During the years in which I began to write fiction, my imagination seemed to be a rover, seeking odd and unlikely subjects, most of which I’d discard as unworkable. Three or four though I found to be usable—a war like the Wars of the Roses of the fifteenth century in England, fought on a distant planet; a far-future America, depopulated, quiet, green; a science experiment that blends DNA to create a being half-lion, half-human. In all that time I was auditioning—so to speak—other options. One that couldn’t be dismissed but which I wasn’t ready to take up was the story of the Tudor plantation of Ireland and the resistance of Irish chieftains to English dominion. I found a book by the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain, a biography of Hugh O’Neill, and read and reread it. I began outlining events, seeking for a beginning, and not finding one. I put it aside, the book and the notes.
Some years later, I wrote a story based on the song “Silkie” that Joan Baez made popular; I was also deep into the life of Dr. John Dee, astrologer, angelologist, alchemist; and I began to see that the Irish story, which had never gone away, was akin to these. The late Gardner Dozois published the piece—now grown into a novella—and it reached enough readers whom I trusted, who’d urged the novella could be part of a novel, and that’s what it is—a mash-up in old genre lingo, enriched with a few years of further study and thought, and now complete. In its writing it doesn’t much resemble anything else I’ve written, but then almost none of my books resemble any of the others, which I’m very happy about.
So I acknowledge here my debt to Gardner Dozois, to Henry Farrell, to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, to Howard Morhaim, who convinced an editor and a firm to take it on; to the many scholars of Irish history I read and drew from, forgot, returned to, remembered; to L, my wife, critic and encourager, to friends who listened to what I could tell them at a moment in time; and to you, reader, one perhaps of not a great number who have come this far with me.
John Crowley, Conway, Massachusetts, September 30, 2021