From rec.arts.sf.written Mon Nov  2 12:28:56 1992
Path: lysator.liu.se!fizban.solace.hsh.se!kitten.umdc.umu.se!sunic!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!sdd.hp.com!usc!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!spool.mu.edu!agate!curtis
From: curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis Yarvin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: An Almost Entirely Pointless Recommendation
Date: 2 Nov 1992 05:05:31 GMT
Organization: UC Berkeley CS Dept.
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Message-ID: <1d2curINN6rg@agate.berkeley.edu>
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The other day, I found a copy of John Crowley's _The Deep_
in a used bookstore.

I am, I must admit, a Crowley fan.  The man is simply one
of the best writers working today, in any genre.  If you
wish to verify this conclusion, find ye a copy of _Little,
Big_ and have a read.  Satisfaction is as usual guaranteed.

But I wasn't prepared for _The Deep_.

I had just recently gotten ahold of _Aegypt_, his latest novel
(Dark Carnival as usual the culprit - if you hurry they may
still have the hardback, remaindered for $6).  Of course, I
loved it.  

Like much of Crowley's recent work, _Aegypt_ is almost entirely
plotless; Crowley is a fine writer but not a brief one, and by
the time he's finished setting up atmosphere the book is over.

This is, I suspect, why _Aegypt_ ended up on the remainder
racks.  Philistines.  Fucking Philistines.  A plague of frogs
upon their forefathers.

(In fact, I did myself wish that _Aegypt_ had had a plot; but
the wish took the form of a prayer for sequels upon sequels upon
tiny volumes buried in the afterleaf which contain the entire
fictional work of Hermes Trismegistus et al - not any desire
for bowdlerism.  Some things are just too beautiful.)

But I digress.  _The Deep_.

Crowley's first novel - 1975.  Tips the scales at a flyweight
186 pp.  Good art but butt-ugly cover design; well, hell, what
can you expect of the seventies.  

My attention was caught by a glowing cover blurb, c/o no less
illustrious personage than Ursula K. Le Guin.  "Thoroughly
extraordinary," she says.  You bet, Ursula.  And I hear some
new editions of Tolkien have cover blurbs from Piers Anthony,
too.

The contents - well, hell, why should I even attempt to
describe the contents?  I can't do it justice.  I couldn't
even if I tried, and I'm not real into justice nohow.

And anyway the book is almost surely out of print.  And
nobody who has one is going to sell you one.  So either
you know already or yer shit outa luck.

But anyway here's the gist.  

The scene is a land in roughly medieval state of culture &
politics.  Blokes rushing about and chopping heads off and
all that.  They have some odd superstitions but that's to
be expected.  Into this culture comes our hero, an android
dropped out of a spaceship.  He shakes things up some, and
then they break for lunch.

Sounds conventional, don't it?

But it ain't.

Crowley is the sort of writer one can expect to recognize from
text, without even having to look at the title page; he has
style, and he has distinctive style.  

There are very few sf writers I could say this about.  In fact
I think I could count them on my fingers.

And with so little competition, one would expect them to stick
to the styles they're good at.

That's what shocked me about _The Deep_.  It is so far from
Crowley's recent style as to be completely unrecognizable.
And it is also equally brilliant - and as far as I know no
one has ever done a book like it, before or since.

You see, when one reads a modern fantasy novel - and _The
Deep_, if not technically fantasy, certainly shares enough of
its trappings to be forced onto the same rails - one expects it
to be an imitation of Tolkien.  

It goes without saying.  People don't even talk about it.
Because if it's not an imitation of Tolkien, it's almost surely
an imitation of Gygax.  Gygax.  Yes, Gygax.  And nobody wants
to talk about _that_.

And maybe, just maybe, if it's something _really truly
exceptional_, it's all little bits of Peake and Garrett and
Eddison and Donaldson fried up and served in an omelet, and
then it will win an award, for sheer originality.  Hybrid
Vigor, I think you call it.  The Mutt Anomaly.

But Crowley's techniques are not Tolkien - nor Gygax (for god's
sake) - nor Peake, nor Garrett, nor any of those other blighters,
nor anyone else you would expect.  Though I did catch a whiff of
Dunsany now and then.

Mainly, it is high fantasy written in the style of Shakespeare.

When I realized this, my jaw dropped - first at the sheer gall
it must have taken to pull off a trick like this, and then with
amazement, at the fact that nobody had thought of it before,
and nobody has thought it worth imitating.

Because it works.  It works completely.  It creates a novel
which is _positively stuffed_ with character, atmosphere, _and_
plot.  

Plot!  Good lord, what plot.  If you condensed the entire
Chronicles of Count Mojo the Sword-Squicker, or whatever fantasy
megalogy is selling like shitcakes these days, down into a
meager 186 pages (search-replace "glaive" with "shiv" should do
the job), it would not have one tenth the plot of _The Deep_ -
or one hundredth the style.

And there's even a hefty subplot, of great cosmological import.

And the setting is no cardboard honkeytonk, either.

I'll be damned if I can figure out how he does it.


_The Deep_ is almost surely out of print.  And even if you find
someone who has it, you'll have a fat lot of luck convincing
them to give it up.

Unless you're properly armed.

Some things are, you see, important.

c

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