#engine summer

Sign of the Unicorn, Roger Zelazny

Engine Summer, John Crowley

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.

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.