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The Shadow of the Torturer
- The Book of the New Sun, Book 1
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
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Overall
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A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.
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What a wild, wacky, awesome book!
- By Noah Smith on 06-20-10
By: Vernor Vinge
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Swords and Deviltry
- The Adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
- By: Fritz Leiber
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Neil Gaiman (introduction)
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In the ancient city of Lankhmar, two men forge a friendship in battle. The red-haired barbarian Fafhrd left the snowy reaches of Nehwon looking for a new life, while the Gray Mouser, apprentice magician, fled after finding his master dead. These bawdy brothers-in-arms cement a friendship that leads them through the wilds of Nehwon facing thieves, wizards, princesses, and the depths of their desires and fears.
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Fafhrd/Gray Mouser
- By melody333 on 08-21-08
By: Fritz Leiber
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The Mote in God's Eye
- By: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
- Narrated by: L J Ganser
- Length: 20 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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The Mote In God's Eye is their acknowledged masterpiece, an epic novel of mankind's first encounter with alien life that transcends the genre. No lesser an authority than Robert A. Heinlein called it "possibly the finest science fiction novel I have ever read".
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A great read!
- By J. Rhoderick on 02-12-10
By: Larry Niven, and others
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Hyperion
- By: Dan Simmons
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Allyson Johnson, Kevin Pariseau, and others
- Length: 20 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.
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The Shrike Awaits. Enter The Time Tombs...
- By Michael on 10-13-12
By: Dan Simmons
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A Borrowed Man
- By: Gene Wolfe
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person. He is a clone who lives on a third-tier shelf in a public library, and his personality is an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human. A wealthy patron, Colette Coldbrook, takes him from the library because he is the surviving personality of the author of Murder on Mars. A physical copy of that book was in the possession of her murdered father, and it contains an important secret, the key to immense family wealth.
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Great Gene Wolfe Concept, Distracting Narration
- By Alex Levine on 10-27-15
By: Gene Wolfe
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Suldrun’s Garden
- Lyonesse: Book 1
- By: Jack Vance
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 18 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The Elder Isles, located in what is now the Bay of Biscay off the coast of Old Gaul, are made up of 10 contending kingdoms, all vying with each other for control. At the centre of much of the intrigue is Casmir, the ruthless and ambitious king of Lyonnesse. His beautiful but otherworldly daughter, Suldrun, is part of his plans. He intends to cement an alliance or two by marrying her well. But Suldrun is as determined as he and defies him.
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Not my cup of tea
- By Ann on 01-10-11
By: Jack Vance
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Elric of Melniboné
- Volume 1: Elric of Melnibone, The Fortress of the Pearl, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, and The Weird of the White Wolf
- By: Michael Moorcock, Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Samuel Roukin
- Length: 24 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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When Michael Moorcock began chronicling the adventures of the albino sorcerer Elric, last king of decadent Melniboné, and his sentient vampiric sword, Stormbringer, he set out to create a new kind of fantasy adventure, one that broke with tradition and reflected a more up-to-date sophistication of theme and style. The result was a bold and unique hero: a rock-and-roll antihero who would channel all the violent excesses of the '60s into one enduring archetype.
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Skip the first chapter, it's not Moorcock.
- By Ted C. on 02-17-22
By: Michael Moorcock, and others
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Lord of Light
- By: Roger Zelazny
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose them: he who was once Siddhartha and is now Mahasamatman. Binder of Demons, Lord of Light.
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How could a performance be so wrong?
- By 1st World Problems on 05-29-22
By: Roger Zelazny
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Ilium
- By: Dan Simmons
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 29 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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From the towering heights of Olympos Mons on Mars, the mighty Zeus and his immortal family of gods, goddesses, and demigods look down upon a momentous battle, observing - and often influencing - the legendary exploits of Paris, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and the clashing armies of Greece and Troy. Thomas Hockenberry, former 21st-century professor and Iliad scholar, watches as well. It is Hockenberry's duty to observe and report on the Trojan War's progress to the so-called deities who saw fit to return him from the dead.
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Achaeans and robots and post-humans, oh my
- By Ryan on 04-11-14
By: Dan Simmons
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The Stars My Destination
- By: Alfred Bester
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Marooned in outer space after an attack on his ship, Nomad, Gulliver Foyle lives to obsessively pursue the crew of a rescue vessel that had intended to leave him to die.
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STILL AMAZINGLY GOOD AFTER 62 YEARS
- By charles watkins on 02-19-18
By: Alfred Bester
What listeners say about The Shadow of the Torturer
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- Ryan
- 03-20-10
great writing, won't appeal to everyone
There was a time when the fantasy genre didn't just exist to entertain, but sometimes aspired to a higher level of artfulness. The Shadow of the Torturer is such a book. Set in a far distant future, when Earth's sun is fading and human society has lost much of its technological aptitude, Wolfe's novel has a haunting, elegiac quality. It's written in a voice reminiscent of 19th century writers like Poe or Dickens, which adds to the melancholy beauty. Fortunately for the squeamish, though torture is part of the story, it's not described in much detail.
In terms of plot, The Shadow of the Torturer isn't a complex novel. The protagonist grows up under the protection of a strange, cloistered society, learns a few things about the outside world, betrays his guardians, and is thrown out to seek his own fortune -- familiar fantasy stuff. But what sets the book apart from standard swords-and-sorcery fare is the richness of its language and the great imagination in its details; the difference is like comparing a fine oil painting to a crude computer graphic rendering. It has subtlety that forces the reader to pay attention. Wolfe messes with time and space, contemplates philosophical ideas, writes long exchanges whose import isn't immediately clear, and relies on the audience to make sense of the strange, slightly dreamlike events that unfold in the story, rather than spelling out how they're connected.
Without a doubt, this is a book that will absorb some readers and alienate others. Wolfe's ornate, college-level English, though not difficult, is not for everyone. Nor will everyone relate to the protagonist's detached, clinical voice. Basically, if you're looking for a light, Harry Potter-style book with instantly charismatic characters, you're better off going elsewhere. But, for readers who appreciate sophisticated writing and atmospheric, textured imaginary worlds, this is a great read.
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166 people found this helpful
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- Jefferson
- 10-21-12
"All of you are torturers, one way or another"
The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), the first of the four books that comprise Gene Wolfe's science fiction masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, is a rich, moving, and challenging novel. Just in the first few chapters we learn that narrator Severian (who is writing his life story) was an orphan apprentice of the guild of torturers (the Seekers for Truth and Penitence) in the Citadel of sprawling Nessus (the City Imperishable) in the far future of Urth (earth?), under a dying sun; that the towers of the Citadel are long-derelict spaceships; that Severian has an eidetic memory; and that his youthful encounter with the rebel leader Vodalus set in motion events that will lead him to betray his guild, become an exile, and sit on the throne.
The novel is disturbing! There are glimpses of the appalling "excruciations" the guild performs upon its "clients," and many characters are afflicted with grief, including Severian, who is cursed to remember every detail of his sad experiences. But it is also funny, as in the eccentric and grotesque characters like Dr. Talos and Baldanders and the banter between Severian and Agia.
Severian's history is a demanding read. As in novels like A Voyage to Arcturus, everything seems to bear symbolic as well as narrative meaning. And Severian is not a completely reliable narrator, for he often lies and may be insane, and although he remembers everything, he selectively tells his story, at times eliding painful things and alluding to them later while narrating different events. And some things he recounts question the reality of his world (and ours).
Severian has much to say about reality, memory, history, story, art, culture, justice, religion, meaning, and love. Provocative lines punctuate his text. Symbols "invent us, we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." Or "time turns our lies to truths." Or "the charm of words … reduces to manageable entities all the passions that would otherwise madden and destroy us."
Additionally, the richness of the novel's language, the elegance of its style, and the fertility of its imagination require slow savoring. In Severian's text common words rub shoulders with archaic or obscure ones, evoking the exotic texture of his world, as in names for officials (autarch, archon, castellan, chiliarch, lochage) and beasts of burden (dromedaries, oxen, metamynodons, onagers, hackneys).
Numerous descriptions yield shivers of pleasure: "She sighed, and all the gladness went out of her face, as the sunlight leaves the stone where a beggar seeks to warm himself." Or "Behind the altar rose a wonderful mosaic of blue, but it was blank, as if a fragment of sky without cloud or star had been torn away and spread upon the curving wall." Or "(A spell there was, surely, in this garden. I could almost hear it humming over the water, voices chanting in a language I did not know but understood.)"
Numerous scenes impress themselves on mind and heart, as when Severian visits the blind caretaker of the Borgesian library, finds a horribly wounded fighting dog, connects Thecla to the revolutionary, receives the black sword Terminus Est, falls into the Lake of Birds in the Garden of Everlasting Sleep, performs for the first time the mysteries of his guild's art, or witnesses a miracle with Dorcas.
Jonathan Davis adds so much to the novel with his witty and compassionate reading, modifying his voice to enhance each character without drawing attention to himself. And it's a pleasure to hear him relish Wolfe's beautiful prose or say words like anacreontic, carnifex, epopt, fuligin, fulgurator, hipparch, paracoita, and psychopomp. (Though it does help to have the text handy!)
At the end of The Shadow of the Torturer, Severian says he cannot blame his reader for refusing to follow him any more through his life, for "It is no easy road." Nevertheless, the next three novels reward the effort to read them manifold.
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- Darwin8u
- 04-11-12
Original, Difficult and Well-Crafted.
I am almost anti-fantasy. I find most derivative at best and banal to the extreme. Wolfe's first book in his famous The Book of the New Sun tetralogy, however, is genre fiction at its finest. Original, difficult and well-crafted, it is easy to see how Wolfe is regarded as a writer's writer.
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38 people found this helpful
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- Charlotte A. Stanford
- 10-24-10
Great reading of an intellectual masterpiece
Thought-provoking, image-rich and intricately plotted. This series has had a prized place on my bookshelf for years and I was thrilled to see it available as an audiobook. Even better, Jonathan Davis as narrator has a moderately slow (but not too slow) pace, great voice characterization, and handles the author's challenging and singular vocabular with ease.
Wolfe is subtle, profound writer and demands close attention from his readers/ listeners; this is not a surf-along novel. If your attention is distracted for a minute, you could miss something vital, and need to rewind -- I sometimes have had to do that as I listen. But most of the time I am completely engrossed. This is one of the best finds I've made, ever.
I hope to see more Wolfe audiobooks- beginning with this series' sequel/ continuance, "The Urth of the New Sun".
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34 people found this helpful
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- Lauffeuer
- 02-23-10
Not for everyone, but I enjoyed it.
This is maybe one of the saddest books I've read. An overwhelming sense of isolation and loneliness pours out of each line. It is deeply emotional book, and I don't think such a book is for everyone.
If you need constant action, hope, a quest, a hero with a purpose, and so on, this is not the book for you. There isn't even the hope of redemption for the protagonist and he really could use it. The story really is something quite dark and often times aimless.
Now, I completely enjoyed the book and found myself easily lost in the story. I don't doubt it is due a good deal to the excellent narration. The random wandering, discoveries, and encounters keep the story moving along and interesting. It is a very dream-like tale.
The only issue I had was that the author does ramble more than once, even to the point of being annoying in a few instances. Once during the book, I did sigh and think, "Can we get on with it?" However, this did not spoil my overall enjoyment.
In short, it's a great story if you can appreciate a great setting where hope isn't offered as the protagonist wanders aimlessly into exile.
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28 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 05-15-12
The character Jonathan Davis was born to play!
This book is the first part in a five part series, and only the first four books are available on Audible. I would say that this series is the story of the torturer's apprentice Severian, and his journey from lowest and most despised member of society to the throne, set in a far future Earth in which civilization and society are on a slow decline. I would say that, except that this is less a story and more a multi-dimensional mental jigsaw puzzle. The series requires that you, the listener, pay a great deal of attention to the plot, characters and vocabulary, and then listen to the whole thing all over again, possibly a few times, to get the richness, complexity and beauty of Gene Wolfe's vision. If you are prepared to make that kind of commitment, this is a great bargain as it will repay you in many hours of listening pleasure, getting better each time you listen again.
If you are not familiar with Gene Wolfe's work, you would probably be surprised to hear this series compared to Lord of the Rings. After all, how many stories can live up to that kind of comparison? Amazingly The Book of the New Sun series does, and in some ways exceeds it, as these are more adult stories with some added layers of complexity.
Audible really outdid themselves with this production. I can't imagine a finer narrator for this series than Jonathon Davis. His pacing, emphasis, vocal expressions and various character renderings are flawless. The pacing is particularly important, as nearly every sentence contains some clue to solving the final puzzle.
I hope the final book in the series, The Urth of the New Sun, will be available at some point. Although written a few years after the first four in the series, it fits in so well with the rest of the story and solves so many unanswered questions that it appears to have been planned all along.
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- Robert Kenyon
- 01-16-10
Worthy
I am so glad I have found another author that I can trust to deliver a worthwhile experience. It is really a bad deal to take a gamble on a new writer and feel you 'wasted' your credits.
When the reviews are skimpy, I run to other review sites to see what others say. It appears that the titles have been changed a bit from the original works. At first, I thought the book left off in a ridiculous place until I realized that I only d/l'ed the first of 2 parts. I have already d/l'ed the 2nd book so there will be no waiting.
I rarely write reviews but since there are so few, I thought I would say a word or two to others who spend their credits cautiously. This writer is sophisticated and dark. I think of Robin Hobb's strong character development mixed with Robert Jordan's poetic skill. Any would be writers would do well to humble yourself observing this writers mastery.
If you are looking for something after this, I strongly recommend R.R. Martin's "A Song of Fire and Ice" series. Pretty much, most works pale in comparison to R.R. Martin's.
I hope this is helpful.
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23 people found this helpful
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- Katherine
- 09-11-10
It's time to read it this epic!
The Shadow of the Torturer introduces Severian, an orphan who grew up in the torturer's guild. Severian is now sitting on a throne, but in this first installment of The Book of the New Sun, he tells us of key events in his boyhood and young adulthood. The knowledge that Severian will not only survive, but will become a ruler, doesn't at all detract from the suspense; it makes us even more curious about how he will get there and what he experiences on the way.
What makes Gene Wolfe's epic different from everything else on the SFF shelf is his unique, evocative storytelling style. The reader isn't given all of the history and religion lessons (etc.) that are often dumped on us at the beginning of a fantasy epic. Rather, Severian's story is episodic and seems like it's meandering lazily, taking regular scenic detours, as if there's nowhere to go and plenty of time to get there. Because the story isn't a straight narrative, we don't understand the purpose or meaning of everything Severian relates ??? we have to patch it together as we go. By the end of the book, we're still clueless about most of it and we're starting to realize that Severian is kind of clueless, too. Much of the power of this novel comes from the sense that there is world-building and symbolism on a massive scale here, but that explanations and revelations for the reader would just cheapen it and remove the pleasure that comes from the experience of discovery.
In addition to being unique in style, The Shadow of the Torturer is a gorgeous piece of work: passionate storytelling (heart-wrenching in places), fascinating insights into nature and the human condition, beautiful prose.
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- Jim "The Impatient"
- 09-01-12
The Tortuered Reader
If you look at the ratings of this book you will see that people are all over the map on this book, as they are with this writer in general. GW has won high praises for this series, along with The Fifth Head of Cereberus and Seven American Nights.
It seems either you get him or you don't. I am afraid that I fall under the crowd that does not get him. Some have said it is the torture that turns people off to the book. No, it is the pretentious use of language that is the biggest problem for me. At times it seems that there is a good story here. A world where a guild of torturers is considered necessary. A young man who does not know his parents and knows nothing, but the life of torture. What a concept! Yet when you try to read it, the language is so annoying and unusual that your mind starts to wonder and you lose track of the story.
There where parts I liked. His compassion for the lady to be tortured, the dog he rescues, the tunnel under the city. There is an interesting plot twist involving a duel, only it is a duel with plants.
There are certain things that turn me off to a book, such as dream sequences like the one this book starts out with and the use of strange languages or made up language or sticking too many high fluent words together in one space, so that your mind gets lost. Some love this or pretend to love, so they don't seem stupid to others. I can admit I am stupid and say I don't enjoy such literature.
The narrator is rather slow and methodical and I found it helped to put the playback on fast.
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- David
- 03-19-10
Excellent Read!
This is a remarkable book. Well crafted, rich language, delicate narrative. Certainly not filled with slashing heroes or delicate heroines and certainly not for everyone, but then neither is 20 year old scotch. If you enjoy language and the magic of words you will love this book. The narrator does a beautiful job bringing the characters to life...perfection.
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