terrors I, edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980; 1982), containing the following stories:

The Stains by Robert Aickman; City Fishing by Steve Rasnic Tem; Yare by Manly Wade Wellman; A Room With a Vie by Tanith Lee; Tissue by Marc Laidlaw; Without Rhyme or Reason by Peter Valentine Timlett; Love Me Tender by Bob Shaw; Kevin Malone by Gene Wolfe; Chicken Soup by Kit Reed; The Pursuer by James Wade; The Spot by Dennis Etchison and Mark Johnson; The Gingerbread House by Cherry Wilder; .220 Swift by Karl Edward Wagner; The Fit by Ramsey Campbell; and Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game by Stephen King.

　

American paperback cutdown of Campbell's massive British anthology of new horror stories. Pocket Books seemed to be keeping one eye on the bottom line, so the limited page count in this and the subsequent volume caused several novelettes from the British anthology to be left out of the two American volumes. So it goes.

The stories are mostly excellent. The late, great Robert Aickman's novelette dominates the anthology -- it's weird and unnerving and inexplicable in that peculiar Aickman way that seems to be some odd combination of Franz Kafka and M.R. James. Gene Wolfe, Campbell himself and Karl Edward Wagner all contribute solid, disparate stories. Wolfe's echoes Shirley Jackson and Edith Wharton. Wagner's novelette feels like a novel that's collapsed into itself -- it needs more length to avoid the sudden narrative shifts and jumps that threaten to completely undo suspension of disbelief, but it ultimately holds together.

Dennis Etchison supplies a story that could be held up as an exemplar of Etchison's dry, allusive work about the assorted weirdnesses of Los Angeles life. Tanith Lee supplies a less dire, funnier story than I'm used to from her, about a very oddly haunted hotel room.

And there's Stephen King's surreal little gem "Big Wheels: A Tale of the Laundry Game," which Campbell cites as King's strangest story circa 1980 and which remains so circa 2011. All in all, a fine anthology (or at least part of one), and a testament to Campbell's underrated excellence as an anthologist. Highly recommended.

Man-eating Toilets and Flowers with Faces

Novels:

Irrational Fears by William Browning Spencer (1998): I can't think of many funny, sad novels involving Alcoholics Anonymous, a thinly veiled Church of Scientology, and the dangers of thinking H.P. Lovecraft was writing fact rather than fiction, but this would be one such novel. An organization called The Clear (cue Scientology alarm whistle -- 'becoming clear' is a major catchphrase in Scientology) has taken it upon itself to try to discredit Alcoholics Anonymous by advancing the 'theory' that alcohol and drug addiction are actually the result of a transferable psychic curse cast upon certain humans by dark alien gods.

The Clear is actually a front for one man's completely bizarre obsession with discrediting and destroying AA while also perhaps bringing about global armageddon as well. Much of The Clear's mythology is lifted wholesale from the H.P. Lovecraft revision "The Mound", which appears in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, a Lovecraft collection I reviewed about a month ago. It's amazing how these things come together!

The mythology I'm referring to above is the monster stuff and not the AA stuff. HP Lovecraft did not write stories about aliens causing alcoholism.

In any event, an oddball assortment of AA members that includes a fallen American Literature professor, an angry old coot who's been sober for 68 years and a late middle-aged man who may actually be some sort of retired US secret agent come together to try to figure out what The Clear is up to, and how to stop it before it plunges the U.S. into telepathically induced anarchy.

Irrational Fears is pretty much its own book, though Spencer certainly shares certain traits with Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut. A previous novel, Resume with Monsters, managed to suggest The Cthulhu Mythos meets The Office, an impressive feat given that The Office was still several years in the future when that novel came out in 1995. Highly recommended.


The Shadow of the Torturer (Part One of The Book of the New Sun) by Gene Wolfe (1980): Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy is probably the most critically praised science fiction or fantasy series of the last 30 years, both in genre circles and in the mainstream press. Set so far into the future that technology has become, in some cases, indistinguishable from magic, the series ends up being somewhat unclassifiable. 'Science fiction', 'fantasy' or that handy hybrid 'science fantasy'? That it often more resembles the works of Voltaire, Rabelais and Jonathan Swift just makes classification that much more pointless. It may contain many of the rough plot stages of an epic quest, and the overall arc of a bildungsroman, and so on and so forth, but it is its own thing in the end, an enjoyable, deeply weird and challenging thing on pretty much every level one can think of.

The bare-bones plot of this first novel in the series is quite simple: Severian, a young member of the Torturers' Guild is cast out of the guild to find his way in the world after he shows mercy to a prisoner. The planet he lives on, Urth, appears to be our Earth so far into the future that the sun is going out and all the coloured glass of our era now covers certain beaches with coloured grains of sand. Technology and biotechnology have advanced to such a point that certain events seem like magic. And some members of humanity long ago left for the stars, while on Urth the rulers have decided to purposefully retrogress society to a quasi-medieval state, albeit one in which the more learned citizens are well aware that their society's structure is wholly imposed and artificially retrograde. Somewhat bizarrely, that last sentence makes me think of a number of Islamicist nations. Oh, well.

Severian's adventures here sometimes baroque, sometimes whimsical, and always prone at any instant to plunging into the starkest matters of life and death. Though the Torturer's Guild operates entirely at the whims of the rulers of Severian's nation, the torturers themselves are despised and shunned by most who meet them. Or at least they used to be. By Severian's time, society's institutions and the general knowledge of them have declined to the extent that many greet him as a wonder, especially the farther he gets from the center of the great city. He meets companions" some of them loyal, some of them treacherous. And as Part One ends, he and his companions reach the edge of the great city and pass beyond its cyclopean walls to the countryside beyond. Highest recommendation.