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PM's Outspoken Authors #19
Totalitopia
John Crowley's all-new essay “Totalitopia” is a wry how-to guide for building utopias out of the leftovers of modern science fiction. “This Is Our Town,” written especially for this volume, is a warm, witty, and wonderfully moving story about angels, cousins, and natural disasters based on a parochial school third-grade reader. One of Crowley’s hard-to-find masterpieces, “Gone” is a Kafkaesque science fiction adventure about an alien invasion that includes door-to-door leafleting and yard work. Perhaps the most entertaining of Crowley's “Easy Chair” columns in Harper's , “Everything That Rises” explores the fractal interface between Russian spiritualism and quantum singularities—with a nod to both Columbus and Flannery O'Connor. “And Go Like This” creeps in from Datlow's Year's Best , the Wild Turkey of horror anthologies. There's a bibliography, an author bio, and of course our Outspoken Interview, the usual cage fight between candor and common sense.
128 pages, Paperback
First published May 8, 2017
7 people are currently reading
126 people want to read
About the author
John Crowley
129 books832 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.
In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”
In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation.
Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)
John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942; his father was then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Endless Things) in 2007. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
His first published novels were science fiction: The Deep (1975) and Beasts (1976). Engine Summer (1979) was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award; it appears in David Pringle’s 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.
In 1981 came Little, Big, which Ursula Le Guin described as a book that “all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.”
In 1980 Crowley embarked on an ambitious four-volume novel, Ægypt, comprising The Solitudes (originally published as Ægypt), Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania, and Endless Things, published in May 2007. This series and Little, Big were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
He is also the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant. His recent novels are The Translator, recipient of the Premio Flaianno (Italy), and Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, which contains an entire imaginary novel by the poet. A novella, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, appeared in 2002. A museum-quality 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton and a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, is in preparation.
Note: The John Crowley who wrote Sans épines, la rose: Tony Blair, un modèle pour l'Europe? is a different author with the same name. (website)
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
October 14, 2020
This special collection from the Outspoken Authors series has four short stories, three essays, and an interview with the author.
These are the first stories I've ever read by Crowley, and they are certainly strange. "This is Our Town" is ostensibly a mainstream story following a very religious Catholic girl, but is somehow set in the actual town of the Catholic book for children, This is Our Town. "Gone" is another disorienting story about a woman faced with an alien wanting to do chores (though that's only the tip), and "In the Tom Mix Museum" was incomprehensible to me beyond knowing it's featuring some cowboy history. "And Go Like This" was quite interesting, taking a Buckminster Fuller quote about the entire world being able to fit in NYC and carrying it out with some implications.
The essays were interesting: "Totalitopia" discussing SF's so-called predictiveness and "Everything That Rises" about transhumanism (looking closely at the Russian cosmism of Federov). We also get an extended review of Paul Park's works, which was also intriguing, though I'll be reading the Paul Park entry in the Outspoken Author series in a couple months. The interview with Terry Bisson certainly indicates a very interesting background and outlook to Crowley's writing.
These are the first stories I've ever read by Crowley, and they are certainly strange. "This is Our Town" is ostensibly a mainstream story following a very religious Catholic girl, but is somehow set in the actual town of the Catholic book for children, This is Our Town. "Gone" is another disorienting story about a woman faced with an alien wanting to do chores (though that's only the tip), and "In the Tom Mix Museum" was incomprehensible to me beyond knowing it's featuring some cowboy history. "And Go Like This" was quite interesting, taking a Buckminster Fuller quote about the entire world being able to fit in NYC and carrying it out with some implications.
The essays were interesting: "Totalitopia" discussing SF's so-called predictiveness and "Everything That Rises" about transhumanism (looking closely at the Russian cosmism of Federov). We also get an extended review of Paul Park's works, which was also intriguing, though I'll be reading the Paul Park entry in the Outspoken Author series in a couple months. The interview with Terry Bisson certainly indicates a very interesting background and outlook to Crowley's writing.
October 8, 2018
A bit uneven & probably one for completists, of which there should be a great many given the author's fantastic output. My favourite bit was probably the interview, but it was all worth reading.
April 17, 2018
I’ve always intended to read something by John Crowley, but somehow until now I’d never got around to it. But when PM Press decided to include him in their Outspoken Authors series, it finally seemed the right time to make a start. Said volume, titled Totalitopia, is a collection of short fiction and essays by Crowley, augmented with an interview and bibliography.
The first story in the collection, This Is Our Town, was in itself enough to make me happy I’d decided to read it. It is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of childhood, faith and memory, set in a small American mining town that has seen disasters and, possibly, miracles. The narrator is a young girl from a relatively poor Catholic family, who converses with her guardian angel and believes that prayer, free will, and God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience can be reconciled in such a way that, somehow, good will prevail - and who, in looking back as an adult, longs for that childhood certainty of faith.
What if, when the aliens come, they offer to do your chores? Why might they do such a thing? What would be their ulterior motive - for as everyone knows, aliens always have an ulterior motive. The short story Gone suggests one possibility.
And Go Like This is a story inspired by a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.” Crowley writes this as if it happened, all the people in the world painstaking transported to NYC, assigned spaces, and then, when all are accounted fir, the music starts on a hundred thousand records players and the world twists. But the twist is also a psychological one, for what would it mean, that for a brief point in time, the whole of the world were neighbours?
The title piece, Totalitopia, is an essay - serious in intent for all its lightness of tone - on the predictive tendencies of science fiction. Crowley advances various approaches to predictive SF, notes that many futuristic utopias and dystopias are actually commentaries n present conditions rather than serious attempt to forecast the future, and discusses a few of the classic texts, even advancing his own ‘prediction’ - which bears certain resemblances to my own ideas of utopia, something which disposes me to think I may enjoy more of this author’s works - before concluding:
“It will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature. Of course holding the mirror up to nature is what Hamlet insisted all playing, or pretending, must do; but—as Lewis Carroll knew—the image in a mirror, however scary or amusing or enlightening, is always reversed.”
In the essay “Everything that Rises,” Crowley gently critiques the transhumanist movement - which he links to a strain of primarily Russian scientifically-inspired mysticism known as cosmism. Immortality, the transference of mind to mechanical rather than biological substrates, the transmission of the human data stream at the speed of light, the development of the superintelligent AI - all these speculations on the future of mind are part of this movement, and come under Crowley’s eye.
The concluding essay is a review of the works of another author I’ve never read, Paul Parks. Here Crowley does the work of a reviewer well, for in Paul Park’ Hidden Worlds he makes me think quite seriously about looking into some of the books he discusses.
The volume ends, as all of the books in this series do, with an interview conducted by Terry Bisson. Between the sentiments expressed in the interview, and my feeling of profound delight with both fiction and essays collected in this volume, I have the distinct sense that I have missed out on something I would have enjoyed very much in not reading Crowley earlier, and despite the clamourings of thousands of other books demanding to be read, I really must find space for more of his work in the never-ending queue.
The first story in the collection, This Is Our Town, was in itself enough to make me happy I’d decided to read it. It is a fascinating and multilayered exploration of childhood, faith and memory, set in a small American mining town that has seen disasters and, possibly, miracles. The narrator is a young girl from a relatively poor Catholic family, who converses with her guardian angel and believes that prayer, free will, and God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience can be reconciled in such a way that, somehow, good will prevail - and who, in looking back as an adult, longs for that childhood certainty of faith.
What if, when the aliens come, they offer to do your chores? Why might they do such a thing? What would be their ulterior motive - for as everyone knows, aliens always have an ulterior motive. The short story Gone suggests one possibility.
And Go Like This is a story inspired by a quote from Buckminster Fuller: “There is room enough indoors in New York City for the whole 1963 world’s population to enter, with room enough inside for all hands to dance the twist in average nightclub proximity.” Crowley writes this as if it happened, all the people in the world painstaking transported to NYC, assigned spaces, and then, when all are accounted fir, the music starts on a hundred thousand records players and the world twists. But the twist is also a psychological one, for what would it mean, that for a brief point in time, the whole of the world were neighbours?
The title piece, Totalitopia, is an essay - serious in intent for all its lightness of tone - on the predictive tendencies of science fiction. Crowley advances various approaches to predictive SF, notes that many futuristic utopias and dystopias are actually commentaries n present conditions rather than serious attempt to forecast the future, and discusses a few of the classic texts, even advancing his own ‘prediction’ - which bears certain resemblances to my own ideas of utopia, something which disposes me to think I may enjoy more of this author’s works - before concluding:
“It will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature. Of course holding the mirror up to nature is what Hamlet insisted all playing, or pretending, must do; but—as Lewis Carroll knew—the image in a mirror, however scary or amusing or enlightening, is always reversed.”
In the essay “Everything that Rises,” Crowley gently critiques the transhumanist movement - which he links to a strain of primarily Russian scientifically-inspired mysticism known as cosmism. Immortality, the transference of mind to mechanical rather than biological substrates, the transmission of the human data stream at the speed of light, the development of the superintelligent AI - all these speculations on the future of mind are part of this movement, and come under Crowley’s eye.
The concluding essay is a review of the works of another author I’ve never read, Paul Parks. Here Crowley does the work of a reviewer well, for in Paul Park’ Hidden Worlds he makes me think quite seriously about looking into some of the books he discusses.
The volume ends, as all of the books in this series do, with an interview conducted by Terry Bisson. Between the sentiments expressed in the interview, and my feeling of profound delight with both fiction and essays collected in this volume, I have the distinct sense that I have missed out on something I would have enjoyed very much in not reading Crowley earlier, and despite the clamourings of thousands of other books demanding to be read, I really must find space for more of his work in the never-ending queue.
November 18, 2017
The essays here are more beautifully written than the stories and also offer insights in to Crowley's fiction--especially the review of Paul Park's work: "Paul Park's Roumania series . . . is as dense with synecdochic detail as the great realist novels of the place and time in which (mutatis very much mutandis) it is set, and almost requires the constant attention that an obdurate self-creating modernist text requires. It’s like reading A MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES or Proust or late Henry James, not because these books resemble those books at all, but because they make a similar demand on the attention and on the reader’s powers of appreciation, and the risk of surfeit that reading them entails--you, or at least I can only read them for so long before having to pause. Keep up, the text seems to say, every word of this is meant, it’s neither page filling nor self-indulgence, some of it will be answered in later pages and some not but that’s not the reason to pay attention.” The same can be said about the pleasures of reading (and rereading) LITTLE, BIG or Crowley's latest masterpiece, KA.
December 8, 2018
An installment in PM's series of chapbooks from different authors, mostly science fiction and fantasy, Crowley's includes an interesting selection of short stories ("This Is Our Town" being the real stand-out here) a few essays and a brief, but enlightening interview.
The centerpiece of the book is clearly Crowley's titular essay. "Totalitopia" is an interesting slight of hand wherein Mr. Crowley is pretending to posit a method of predicting the future, but is actually finding a way to discuss the uses of Science Fiction as a form. It will alienate a certain kind of reader and speak volumes to another.
While everything here is of some interest, much of it is slight. None of it, however, is inelegant. "Everything That Rises" traces the obscure and fascinating history of Russian Cosmism and dovetails nicely into Crowley's most recent novel, "Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymr." "Paul Park's Hidden Worlds" takes on the radical Amercan fantasist, clearly a literary brethren to Crowley. "In the Tom Mix Museum" is an oddly affecting piece that is almost a tone poem.
Not essential Crowley, by any means, but a quick engaging read that rounds out one's Crowley-ana nicely.
The centerpiece of the book is clearly Crowley's titular essay. "Totalitopia" is an interesting slight of hand wherein Mr. Crowley is pretending to posit a method of predicting the future, but is actually finding a way to discuss the uses of Science Fiction as a form. It will alienate a certain kind of reader and speak volumes to another.
While everything here is of some interest, much of it is slight. None of it, however, is inelegant. "Everything That Rises" traces the obscure and fascinating history of Russian Cosmism and dovetails nicely into Crowley's most recent novel, "Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymr." "Paul Park's Hidden Worlds" takes on the radical Amercan fantasist, clearly a literary brethren to Crowley. "In the Tom Mix Museum" is an oddly affecting piece that is almost a tone poem.
Not essential Crowley, by any means, but a quick engaging read that rounds out one's Crowley-ana nicely.
June 12, 2018
yeah, it's John Crowley, but it's still rather dull in toto... the "previously unpublished" tale is typical Crowley but just feels pasted into this volume... i tend to dismay at these publications, since on the one hand they make money for the writer and the publisher (a good thing, right?) BUT on the other hand they are often just barely noteworthy at all, brimming with errata and some "rare" piece (sorry, peeps, but a story published in another collection BY THE AUTHOR could hardly be called "rare" unless by "rare" you mean "many readers were too lazy to look for it") and some other randomly selected items of middling quality or interest... yeah, i hate these things, sorry... if you're a fan of Crowley, you find his stories, novels, and essays on your own probably... if one were to come across this and use it as a primer for Crowley, one would likely never follow it up by reading his Aegypt cycle, or Little, Big or anything else by the author since this book lacks any real sense for Crowley's genius and mastery of style... ugh...
August 10, 2017
Stopgap while we wait for Crowley's next novel. (Due soon!) My friend Jamie described Crowley yesterday as "Josh's favourite writer." Maybe! (Favourite living writer, maybe.) I have no idea how the pieces in this anthology were selected. It seems kind of random, but that's fine by me. Fiction and non-fiction, some of which was previously collected and some of which was not. Plus a brand-new (and revealing) interview at the end.
October 2, 2024
I found this book in one of those leave a book take a book things in ATL. It's funny imo...idk at times it seems like the ramblings of a mad man. It's one of those books that you can just pick a random chapter and read it and keep on with your day
December 6, 2021
GOOD WILL
YOU MARK BELOW.
ALL ALL RIGHT WITH LOVE AFTERWARDS
WHY NOT SAY YES
[ ] YES
YOU MARK BELOW.
ALL ALL RIGHT WITH LOVE AFTERWARDS
WHY NOT SAY YES
[ ] YES
April 7, 2024
With Crowley, five stars is the minimum. He's apparently unable to write anything less than stellar. And "Gone" is going to wrench you.
November 2, 2025
Pretty meh overall. Didn’t make me think or feel very much… felt dated. Not sure what the deal is with him.
December 10, 2020
Another book from PM Press Outspoken Authors. This one needed help with a few of the words Kindle lets me check without putting down the eBook.
Non-fiction, novella, essay, biography all in one small book? It's like a tasting menu.
(Just had my public library send Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. I want more of John Crowley)
Non-fiction, novella, essay, biography all in one small book? It's like a tasting menu.
(Just had my public library send Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr. I want more of John Crowley)
June 2, 2024
interview, essays and four stories:
This Is Our Town (2017)
Gone (1996)
In the Tom Mix Museum (2012)
And Go Like This (2011)
This Is Our Town (2017)
Gone (1996)
In the Tom Mix Museum (2012)
And Go Like This (2011)
Read
April 23, 2018Part of PM Press’ Outspoken Authors, slim miscellanies far finer than the slightly embarrassing series name suggests. This time, stories and articles by, and an interview with, the great John Crowley – an odd figure in that both the SF and literary establishments seem to rate him, without his ever having attained the wider recognition of a Le Guin, Moorcock or Butler. The collection opens with a story set in a storybook town, told by a child remembering the simpler days when they could see their guardian angel; in some details it overlaps surprisingly closely with Mark Twain’s ‘Captain Stormfield’, which I read less than 24 hours earlier. You could tie yourself in knots asking whether it’s really fantasy, and if so what sort; the wise will simply say that it’s by John Crowley, and know that’s enough. Next up, the title essay, in which Crowley shares his trick of predicting the future by assuming that everyone else is predicting it wrong. He freely admits that like every other method it will fail, and produce futures which tell you more about the moment of their conception than anything which somehow transpires, but that’s no worse than any other method’s average, and at least ones made this way stand out more. ‘Everything that Rises’ recounts a visit to a Cosmist conference, where the heirs of Fedorov shade into modern transhumanism. As in ‘Totalitopia’, Crowley is fairly sure these predictions are wrong, without suggesting they’re any wronger than anyone else, comparing them to Columbus, “voyager who only dimly knew where he was going, and was wrong about where he arrived”, but still remade the world.
Two stories – which is to say, roughly a quarter of the volume – also appear in Novelties and Souvenirs, the default collection of Crowley’s short fiction. Given this book will surely sell mainly to Crowley fans*, that could be construed as cheeky. Not that they're not good; 'Gone' is Mr Meeseeks from Rick and Morty replayed for a sort of melancholy uplift, while 'And Go Like This' makes concrete, in a fairytale sort of way, Buckminster Fuller's notion that - as of the sixties, anyway - all of humanity could fit indoors in New York City and still have room to do the Twist. In between them sits 'In The Tom Mix Museum', probably best classified as a prose poem, and possessed of more inchoate resonance than something so short might seem able to sustain. Following that, an essay on the works of Paul Park, a writer I've been meaning to read for at least a decade, I think precisely because I found a free book of his with a Crowley quote on the cover. An urge now revivified, though whether it'll take this time, who knows? Still, the piece gets off to an odd start when Crowley suggests that as a rule, set against the likes of Woolf, Joyce or DH Lawrence, "the writers of works now generally classed as 'genre' - thrillers, horror novels, fantasy and science fiction, mysteries - seem the ones who put their lives to the least use". Really? Sure, he allows recent exceptions in crime, but even in science fiction and fantasy I think of counter-examples from Robert E Howard's homosocial visions of escape from civilised constraint, and Lovecraft's alienated horror at the Other, through to Yoon Ha Lee's first-hand experience of what it's like to be stuck in the wrong body.
Finally, as always in this series, the interview. Which I find hard to judge because I've not seen Crowley interviewed before, so can't say how much it varies from others of its kind, or how good the questions were - but I certainly enjoyed reading it, which I suppose is the main thing? Even if it did remind me how difficult I found the conclusion of the Aegypt sequence.
*Looking at other Goodreads reviews, I may have been mistaken on this point.
Two stories – which is to say, roughly a quarter of the volume – also appear in Novelties and Souvenirs, the default collection of Crowley’s short fiction. Given this book will surely sell mainly to Crowley fans*, that could be construed as cheeky. Not that they're not good; 'Gone' is Mr Meeseeks from Rick and Morty replayed for a sort of melancholy uplift, while 'And Go Like This' makes concrete, in a fairytale sort of way, Buckminster Fuller's notion that - as of the sixties, anyway - all of humanity could fit indoors in New York City and still have room to do the Twist. In between them sits 'In The Tom Mix Museum', probably best classified as a prose poem, and possessed of more inchoate resonance than something so short might seem able to sustain. Following that, an essay on the works of Paul Park, a writer I've been meaning to read for at least a decade, I think precisely because I found a free book of his with a Crowley quote on the cover. An urge now revivified, though whether it'll take this time, who knows? Still, the piece gets off to an odd start when Crowley suggests that as a rule, set against the likes of Woolf, Joyce or DH Lawrence, "the writers of works now generally classed as 'genre' - thrillers, horror novels, fantasy and science fiction, mysteries - seem the ones who put their lives to the least use". Really? Sure, he allows recent exceptions in crime, but even in science fiction and fantasy I think of counter-examples from Robert E Howard's homosocial visions of escape from civilised constraint, and Lovecraft's alienated horror at the Other, through to Yoon Ha Lee's first-hand experience of what it's like to be stuck in the wrong body.
Finally, as always in this series, the interview. Which I find hard to judge because I've not seen Crowley interviewed before, so can't say how much it varies from others of its kind, or how good the questions were - but I certainly enjoyed reading it, which I suppose is the main thing? Even if it did remind me how difficult I found the conclusion of the Aegypt sequence.
*Looking at other Goodreads reviews, I may have been mistaken on this point.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews