All his life, Severian has lived in the slowly decaying Citadel of Nessus, built by people long since dead. Since he can remember, he has been an apprentice with the Guild of Torturers, the Order of the Seekers of Truth, whose lot in life is to enact the punishment decreed by the Autarch's courts.
After Severian is promoted to Journeyman of the guild, he commits a sin. He falls in love with a client, a prisoner named Thecla, and grants her a swift death by allowing her to commit suicide. After conféssing his sin to the elders of the guild, he is banished to the faraway city of Thrax. There, Severian is to act as an executioner.
Shadow of the Torturer is an odyssey. It's an odyssey of Severian in the strange yet familiar world of Urth, set so far in the future that its inhabitants have forgotten almost everything about the past. It's a world that exists on the long since buried bones of the ancient people, who travelled between the stars, built massive structures and left behind machines which now barely work. Now, the world, ancient as it is, exists under a slowly dying red sun. People know it is dying and that it has changed the world quite a bit, remembering the old flora and fauna with the help of places like the great Botanic Gardens, with its seemingly endless rooms filled with plants long since dead.
Gene Wolfe sets this even further in the small snippet in the book, in which he proclaims he has translated the text from sources he barely knew how to read, but did his best to convey it to us. The words that may seem familiar to us, like horse, may not mean what we think they mean, as the beings used as horses in the world of Urth are far stranger beings. Wolfe doesn't even directly mention all the mechanical marvels of the world, but he alludes to them. Like the great towers, even the one in which the Toturers reside, are mostly ancient spaceships, which have turned into places of accommodation, and people have just forgotten what they are, only wondering what the rooms filled with screens and controls at the top of them were.
Reading Shadow of the Torturer, I wondered if I'd classify it as fantasy or sci-fi. It's not flashy sci-fi, if it is a part of the genre. It wears its science fiction in its sleeve, slowly revealing more and more of it, while it always feels and reads more like a fantasy story. Then again, does it even really matter what its classification is? In the same sense, Dune is a sci-fi novel, even clearer than Shadow of the Torture, but it reads more like a fantasy. So, maybe, if you want a more proper classification for it, Shadow of the Torturer is a genre hybrid and leave it at that.
Shadow of the Torturer is a well-written tale. While Severian is not the most active protagonist in the world, most things in the story just happen to him rather than him looking for them. It is well told, and the world it is set in has more than enough intrigue to carry the story forward. That, tied with the colourful cast of characters Severian encounters make it an enjoyable book from start to finish.
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