Urth Net
Crowley
↰ answers Kieran Cleary
· by quotation
3 quoted lines · 1–2 deep
....it's going to
be much shorter than the previous ones. Maybe 2004. I know Crowley wants to wind up the series, and who can blame him.
Thanks for the news, Alga. You make it sound as if Crowley is thoroughly fed-up of the series. Hope he's not going to short-change us. Any more words on what the Translator is about?
I don't think he is exactly fed up, but he wants to close it out. The last volume will be set in the present (2003 or so), the central figure will be a grown-up Sam, and we will be hearing directly from Fellowes Kraft, via a diary, I suppose. Prague will feature--as you recall, at the end of the last book Pierce was set to go to Prague. The passage time will be over, and the world that Sam (and the others) live in is the world that has resulted. It is to be much shorter. I wonder how he will cope with Sept. 11; he can't just ignore it. Perhaps it will change his mind about the book.
The Translator is set at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The two central figures are a Russian poet who is a visiting professor at a Midwestern university and a female graduate student who undertakes to help him translate his poetry into English. There are layers of meaning. As you might expect. You may be interested to know that the basic idea for the novel came partly from Tom Disch (himself a poet, of course). And that Crowley wrote it to be deliberately more accessible and "popular" than the Aegypt series.
-alga