From: "Alice K. Turner" 
Subject: (urth) Crowley
Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 03:08:09 -0500


> > ....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



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