Urth 2 - The Claw of the Conciliator
Gene Wolfe
- Reviewed
- Reviewed 7 Aug 2026
Rated 2.5 out of 5.
Overall
Synopsis — skip if you already read the book (most likely LLM generated)
Severian is an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers, in a city called Nessus on a dying planet whose sun has begun to fade and redden. He tells his own story, claiming perfect memory — and then shows the gaps in it anyway. Exiled from his guild for an act of mercy toward a prisoner, he travels out into a world of decayed grandeur: a tree-dwelling autarch, a green man displayed in a fairground tent, giants in the river, an endless war against an enemy called the Ascians.
Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe. Great worldbuilding, great prose, and it still doesn't quite get me. It reads as SF wearing a fantasy disguise
I struggle with this one, I like the worldbuilding and the style, but it does not realy get met and I think I know why: I read it as a science fiction novel wearing a fantasy world disguise but maybe it is a fantasy novel wearing a sci-fi disguise.
The catch is Severian’s vocabulary. He describes what he sees with total precision and often no understanding of what it is. A photograph reads as a strange picture. What might be a hologram reads as an apparition. The towers his guild lives in are, by their walls and decks, clearly grounded starships and he calls them towers, because that’s the only word he has.
So the world plays as fantasy on the surface with swords, guilds, kings, magic and while the substance underneath is technological remnant, half-legible through a narrator who can’t translate it for you.
I think it would work for me if I understood it as a fantasy novel and later figured out, that all the magic is science.