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The Deep (Crowley novel)

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(Redirected from The Deep (John Crowley)) 1975 novel by John Crowley

Cover of the first edition, published by Doubleday. Cover art by John Cayea.

The Deep is a 1975 speculative fiction novel by American writer John Crowley, who described it as being "based quite closely on events in the English Wars of the Roses". The novel is set in a medieval world where the two factions, the "Reds" and the "Blacks", struggle for supremacy through battle.

Plot

A visitor arrives in the conflict between the two factions, the "Reds" and the "Blacks". It soon becomes apparent that he (it) is only superficially human. Damaged in a skirmish between Protectors and the Just at the start, he and we spend the rest of the book finding out how and why he was made and sent. Early, Fauconred quotes their book: "the world is founded on a pillar which is founded on the Deep". This turns out to be true.

Whilst a war of succession plays out, the visitor becomes secretary, then recorder; and travels to the edge of the world to meet Leviathan, an immemorial creature who built the world to shelter his sleep from the heaven stones. Meanwhile, the slow stable world which has been immortal because repeating for uncounted years begins to spiral into the unknown path of development.

Reception

Critics Brian W. Aldiss and David Wingrove praised The Deep as "a remarkable first novel, well written and darkly true to human nature." They described it as "a complex novel of many layers people live and breathe and die horribly in pages.

References

  1. "SF". John Crowley Author. Archived from the original on August 7, 2022.
  2. "Aldiss & Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree, Victor Gollancz, 1986, p.453

Further reading

External links

Works by John Crowley
Novels
  • The Deep (1975)
  • Beasts (1976)
  • Engine Summer (1979)
  • Little, Big (1981)
  • The Translator (2002)
  • Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (2005)
  • Four Freedoms (2009)
  • The Chemical Wedding: by Christian Rosencreutz: A Romance in Eight Days by Johann Valentin Andreae in a New Version (2016)
  • Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (2017)
  • Flint and Mirror: A Novel of History and Magic (2022)
Ægypt Cycle
Short fiction
  • "Antiquities" (1977)
  • "Where Spirits Gat Them Home" (1978)
  • "The Single Excursion of Caspar Last" (1979)
  • "The Reason for the Visit" (1980)
  • "The Green Child" (1981)
  • "Novelty" (1983)
  • "Snow" (1985)
  • "The Nightingale Sings at Night" (1989)
  • "Great Work of Time" (novella, originally published in Novelty, 1989)
  • "In Blue" (1989)
  • "Missolonghi 1824" (1990)
  • "Exogamy" (1993)
  • "Gone" (1996)
  • "Lost and Abandoned" (1997)
  • "An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings" (2000)
  • "The War Between the Objects and the Subjects" (2002)
  • "The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines" (2002)
  • "Little Yeses, Little Nos" (2005)
  • "Conversation Hearts" (2008)
  • "And Go Like This" (2011)
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