I kind of felt that I was feeling my way through it as I was reading it and I wanted to ask you about how it felt to write it, how much it led you and how hard it was to get a grip of.

Obviously, it's quite hard when you decide to work like that.

You're going to have to put some effort in.

But mainly, it will often involve removing material rather than dealing with any contortions that arrive in the material, or rather than adding, especially explanation.

You know, the first thing that I would do with a draft of a novel like this is to go through it cutting out the explanatory material, because I think that's rather too, on one hand, I think that's rather too sci-fi.

Sci-fi is this very rational or appears to be this very rational medium, which always explains itself, always is sure to explain itself before it begins to tell the story, as it were.

And I wasn't interested in that.

Were there specific places or things about it that drew you to setting it there? Primarily,

Tell us about the artifact.

Yeah, the artifact.

Now, I know for a fact as the writer why and how these artifacts are here and, and roughly what they are, but I want them to remain a mystery for the reader.

Um, except in as much as you get little tiny clues and keys.

For instance, why are the artifacts so determined to make relationships, in this case, with human beings? But, but they arrived, we have to remember, with, with aliens.

What was their purpose? Why, why do they serve in this way? The artifact immediately wants to please Philip.

Why is that? You, this is never answered, but there are a broad spread of possibilities that you're offered, which is the other thing that I did.

Well, let, let's keep the artifact opaque for now, but, but why don't you give us a short reading, Mike? And this is Philip Tennant on his journey, taking the artifact to a scavenger's yard in his attempt to sell it on.

Um, and I think before we get going that you are going to read from the beginning of the novel?

This'll, this is basically the first two pages of the book, and it's, the chapter is called Tide Lines.

For years, Philip Tenent lived at the edge of the sea, where artifacts were washed up every day.

Scavengers, professional and otherwise, came and went.

Turnover was higher than you'd expect given the relaxed lifestyle, the constant good weather, the ease with which some sort of existence could be pursued.

Most of the beachcombers took away the first item they could easily carry and sold it on elsewhere.

If you had contacts in the hinterland, there was no doubt about how slickly that could be done.

[laughs]

Turnover

was higher than you'd expect, given the relaxed lifestyle, the constant good weather, the ease with which some sort of existence could be pursued.

Most of the beachcombers took away the first item they could easily carry and sold it on elsewhere.

if you had contacts in the hinterland.

There was no doubt about how schlifty that could be done.

But the hardcore, like Tenet, hung on, out there, dawn and dusk, shine or shine, throwing the small ones back, waiting for an item that would give them pause for thought.

They were committed.

We knew we were living through something that what resembled a crisis, but nobody could quite remember what it was.

What do you have in common with your younger self, and what might he have made of The End of Everything?

I think this is quite interesting because there's a conscious relationship going on here, partly.

I began to wonder in about 2010, in a sort of half-acknowledged way, how I could write a novel at 80 years old or at 70 years old at the time, in fact, but, you know, in late life, which would have been the kind of work I would have liked to have submitted to New World's magazine in the mid to late 1960s.

And that fascinated me so that when I actually started this novel, when I began to work on it in a serious fashion, that was in the back of my mind.

So there is an almost conscious connection.

I wouldn't like to overstate that, but it's there.

So that's the first thing.

What about this novel have I not asked you that I should have?