- CROWLEY, John
- (1942-)US writer who has also worked in documentary films and tv since 1966. His sf novels have had a considerable impact on the field, and his fantasies have established him as a figure whose work markedly stretches the boundaries of genre literature.His first sf novel, The Deep (1975), is set on a flat discworld resting on a pillar that extends beyond measurement into the circumambient Deep, in which very few stars are visible. On this disc complex feudal conflicts, which seem interminably to repeat a bad year from the Wars of the Roses, are regulated, maintained and when necessary fomented for its own pleasure by the mysterious Being who originally transported to this strange new domain its present inhabitants - humans whose own world was dying. Though the story is told from various points of view, the reader's main perspective is through the eyes of a damaged ANDROID with memory problems sent to record events by the disc's peculiar God. Using sources as widely divergent as James Branch CABELL's Biography of the Life of Manuel, Philip Jose FARMER's World of Tiers novels and E.R. EDDISON's The Worm Ouroboros (1922), JC constructed a story whose free and supple use of numerous generic conventions marks it as the sort of tale possible only late in the life of any genre.Beasts (1976) somewhat more conventionally depicts a balkanized USA, but with a complex deployment of sf themes, notable among which are the uses made of biologically transformed animals and of the potential for genuine interspecies empathy. The chilly belatedness of these two books - like all his work they depict worlds caught in the iron claws of a prior authority or Author - warms very considerably in the third, ENGINE SUMMER (1979), whose title neatly epitomizes JC's abiding central concerns and whose plot - its protagonist finds that his life in a dying post- HOLOCAUST pastoral USA is nothing but a memory interminably replayed, and that he himself is no more than a crystal device replaying those memories on command - exudes a cruel melancholy. But the story which Rush That Speaks represents in his being (and tells) is powerfully moving; and his sleep at the close (though he will soon be turned on again to play himself) is earned.A similar grave cruelty infuses the TIME TRAVEL cul-de-sacs uncovered in Great Work of Time (1991), a tale which depicts the desolate consequences of attempting to control history; it first appeared in NOVELTY (coll 1989), along with some shorter fantasies and "In Blue" a DYSTOPIAN parable. Further short work is assembled in Antiquities: Seven Stories (coll 1993).His major single novel, the grave and eloquent Little, Big (1981), is primarily a fantasy; partly set in a NEAR FUTURE USA, this large work puts into definitive form JC's steely nostalgia for the long arm of immortal law. The title itself - which condenses a message repeated throughout the text: "The further in you go, the bigger it gets" - is a restatement in fantasy terms of the process of CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH central to much sf. The story embeds in the centrifugal world of US fantasy a UK tale of harrowing centripetal inwardness; Smoky Barnable's book-long attempt to enter the world of faerie ends, as it must, in something like death. In the meantime, as the century itself closes, a reborn Barbarossa ravages an unsavable USA. The Renaissance Art of Memory-later utilized by Gene WOLFE, Mary GENTLE and Michael SWANWICK, among others - significantly shapes the geography of the book, with the result that the metamorphoses suffered by its protagonists seem both mathematically foreordained (Lewis CARROLL is a constant presence in the text) and symbolically potent. Little, Big has permeated the field. As much cannot be said, perhaps, for AEGYPT (1987) and Love \& Sleep (1994), the first two of the projected Aegypt sequence examining Renaissance neoplatonism with hallucinated concentration, and seemingly moving towards a millennial shift in the reality-determining Story of the world; but even the torso of this sequence confirms JC's very considerable shaping power, which is his most significant gift to genre literature. The novelty of his work is less important than the magnetism of the synthesis it represents.JCOther work: Beasts/Engine Summer/Little, Big (omni 1991).
Science Fiction and Fantasy Encyclopedia. Academic. 2011.
