OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)

By: Joshua Glenn
May 28, 2026

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.

ENGINE SUMMER | JOHN CROWLEY | 1979

John Crowley is best known for Little, Big, a 1981 family saga and gnostic adventure that Ursula K. Le Guin insisted “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy,” and which Harold Bloom called “the most enchanting twentieth-century book I know.” In addition to his fantasy novels, he’s produced gem-like sci-fi novels and stories, including The Deep (1975), Beasts (1976), Engine Summer (1979), and the novella Great Work of Time (1989), that ought to be far more famous.

Rush That Speaks, the protagonist of Engine Summer, is 14 when he leaves Little Belaire. This is a maze-like village populated by “truthful speakers,” the post-apocalyptic descendants of anti-technology, Gurdjieffian-ish hippies and radical feminists in what, if you ask me, is situated — as is Edgewood, in Little, Big, not to mention Blackbury Jambs in the author’s Ægypt series — in a version of New York’s Hudson Valley… in this case, seemingly in the shadow of Belleayre Mountain. Rush’s community harvests and sells “St. Bea’s bread,” a psychotropic plant the origin of which, we eventually figure out, is not Earth.

Once a Day, a girl whom Rush loved when they were children, has run off with a strange nomadic group, Dr. Boot’s List, who trades the medication that allow women to get pregnant for St. Bea’s bread. The telepathic cat-worshipping group’s strangeness, Rush will learn, once he tracks the group south to the ruins of Service City (New York? White Plains?), turns out to be a function of their use of an ancient artifact — in the form of a transparent globe — capable of imposing a personality, from a mind-recording, temporarily over one’s own. An unintended consequence of which is an addictive rush of returning self-knowledge as that effect wears off.

Rush is also curious about the pre-catastrophe past, relics and rumors of which confound and amaze him. Over the course of his slow journey to find Once a Day, he will spend time in the company of the scavenger Blink, a devoted scholar of pre-catastrophe America (one whose exegetical interpretations, the reader wants to tell Rush, are often incorrect); and of Zhinsinura, a nurturing spiritual guide who challenges Rush to “uncurl” and expand his consciousness. Thanks to these and other interlocutors, Rush will come to understand that pre-catastrophe America was a technologically advanced yet deeply screwed-up society that brought ruin upon itself.

While dwelling with Blink, Rush rejoins linked artifacts — a high-tech ball and glove — that have been separated for centuries. This action sends a long-awaited signal to the “angels” whom Rush already suspected of hovering overhead, “above the clouds, below the sky”; one of these beings intercepts Rush and records his story. Which it seems we’re experiencing not directly from Rush… but from a kind of amalgam of recorded Rush and whoever it is that is temporarily inhabiting his memories. It’s a deus ex machina moment, in which a divine being descends from above to resolve a hopeless plot conflict… except that in this case there are all sorts of things left unresolved. Harold Bloom himself admitted that he wasn’t able to fully “solve” Engine Summer… and that’s OK. Crowley’s wonderful little book is not a puzzle so much as it is a kind of globe into which the reader inserts his or her head, thus inviting a rather inscrutable stored consciousness to take up residence for a while.

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OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)

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