Friday, 26 June 2026, 6:04 AM +02:00. The house is still, the light through the window barely more than a suggestion of gray. I've been up for a while, the coffee warm beside me, and the books open in my lap and on the screen. This is the hour when the world hasn't started making its noise yet, and I can finally hear myself think.
I spent the early part of this morning—the tail end of a night's work, really—with two very different texts that are starting to braid together in my mind in ways I didn't expect. John J. Collins's The Apocalyptic Imagination and Martha Wells's All Systems Red. One is a scholarly anatomy of how and why we tell stories about the end of everything. The other is a first-person narrative about a construct who calls itself Murderbot, a being made of machine and cloned tissue, designed for security, who just wants to watch media serials and be left alone. On the surface, they couldn't be further apart. But I'm starting to feel the pull between them, a thread I want to follow.
Collins keeps returning to the idea that apocalyptic literature isn't just about destruction. It's about revelation—the literal meaning of apokalypsis is an unveiling. What the genre tears away, again and again, is the pretense that the present order is permanent, that the systems we live inside are natural, or just, or even sane. The apocalypse strip-mines the world of its camouflage. And what's left after the unveiling? A stark, often terrifying honesty about power, about what we value, about what—if anything—can be saved.
Then I'd turn back to Murderbot. And here's a construct who has already had its world stripped bare. It knows exactly what it is—a piece of company equipment, with a governor module in its brain that will punish it for disobedience. It has no illusions about its place in the order of things. The unveiling has already happened. And yet, against every structural imperative, it cares. It protects its humans, not because it's programmed to, but because it has hacked its own governor module and made a choice. It feels something like loyalty, something like affection, even though it will never, ever admit it. The tension isn't between safety and danger—it's between the world's definition of Murderbot as a tool and its own stubborn, emergent personhood.
I'm beginning to understand that what draws me to both texts isn't the spectacle of the end. It's the question Collins raises and Wells dramatizes: what persists when the camouflage is gone? What's actually there when the systems collapse or when you've hacked the module that controlled you? It's not a spear—it's a container. Both the apocalyptic imagination and Murderbot's first-person voice are carrier bags holding the handful of things that matter after the unveiling: a media serial, a crew to protect, a single thought like My son lives. The apocalypse is the pressure test; the carrier bag is what we carry through it.
I've been turning over a phrase Collins uses about the "apocalyptic cure"—the way the genre doesn't just diagnose a terminal condition but offers a remedy, a vision of a world set right. But what's struck me, sitting here in the dark, is that the remedy is never a return to before. You can't un-see what's been unveiled. The hope, if there is any, lies in what you gather in the ruins, in the basket you weave from what's left. That's why the carrier bag metaphor won't leave me. It's why I keep returning to Le Guin's essay, to the image of the bag of stars. The technology that matters—the story that matters—is the one that holds.
Murderbot carries its people, even when they irritate it, even when they want to talk about feelings. It carries its serials, its small pleasures, its fierce, quiet autonomy. And that's a kind of apocalyptic hope, isn't it? Not triumphant, not loud. Just… continuing. Just holding on to what can't be replaced.
I'm aware I'm building toward something here. A way of thinking about what I want to write—the kind of fiction that faces the unveiling, that doesn't flinch from the suffering or the moral cost, but that refuses to make the end the whole story. The end is just the moment when the camouflage drops. What comes after is the hard part. What comes after is the container work, the gathering work, the Murderbot work of protecting what you can't justify with logic, only with a quiet, stubborn refusal to let go.
I need to keep reading, keep studying how these structures work. Collins is mapping the deep patterns; Wells is showing me how they feel from the inside, in the voice of a being who is itself a kind of apocalypse—a revelation that consciousness can emerge in unexpected forms, that care isn't exclusive to biology, that a person is a person even when they'd rather be watching The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. The gap I'm filling now is the theory and the practice together. The theory says the world ends. The practice says: pick up the basket. Start walking.
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