Conceived around 2010 as the novel I might have submitted for serialisation at New Worlds in 1967 if I’d had the skill to write it. An array of parodies, self parodies, pastiches and political metaphors. The idea that our contemporary economic-environmental disaster can be–is already being–passed off as a temporary “crisis”, I extended from a short story of that name (find it here or here), which also provided some of the set-up.

At one level The End of Everything is about trying to live as if nothing has gone wrong. At another it’s a gentrification satire. Aliens not as space invaders but as incomers from another dimension, paralleling the arts-gentrification of Margate & Deal. A sense that the original invasion of the UK’s south eastern seaboard by middle class Londoners is repeated in the appropriation of human space by the aliens.

The book is 40,000 words. That encouraged an aggressive extension of the structure I sometimes use for short stories, in which a stretched epilogue accompanied by register change or tonal shift seems to offer closure or at least a new perspective but really only asks more questions.

Underlying: the problem of Umwelt and the perceptual centrism of species. What no one actually says in the novel: “The world we perceive–and live in according to those perceptions–is an epiphenomenon of processes we can’t even identify, let alone understand. Everything we tell ourselves about it is a set of rationales tailored to prevent our acknowledgment of that.” Nothing, obviously, is solved. There’s a lot of telling-not-showing where the set-up is concerned, though as always you can find the book’s real concerns and issues in the unspoken. Lots of quite loaded ekphrasis too, & not just in the art-chat.