Ebony Earwig asked Richard C. Cox:

Are you planning to release any other books? Or is The Everything everything?

Richard C. Cox Apologies, Ebony, for taking so long to answer this—Goodreads have been messing with the site again, and I’ve only just found it (that’s GR for you though: all the things which do badly need fixing, they never touch, while all the stuff that’s fine already is what they change!)

I have thought about some sort of follow-up to the book—it was unusual, though, the way that came together. The idea overall was to try to give the reader a fresh look at our universe—I’ve long thought our own world is so odd, so decidedly peculiar, it almost looks like fiction itself, but how do you get that feeling across? The problem is that we’re looking at it all from the inside, so to speak, from here, and maybe what you’d need would be to somehow see it from the outside, from a completely fresh vantage point, looking back at it from somewhere different. So the idea was to give the reader a couple of hundred pages of that “somewhere different”, then (embedded in it, probably near the end) a glimpse of here. Try to catch the reader’s mind unawares, in other words, sort of spring it on them.

I had that simple idea ages ago, but all the actual stuff that fills the book’s pages—all the weird landscapes, buildings, animals and plants, theories and stories, works of art and all the rest—only accumulated slowly, and in no particular order either, over decades. I don’t think there’s any possible way of repeating that, and in any case the idea from early on was also to try to finish up with something as unclassifiable as possible—an absolute one-off.

Not sure it worked anyway; another reason I’ve been slow to write anything else is the pasting the book has taken from some readers, particularly on Amazon, who clearly had no idea what to make of it! So The Everything, almost certainly, really is everything.

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