M. John Harrison returns to the Shakespeare and Company Podcast to talk with Adam Biles about his new novel, The End of Everything, a disaster story set in a "wrong UK" where societal collapse coincides with the arrival of an alien presence, and the strange shape-shifting "artefacts" it leaves behind.

Harrison discusses writing an "epistemological" catastrophe rather than a physical one, the decades of discipline it took to trust readers without over-explaining, and how the book's permacrisis mirrors post-2008 Britain and Brexit. He talks character-building from "bits and pieces" of real people, why he refuses to fully reveal his monsters, and how AI anxieties seeped into a book largely conceived before ChatGPT. 

Buy The End of Everything: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/anabasis-2

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MICHAEL JOHN HARRISON is the author of, among others, the Viriconium stories, The Centauri Device, Climbers, The Course of the Heart, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Signs of Life, Light and Nova Swing. He has won the Boardman Tasker Prize (Climbers), the James Tiptree Jr Award (Light), the Arthur C. Clarke Award (Nova Swing) and the Goldsmiths Prize (The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again). He lives in Shropshire.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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