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Interview with John Crowley
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John Crowley from Believer Magazine
The always interesting John Crowley is interviewed in Believer Magazine.
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.
Crowley’s skill at transcending genre has had its pitfalls, too, as illustrated in the publishing saga of the Ægypt cycle, his four-volume opus that navigates through both the intricate romantic affairs of an Aquarian-age cluster of upstate New Yorkers and an occult re-reading of Western history. Though the original books were slowly released over two decades by various publishing houses—some parts marketed as fantasy novels, others more as literary fiction—a complete, definitive edition of the series was finally published between 2007 and 2009 by Overlook Press.
While Crowley has garnered numerous literary laurels—ranging from three World Fantasy Awards to an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature—few of his readers probably know that projects he’s worked on have also won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and been nominated for an Academy Award. In addition to his novelistic pursuits, Crowley is a longtime researcher and writer for documentaries; given the palpable textures he creates for his speculative novels, it’s fitting that he has one foot squarely in the world of recorded facts, the other in more imaginary realms.
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