Years before I’d done an interview with William Gibson for Performance Magazine. Gibson said that the world of his book Neuromancer was only one molecule thick – not a careful or reasonable piece of researched world-building, something more fragile, more playful – and that (in effect) any reality sensed in it by the reader was just a temporary effect, a momentary production in the language. I liked that idea. It made sense to me in terms of other stuff that I respected as writing. In Endland Stories, I was trying to play with how thin the world could be and how dense it could be at the same time, how disposable I could make that world and the characters populating it, while still somehow keeping an engagement with the reader. It meant creating characters and narratives in the ruins of a larger world, whose shape, purpose and extent could only be guessed at. This seemed to me a productive tension. The stories came pretty fast, one after another. Elaine Palmer at Pulp Books included ‘German Fokker’ in an anthology on pop culture, titled Allnighter, and soon afterwards agreed to do the whole collection as a book. After Endland Stories came out in 1999, I wrote a few more stories in pretty much the same world, landscape and language (‘Taxi Driver’ for the 1999 Sceptre anthology Britpulp! New Fast and Furious Stories from the Literary Underground and rather later ‘Cellar Story’, published in the San Francisco magazine Fourteen Hills), but beyond that my fiction writing post-Endland Stories took off in quite other directions.

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Years later, in 2006, I got another out-of-the-blue invitation, this time to participate in an art, writing and performance project by Australian artist Barbara Campbell, 1001 nights cast (http://1001.net.au/). In response and without really planning to do so, I found myself producing work that went towards a new Endland territory, exploring and reinventing the terrain ten years later.