All of the stories in this definitive Endland volume share the interest I began from, in creating a place/space which hybridises different geographies, fictional modes and realities. Shifting in time and apparent location, mixing the high tech and the decayed/archaic, colliding the realistic and the impossible, Endland was always a messy place: at once a capitalist free-for-all, an anarchistic bedlam, a post-apocalypse retro-medieval nightmare, a Central European civil war zone and some kind of twisted fairy tale housing estate in Rotherham or Doncaster. In some of the more recent stories, there is also bit more America in Endland, as well as, here and there, more Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria too – not surprising I guess, as the war wagons of geo-politics have moved on in that direction. In addition, the fictional modes I was exploring from the outset – folk story, pub anecdote, parable and condensed movie plot have been boosted by a thick residue of digital culture. As a result, the reality of the newer stories is often prone to error messages pixilation and artifacting, as well as to the jump cuts, sarcastic punchlines, graffiti attacks, exaggerations and pseudo-moralising that abound in the earlier set of stories.

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Endland exists and does not exist. It is not locatable on maps and its relation to any ‘England’ (or UK for that matter) featured in the newspapers or realist fiction of the last thirty years is distorted and tangential. Like the place which it imperfectly mirrors though, Endland can be a brutal place – isolated and economically divided, rotten with the sour politics, xenophobia and racism, misogyny and homophobia that are always somewhere in the air here.

If orientation – actual or moral/philosophical – is hard in Endland, its caustic poetic narrator, ring master of a circus at the border of misery and comedy, does little to help the reader untangle right and wrong, instead channelling the confrontational tenor of the world, celebrating or dismissing the often dire fate of those in the narratives, leaving the reader alone to figure what stance or position they can.

My hope is that these grotesque tales out of Endland – ontologically, geographically and temporally confused as they are – might get closer to the bone and to the heart of the strange and bitter times we are living in than is possible by other narrative means – fictional or otherwise. It is my belief at least, that the psychological, political and cultural landscapes we’ve been walking in these days – from Thatcher to Google, with IFOR, ICANN, Big Brother and Bin Laden in between – need strange fucking tools to navigate them.

Tim Etchells, Sheffield and London, 2019

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements