Into this era, this place, is born Rush That Speaks. We hear the story of his life from earliest consciousness until roughly the end of his teens, told in his own voice. (But the narrative is broken at spots by the cryptic interjections of a mysterious interlocutor, to whom Rush is conveying his life.) We witness Rush's education at the side of his Mbaba, his grandmother, who teaches him how to smoke the bread that sustains life, and under the hands of a wise woman named Painted Red, who knows the secret of the glass slides that comprise the prophetic System, and at the feet of his father, Seven Hands, who dreams of exploring the world beyond Little Belaire. We watch as the inquisitive Rush ponders the many oral legends of his community's past, about famous saints like Roy and Plunkett and Olivia, and the Long League whose exclusively female members helped guide the world through the engimatic Storm that ended the civilization of the extinct angels.

And we meet Once a Day, the charming, impulsive, dark girl Rush's age with whom he falls in love. But Once a Day belongs to the Whisper cord, an involuted clan, while Rush belongs to the outgoing Palm cord, and their differences threaten to drag them apart. And in fact one day, when the people from the distant settlement called Dr. Boots's List come trading, Once a Day runs off with them, and Rush is left heartbroken. He stays at Little Belaire another restless year and then sets out alone in search of his lost love—and with hopes of restoring to his people all that was lost during the Storm.

His first major interaction on the road is with a hermit named Blink. Amazingly, Blink knows how to read and can intepret old books from the angel days. He teaches Rush a lot over a year or so, but then Rush is impelled to move on. After long searching he finally stumbles onto his goal, the settlement of Dr. Boots' List. Here, people seem strangely hypnotized by the giant cats who share their village. Once a Day is indeed still there, and she shares this odd communal affect. After failing to reconnect with her in a normal fashion, Rush determines to undergo the ritual of receiving "a letter from Dr. Boots." But the treatment unhinges his very personality, Once a Day flees him, and Rush returns to his wandering, having been adopted by Brom, Once a Day's former cat.

Some time later, an "avvenger" (or scavenger) named Teeplee provides Rush with a sacred relic long sought by the community of Little Belaire. Rush sets out for home, arriving on his doorstep some three years after departure, much changed.

But just before he can enter Little Belaire, he is accosted by a stranger—a living member of the vanished race of angels, who wants his relic back.

A postmodern apocalypse

For as long as the genre of SF has existed, a subset of tales therein has been concerned with life after the collapse of civilization. Perhaps the earliest standout entry is Richard Jeffries' After London (1885). Surely Wells helped crystallize the trope, as he did so often, with his Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine (1895). Once the 20th century dawned and mankind's reign began to appear more and more tenuous, especially after the advent of the atomic bomb, such tales proliferated. George Stewart's Earth Abides (1949), Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow (1955), John Wyndham's Re-Birth (1955), Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), Brian Aldiss' Greybeard (1964) and Edgar Pangborn's Davy (1964) are all relevant to the Crowley book under discussion.

But none of the works cited really possesses all the elements of Engine Summer that work together to make it so exceptional.

First off, this novel is probably the first postmodern apocalypse. By that statement, I refer to its nontraditional method of telling or being told and its simultaneous embrace of ancient modalities of human existence.

Without giving away the thrilling, disturbing secrets of Rush's fate and his altered state of being by novel's end, we can say that his narrative is so multilayered and involuted that it thumbs its nose at old-fashioned Victorian modes of storytelling. Additionally, because all the information about the world of the future is delivered matter-of-factly, without infodumps in Rush's voice, we experience the sort of delicious estrangement that slipstream or postmodern writing values so highly. (Curiously enough, the very next year, 1980, was to see the appearance of a kindred book, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.) With each successive moment of understanding (Rush and his kind no longer even eat or reproduce as we do, for instance), the reader gets another jolt. Also, Crowley's refusal to complete Rush's saga beyond a certain point is very much a metafictional gambit.

Yet at the same time Crowley layers in eternal, mythic elements, such as a moment when Rush is identified with Theseus, following a thread that would lead to Once a Day, his Ariadne. In this sense, Crowley and his book are part of the same movement that perceived SF as a modern mythology, and that produced Delany's The Einstein Intersection (1967). (And Crowley even plays with the same kind of Ouroboros ending-beginning that Delany used in Dhalgren [1975], arguably a post-apocalypse predecessor of a sort.) Crowley's brilliant and sustainable identification of sainthood and storytelling (a saint is someone whose story and self are ultimately unified, transparent and inhabitable by others) is the kind of mythic resonance that later authors such as Neil Gaiman would strive for and yet reduce to bathos.

In fact, this book, despite its 1979 publication date, can in a sense be seen as the ultimate terminal flowering of the New Wave and the birth of its literary successor movement. The whole notion of the hippie-ish commune roots of Little Belaire, plus the aggressive feminism of the Long League, betray its politics and vintage.

But all this abstraction and intellectual parsing of the book denies or obscures its immediate impact and accessibility. The story Rush tells is gripping, instantly apprehensible, emotionally wrenching and involving. The autumnal, elegiac atmosphere hits the reader like a bus. (The Aldiss work cited above is the only one that comes close to achieving this same effect for me.) The Le Guin-style anthropological riffs are inventive. Nor is Crowley above shamelessly using the blunt instruments of the genre. Teeplee's American flag garment, for instance, might have come straight out of Planet of the Apes (1968).

Blending echoes of Clifford Simak, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, John Varley and even Andre Norton, Crowley's compact masterpiece (arguably even greater than his other work in view of how much it managed to cram into so small a package) transcends all its earthly origins and inhabits a city in the sky, where angels dwell and stories are cherished.