A Son of the Rock

Doubleday, 1989, 235 p.

This is a collection of four pieces of Crowley’s shorter fiction.

The Nightingale Sings at Night is a fable outlining a creation myth garnished with a touch of Just So story. It tells how Boy and Girl (later to become Man and Woman) were the first to name things in the world made by Dame Kind in times when the Moon could talk, and did so slyly. And it tells us why the nightingale, who only ever had this one idea, came to sing only at night.

As its title might suggest, Great Work of Time is a tale of time travel, hinging on whether – or not – Cecil Rhodes was assassinated at his house Groote Schuur, in 1893. A society calling itself the Otherhood was set up after a provision in his will in order to preserve the Empire to which he was so attached. The story starts with Caspar Last in 1983 inventing a method of time travel which involves what our narrator (as in Heinlein’s “‘-All You Zombies-‘” despite superficial appearances, there is really only one) calls orthogonal logic – past and present do not lie before and behind the present but at right angles to it. Yet this story could start anywhere – or anywhen – and is mainly concerned with the life of Denys Winterset, the President pro tem of the Otherhood (all its presidents are pro tem) who is contacted in Khartoum on a journey north on the Cape to Cairo railway, enticed into the Otherhood and given the job of assassinating Rhodes. In the Otherhood’s timeline the Empire was prolonged, the Great War wasn’t so great since it ended in 1915 with the Treaty of Monaco and as a consequence the Holocaust never happened. The story roams hither and thither across the Empire’s history including to time’s end in a forest in the sea. The writing here is wonderful and Crowley’s altered worlds are enticing.

In Blue is a story set, post Revolution, in a kind of eutopia based on coincidence magnitude calculations and the act-field theory (which predicts the occurrence, within any given parameters of the field, of coincidences of a certain magnitude.) Whatever you do, whatever comes about in the whole act field, is by definition what act-field theory predicts. All possible disproofs were themselves provable parts of act-field theory as was everything else. Our protagonist, Hare, meets a woman who thinks there is no such thing as act-field theory but that as long as everybody else believes in it, then it does work. A beautiful expression of the type of double-think which exists in authoritarian societies.

Novelty relates the struggle of a writer to come to terms with his theme, the contrary pull people feel between Novelty and Security

Pedant’s corner:- “A theatrical costumer” (costumier,) “the place where the Nile had its origin” (the text implies this origin is the Victoria Falls, which are on the Zambezi, not the Nile,) railroad (I know it was written by a USian and for a USian publication but Brits don’t use that word. It’s a railway. Similarly we had ‘drapes’ for ‘curtains’,) the American civil war” (it’s a proper noun so, American Civil War,) “the year of grace IV Elizabeth II” (I’m not sure why that ‘IV’ is there – unless it’s to denote the fourth year of the reign,) “I apologise for the hugger-mugger” (hugger-mugger is used here in the sense of secrecy, clandestine, not the usual one of close-packed, disorderly confusion,) question marks omitted from three pieces of direct speech which were questions, “the probability of any two snowflakes’ being exactly alike” (that apostrophe after snowflakes is surely not needed.)