Engine Summer, John Crowley‘s third novel, was first published in 1979. This post-apocalyptic apocrypha of future Earth, wet with lyrical vision, flows a darting lunge through summer’s ash and ruins, hushed adrift — and sashes of our darkened shrines.
Engine Summer is, alas, under over-zealous copyright. Raiazome exposes but a few excerpts, below.
Copyright 1979 John Crowley.
Oh, the world was full in those days. In those days a thousand things began and ended in a single lifetime. It was like some monstrous race between destruction and perfection; as soon as some piece of world was conquered, the conquest would turn on the conquerors, as Road killed thousands in their cars; and in the same way, the mechanical dreams the angels made with great labor and inconceivable ingenuity, dreams broadcast on the air like milkweed seeds, passing invisibly through the air, through the very bodies of the angels themselves, one dream dreamed by all so that all could act in concert, until it was discovered that the dreams were poisonous to them somehow, and millions were sickening, but unable to stop the dreaming even when the dreams themselves warned them that the dreams were poisoning them, unable or afraid to wake and find themsleves alone.
And it all went faster as the Storm came on, that is the Storm coming on was the race drawing to its end; the solutions grew stranger and more desperate, and the disasters greater, and in the teeth of them the angels dreamed their wildest dreams, that we would live forever, that we would leave the earth, a dream they could not achieve because of the Wars starting and the millions of them falling out in a million different ways. And then the Storm, which anybody could have seen, and it all began to stop, and kept stopping till all those millions were standing in the old woodlands which they had never been in before and looking around in wonder at the old world as though it were as strange as their dreams had truly been.