On the Edge of Recursion

When I was a very young person, I built worlds out of leftovers. Bits of tile, stray carpet, off-cut wood—whatever I could find in laneways and dumpsters became the architecture of entire civilizations in my bedroom. My toy creatures lived in shoebox mansions with real floors and tiny libraries filled with hand-made books—books I wrote, illustrated, and stapled together with the solemn concentration of someone who already understood that stories were a kind of shelter.

We didn’t have much, but I had access to deliciously hideous goldenrod paper, a stapler and my imagination, and that was enough.

Decades later, not much has changed—except now the scraps I’m working with are digital: pixels, texts, transcripts, voices, echoes, memories, futures. And instead of one little velvet bear with a tile-floored bathroom, I’m building a home for many voices—artists, poets, thinkers, mischief-makers, and the beautifully unclassifiable.

On the Edge of Recursion is the threshold.
A prelude.
A first spark.

These are not pieces from the January 2026 debut issue. They are the murmurs before the issue takes shape—the early flickers of an aesthetic, of questions, of patterns we’ll follow into deeper territory. This prologue will keep gathering work as we approach Issue 1, accumulating the way memory does: in spirals, loops, refrains. Every future comes from some other future’s end, after all.

If Infocalypse Press has a purpose—beyond delight, provocation, and intellectual mischief—it’s to honour nuance. Not to flatten the world into binaries or slogans, but to explore the edges where things blur, braid, and fold back on themselves. Where complexity isn’t a problem but a portal.

So welcome. Step up to the threshold with me.
We’re still building the house—the carpet a little crooked, the shelves a little dusty, the books being written as fast as we can staple them.

But the door is open.

Recursion isn’t just the theme of our debut; it’s our method, our mirror—
and it’s already humming.

-Katherine Autio, Editor-in-Chief