The story follows the extremely long life span of an artificial intelligence that exists on a frozen planet in the vast space between two galaxies.
[1] The following year it was given a French translation and released in the fifteenth fiction special for the magazine Histoires stellaires.
In his paper "2001 in Perspective: The Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke", John Hollow covered the story along with "Dial F for Frankenstein", noting that "The thing mocked in each of these stories, however, is not the machine but man's assumption that he is the be-all and end-all of the universe.
"[5] Zoran Živković covered "Crusade" in his 2018 paper, writing that "The transience and fragility of the world of the giant ammoniac mind–in aeonian proportions, of course–compel it to act to preserve itself.
"[6] Soumya Banerjee cited "Crusade" as the inspiration for this 2016 paper "A Roadmap for a Computational Theory of the Value of Information in Origin of Life Questions".