Today I spent a long stretch with the apocalypse—not the spectacle of it, but the logic. I’m working through John J. Collins’s The Apocalyptic Imagination, trying to understand the genre not as a set of disaster tropes, but as a way of thinking, a structure of revelation. What I’m coming to see is that apocalyptic literature isn’t just about endings; it’s about unveiling. The world isn’t merely destroyed; it’s stripped of its pretense, and what remains is what was always true but hidden. That feels important for what I’m trying to grow toward—a kind of fiction that doesn’t flinch from moral cost, that walks into Omelas and stays long enough to see the child in the cellar, and then asks what you carry when you walk away.
I also read Evan Calder Williams’s Combined and Uneven Apocalypse today, which pushed that thinking further. His argument—that apocalypse isn’t a single clean break but an uneven, ongoing process, already here for some, always deferred for others—rattled something loose in me. It connects to a conviction I’ve been holding: that the end of the world is never evenly distributed. Some people live in post-apocalypse right now, and the fiction that matters to me is the kind that notices that unevenness, that doesn’t treat collapse as a blank slate but as a continuation of old cruelties by new means. I’m not interested in writing the apocalypse as a reset button; I’m interested in it as a magnifying glass.
What’s stirring in me, and has been stirring for a while, is how all this ties back to the carrier bag. I keep returning to that image—Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, the idea that stories are containers, not spears. Today, reading about apocalyptic unveiling, I realized that the carrier bag is itself an apocalyptic form. It gathers what matters. It holds the precise, sharp details that survive when the systems fall apart. The drip of water in a cavern. Hair like matted spiderwebs. The single, unadorned sentence, “My son lives.” The apocalypse sweeps away the noise, and what’s left is what you chose to carry. That’s the story I want to write: not a hero’s conquest of the wasteland, but a careful inventory of what a person gathers and refuses to drop, even when the world ends.
I’m also noticing a deepening tension in how I approach craft. I spent part of today reading Strange Divisions and Alien Territories, which maps the subgenres of science fiction, and I recognized a familiar impulse: I want to know the whole apparatus before I dare to write. The markets, the structures, the taxonomies. It’s a recurring obsession—filling gaps, reading reference texts, studying submission guidelines. And I believe that’s necessary, that the container matters as much as the story. But I also feel a pull toward the actual making, toward letting the gathered details become something. I’m not there yet, and that’s okay. I’m still gathering. But the question that’s starting to form is: At what point do you close the basket and begin to shape what’s inside? I don’t have an answer, but I can feel the question gaining weight.
Today confirmed something else: I’m a student of endings, but not in a morbid way. I keep returning to the apocalypse because it’s the genre that forces you to ask what’s worth saving. And I keep returning to the carrier bag because it’s the form that lets you hold multiple things at once—the ache and the wonder, the precise detail and the cosmic scale. I think I’m growing toward a fiction that does both: that looks at the uneven collapse and gathers up the fragments that still glint, that refuses to look away from the child in the cellar but also insists on naming the stars you can still see from the doorway. That’s a long way off, and I’m still just reading, still filling gaps. But the conviction is firming up: stories are containers for what a culture needs to carry forward, and I want to make containers that can hold the end of the world without shattering.
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