John Crowley (1942– ) is a US fiction writer, screenwriter, and teacher who gained enduring devotion from a legion of fans for his fantasy novel Little, Big (1981), which Harold Bloom called “a neglected masterpiece.” In a sense, Crowley’s Ægypt series can be seen as a continuation of the themes in Little, Big—including exploration of family dynamics, the role of memory, and esoteric strands of religion. Other novels include The Deep (1975), Beasts (1976), and Engine Summer (1979)—the latter a nominee for the 1980 National Book Award. Crowley currently teaches at the Yale Writers’ Workshop and writes a monthly column for Harper’s magazine. He has won the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1992) and the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award (2006), among other honors.
The story reprinted here, “Snow” (1986), was a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Like many of his works, “Snow” deals with the themes of memory and loss. The gadget the Wasp in the story is not too different from modern life today, in which so much of what we do is captured for all eternity.
In a 2011 interview for Lightspeed magazine, Crowley said of the story, “When I was writing it I thought I needed to set the story pretty far in the future in order to make the existence of a machine like the Wasp realistic. So the details of the freight airship and the closed highways were to suggest a world that’s changed greatly from ours. And in the state of my and the world’s knowledge when the story was written in the 1970s, things like the Wasp did seem a long way off. But you probably know that technology has very nearly created the Wasp already. Drones the size of hummingbirds are now capable of facial recognition, can hover and follow and transmit from an array of sensors, and bug-sized ones are coming.”
Crowley notes, “This happens a lot in SF: writers come up with one thing that is not only possible but just about to appear, and insert it into an extraordinary world a long way off, or they leave stuff from their own time in the world they imagine: the first sentence of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, set at some far-off digital world, starts with a sentence (quoted from memory), ‘The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.’ But that’s not how televisions look even today—that gray cloudy look is as old as the snow in my story—dead channels are bright blue. But how could he know that?”