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.The Infinite Jukebox: The Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’.Rumpole of the Bailey: s01 e02 – Rumpole and the Alternative Society.Valerian et Laureline: 26 – Where Stories are Born.

Shadow of the torturer gene wolfe