Words I had read dozens of times suddenly become more obvious, when they were part of a limited portion, and I could see more of the hints and inferences that other, more wise readers have exposed down the years, for the benefit of we who have been less perceptive. For this re-read, I adopted a hitherto untried approach: two chapters at night, before going to bed and, no matter the temptation, only two chapters (except in the case of the last night of The Shadow of The Torturer where, the book having 35 chapters, I read three.)īreaking the story down to such small portions, read with wide intervals, proved to be instructive. Reading The Book of the New Sun is such an immersive experience that it can often be easy to lose oneself in the fabric of the story and in Wolfe’s glorious portrait of this immensely distant future, couched in the archaic language of the past. It would be a long and painful wait for the second volume. Le Guin’s words made the difference, and it did not take more than a few pages to recognise that I was in the presence of greatness, that in front of my eyes an author was vaulting to the front rank of SF. I knew Wolfe by then, primarily as a writer of short fiction, a constant presence in the anthologies I borrowed and read from the library: distinctive, but not enough to tempt me. It was her voice that tempted me to purchase the Arrow paperback edition of The Shadow of the Torturer. As for McCaffrey, I’d learned enough to avoid like the proverbial plague any book her imprimatur was on.īut Le Guin… Aah, Le Guin could be trusted. Lafferty novel, I’d already grown to mistrust his recommendations. Despite Zelazny being responsible for my first purchase of an R. I’d also, after a certain naivete about which I’d been very lucky, begun to have a scale in my head for author blurbs. I’d read a lot of Le Guin, enough to respect her work if not yet to appreciate it as I do now.

I had adopted Roger Zelazny as a favourite author, by means of the first Chronicles of Amber, and was also by that time well into such different writers as Harlan Ellison, and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonrider books (I know: forgive me). I was still in my mid-twenties and had only really begun to open out to SF/Fantasy after first reading Lord of the Rings in 1973/4. I owe a debt of thanks to Ursula Le Guin for discovering this book at the time I did. Trout Nation – Your One-Stop Procrastination Stop.Wing Commander (Robert) Jeffrey Hawke (Part 3) *Guest Post* Garth Groombridge’s Fictional British Spacemen of the 1950s and 1960s: R.A.F.The Infinite Jukebox: The Animals’ ‘It’s My Life’.Rumpole of the Bailey: s01 e05 – Rumpole and the Learned Friends.Hecatae Comics: James Robinson’s Witch Craft.

Gene wolfe shadow