If speculative fiction traffics in the dream of bright and better lands “beyond the fields we know,” to use Lord Dunsany’s phrase, then John Crowley takes this penchant for escapism and gives it a Borgesian twist; his writing pushes beyond the traditional boundaries of fantasy and science fiction into both everyday realism and evocative allegory, sometimes leaving the genres altogether but nevertheless retaining a shimmering dust of possibility. Thick with redolent prose and heady thought-excursions, his stories conjoin medieval and modern forms.
His first novel, The Deep, at first seems like a relatively straightforward sci-fi narrative about a planet of warring kingdoms, yet finally reveals itself to be a far more metaphysical fiction, dislodged from any scientific reality. Engine Summer, a visionary postapocalyptic tale in which the inhabitants of future Earth know only fragments of the history of the twentieth century, is more strictly SF, but contains gnostic overtones and musings on the nature of time, memory, and the mythic role of the storyteller. Little, Big, perhaps his best-known novel, charts the Drinkwater clan from nineteenth-century America to a dystopic twenty-first century, delving deeply along the way into the lost art of memory, the spiritualist world beyond the veil, and the realm of faerie.
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