#engine summer

[dijeh]

Sign of the Unicorn, Roger Zelazny

Engine Summer, John Crowley

Weaveworld, Clive Barker

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Engine Summer by John Crowley (1979)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onOct 14, 2025

[70sscifiart]

1982 Tim White cover art for John Crowley’s Engine Summer

[red-ibis-red]

“In the last month of winter,” she began, almost as though she were talking only to the cat at her feet, “which is the first of spring, the ice on the river, which had been solid and could bear weight, broke up and floated away in great clashing chunks, which makes a pretty sight.”

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

[theinsectworld]

She said nothing, and though she lay still I felt her run away from me further. I wanted to pursue her where she ran, and I took her shoulders in my hands as though to stop her, restrain her; but she had fled.

There’s a certain kind of dream, the kind where you set off to do an urgent errand, or a task, and directions are given you, but as you go on the places you have been sent to are not the places you intended to go, and the nature of the task changes; the person you set out to find becomes the one who sent you; the thing you were to do turns into a place, and the place into a box of treasure or a horrid rumor; and the goal can never be reached because it’s never the same goal; and yet you search on, never surprised by these changes, only persistent, only endlessly trying to do the changing thing set before you.

Until you wake, and there is no search after all.

-- Engine Summer (1979), by John Crowley

[strayfriend]

Last year when the power was out after the hurricane I spent like two days completely engrossed in John Crowley's Engine Summer. I already liked him from having read his strange fairy tale/family anthology Little, Big sometime around 2016.

But Engine Summer did something to me, I think of it fondly and often. The world he built was so alive and lived-in and fleshed out. There is a lot that is unclear on the first read through, I remember several times when I wasn't sure exactly what was happening but kept going because I got the gist. The ending brings everything into sharp focus, the facets of the crystal aligning, beautiful and haunting and heartbreaking and perfect. It reminded me a lot of Ursula K Le Guin's Always Coming Home (both are sort of post-apocalyptic futures but so distant that they don't really remember us and have formed entirely new cultures). I am losing the thread of this thought train.

Anyways it burrowed deeply into my soul, I want to reread it but fear it may be too soon. I want another copy to lend so I can harass others into reading this masterpiece. I uhm. Flipped through the first few pages the other day and cried a little?? Goodness.

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

[dijeh]

Engine Summer, John Crowley