Engine Summer

 
Engine Summer

by John Crowley

Doubleday

1979

 

 

Engine Summer is a post-apocalyptic novel from the 1970s, but it's not dystopian. It takes place centuries after the collapse of the old civilization, after all the chaos has ended, in a kind of low-tech steady-state society that, if not utopian, at least seems pretty nice. The novel is formatted as a life-history interview of Rush That Speaks, a young man from the post-apocalyptic society, telling his story to an 'angel,' which is what his society calls the people from before the apocalypse.

 
Part of the story, then, is explaining how Rush came to meet a human from the last surviving bastion of high-tech civilization. In fact a lot of the pleasure of reading this book is learning about Rush's society and continuously revising what you thought you knew in light of new information. Initially, I thought the story took place is California, both because the old humans are called angels (from Los Angeles, I guessed?) and because Rush's home community is called Little Belaire. I also initially thought the apocalypse took place in the late 1970s, but the more angel technology I saw, the more I refined that estimate. So I'll try to preserve the pleasure of learning the book's secrets.

 
Rush is from an underground habitat called Little Belaire, home to the Truthful Speakers. As a boy, he falls in love with the girl Once A Day, but she leaves the Speakers to join Dr Boots' List, a nomadic community who visit Belaire annually to trade. Rush decides that he wants to become a Saint, basically a person who has led a life worthy of being recounted in story, and so leaves home too when he reaches adulthood.

 
Rush spends one year living in the forest with a hermit who might also be a saint. He finds Dr Boots' List and joins them for a year or so. He spends roughly a third year living alone, occasionally trading with a scavenger. And then he meets the angel. There is no real action in this story, no fights, no great conflicts, only discovery. Crowley has created a rich, interesting society (two really, the Speakers and the List) and they are fascinating to read about.

 
To the extent that there's a through-line to the story, it involves a legend of four dead men who the angels preserved. The first time Rush learns about them, it's while seeing an image of Mount Rushmore. Later we learn that the angels made four glass spheres that each contain the memory of a dead person. Later that there might be a fifth sphere. The List have a sphere and use it once a year. And it is by finding additional technology, a glove and a ball, that are somehow related to the sphere, that Rush is able to meet an angel and give the interview whose transcript is the book.

 
I enjoyed this one. I liked Rush That Speaks. I liked learning about Little Belaire. It was fun to recognize something pre-apocalyptic that Rush could only describe but not name, or realizing how his understanding of something differs from mine. Engine Summer, for example, refers to the half-season that was called Indian Summer where I grew up. It's both the time of year when most of the book's events take place and a metaphor for the period in human history that Rush lives in. More generally, I enjoyed the slow unfolding of information about the strange future world.