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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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5 comments:
Another one of the greats who I didn’t pay enough attention to while we still had them… Great Work of Time got its hooks into me and always remains close.
Engine Summer is one of a few SF novels that I am willing to call the best SF novel of all time. (There is no ONE best novel in any category!)
I also extravaganly love his mostly non-fantastical novel The Translator. And shorter works like "Great Work of Time", "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines", and "Snow",. are also astonishing.
What a loss! But I like to think that an angel is talking to a saint, assuring him that his works will be remembered:
"Ever after. I promise. Now close your eyes."
That's such a beautiful answer (of Crowley's to your question), and one that hits home personally in many ways. Thank you for publishing it.
I remember him saying, or be said to have said anyway, that he wasn't sure it was good to spend so long on Aegypt, and that if he had known how long it would take he wouldn't have started it. I understand how he feels from projects of my own! But I personally would say that it was worth it: it is such an amazing achievement, one worth twenty years of a life even such as his.
Personally, I have long felt & said that Crowley wrote four masterworks all at such a high level that one can't compare them: Engine Summer, Little Big, Aegypt, and Ka; I think those four books are simply at the highest order, as good as anything can be, really.
I am so sorry he is gone. Thank you for writing this,
RIP.
I'm a bit sad to hear these news, but we still have his books. Now I have even more reasons to start one.
That looks like a line from the ending of Engine Summer (no copy handy). I've long thought that the beginning and ending of that novel were sublime.
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