Crowley employs a variety of techniques in Novelty. "The Nightingale Sings at Night" is cast as a simple retelling of the creation myth. Yet at its heart, it owes much to the beast fables and allegorical tales of the Middle Ages. Beast fables were a popular genre well before Chaucer's perfection of the form in the Canterbury Tales (c.

1390). Dame Kind is a character drawn from works such as Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung's Roman de la Rose and Alanus de Insulis's The Complaint of Nature.

"Great Work of Time" with its time travel and focus on the British Empire clearly echoes the work of H. G. Wells, particularly The Time Machine (1895). In his third short story, "In Blue" technique and literary precedent change again; here Crowley employs the genre of dystopian fiction in the tradition of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1925), Aldous Huxley's...