Will Sargent rated The shadow of the torturer: 4 stars
The shadow of the torturer by Gene Wolfe (The book of the new Sun -- v. 1)
The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume in the four-volume series, The Book of the New Sun. It …
It's a one of a kind book -- it's the System as idiot blind Azathoth, piping a monotonous tune on a flute at the center of the Universe. It's the System at two in the morning, faking a human voice, blithely informing you there is no emergency and you have always been on fire. It's the System you created that tells you it's going to take your face to make its customers feel more comfortable.
It's a book that tells you every program that you write will have bugs, every company you work for will have policies that make no sense, and even the hacks you use to get around it have become ingrained into the System itself such that the System itself doesn't expect you to follows its rules, which is good because those rules would be illegal to follow in any case.
If you write code, if you're …
