Andrew Crumey

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945, commenting on unorthodox approaches to genre fiction by writers including Crumey, Frank Kuppner and Ken MacLeod, said "Andrew Crumey is one of the most innovative and engaging Scottish writers to emerge out of this context in the last twenty years. His speculative fiction has a strong European and global dimension, drawing on the influence of Borges, Calvino and Milorad Pavic in its intricate, nested narratives, non-linearity, and ludic encyclopaedism."

In Twenty-First-century Fiction: Contemporary British Voices, Daniel Lea put Crumey in a list of "post-postmodernist" British writers that included Iain Banks, Bernardine Evaristo and Neil Gaiman, characterised by an "intermingling of genre and literary fiction."

Bent Sorensen bracketed Crumey with another physicist-turned-novelist, Alan Lightman, and discussed their move from science to literature using Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of "field", "position-taking" and "gatekeeping".

Sorensen wrote that Crumey was "opposed to the postmodern epistemology when asked to define his world-view in philosophical terms... his fictional practice, however, can still fairly be characterized as postmodern."

Timothy C. Baker described Crumey's novels as "monadological", citing Deleuze's reading of Leibniz, and observing that "The relation between [Crumey's] novels is unusual: five of his seven novels explore, in various ways, the legacies of Enlightenment thought, often drawing upon the same ideas and figures. These novels, crucially, do not amount to a sequence, nor is the relation between events in them ever straightforwardly causal. Instead, each novel covers similar ground in a series of overlapping folds, while remaining narratively distinct."

Cultural theorist Sonia Front wrote, "The notion of parallel universes seems to be Andrew Crumey's favourite physical theory... His writings can be seen as a multiverse themselves, with the characters reappearing to live an alternative world-line in another novel."

Florian Kläger sees "a self-reflexive cosmopoetics of the novel" in the writings of Crumey, Martin Amis, John Banville, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson.