The Shadow of the Torturer
World Fantasy Award winner and the opening of the tetralogy regularly ranked the finest sustained work in SF — the genre's supreme rereader's text, with an academic literature to match.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Nightwings about?
In Earth's Third Cycle, humanity is organised into guilds — Watchers who scan the skies for a prophesied invasion, Fliers with gossamer wings, Rememberers who curate the planet's glories and crimes. An ageing Watcher crosses Europe to Roum with the winged Avluela and a sardonic Changeling, arriving just in time for his lifelong vigil to be vindicated: the invaders come, and they have an old, legitimate bill to collect. Silverberg's elegy for a senescent Earth glows with autumnal beauty, and its theme — redemption through renewal, personal and planetary — makes the conquest of humanity read almost like grace.
Why it matters
The opening novella won the Hugo (1969); the fix-up novel remains the loveliest doorway into Silverberg's great period.
Read next
At the Earth's Core
The keystone hollow-earth adventure, launching a seven-book series (Tarzan eventually visits).
Behold the Man
Nebula winner and the New Wave's most notorious provocation: time-travel paradox as theology, handled with a seriousness that outlasted the scandal.