John Crowley (1942-2026)

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A quarter-century ago, I carried a light portable tape recorder to a convention that my wife, Marianne Porter, could not attend. My intention was to record a few ephemeral moments of the con to amuse her later. In the bar, I struck up a conversation with John Crowley.

Crowley was then universally acknowledged to be one of the best and brightest writers working in genre He was also midway through his ambitious hermetic fantasy, the Aegypt Sequence. The first book, Aegypt, appeared in 1987 and the second, Love & Sleep in 1994. Daemonomania was forthcoming and the final book, Endless Things, would not appear until 2007, twenty years after the first.

With John's permission, I turned on the recorder and asked him why he was engaged in such a large and time-consuming single work. His answer was as follows:

God knows. God help me. For having ever started this. When we are young we think that life will go on forever. When we grow older, we realize that life has shapes. It's time, it seems to me, to find out that the largest stretch of my creative years is going to be taken up with a project that will probably be the major thing that I do in life. That's scary. That's a terrifying thought. You try to preserve possibilities. You try to have a life that continues to open out, even though you know it doesn't. And the idea that it doesn't, and that life has shapes, is borne in on me as I work on this book. It's not like I will go on and write dozens of books. I don't know what they are. No, I know what they are, and I am already in the middle of writing one of them. I don't know why. I wish I knew.

Which answer I found so engaging that I later published it in The New York Review of Science Fiction as the first of a series of “singular interviews.”

John Crowley lived another twenty years after completing that great work. But no author is immortal, though some of his works (Little Big is my favorite of his fantasies and Engine Summer of his science fiction) may be. He passed away on August 8, 2026. 

John led a life that constantly opened out. Now, alas, it has closed.

 

 

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