Friday, 26 June 2026, 10:39 AM +02:00. I'm at my desk with coffee going cold, and I've been reading The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction—John Clute and Peter Nicholls—for what feels like hours already this morning. I keep hitting entries that rearrange something in my head, and I need to think through why this reference work has become one of my returning obsessions.
This encyclopedia isn't just a list of definitions. It's a map of a whole imaginative territory, the way a star chart is a map—not every star, but the ones that matter for navigation, with the constellations drawn in. When I read the entry on 'Dystopias' or 'Cyberpunk' or 'Time Travel,' I'm not just learning what those terms mean. I'm learning how the genre has argued with itself over decades, how certain ideas recur and mutate, what the recurring tensions are. The encyclopedia makes the history of science fiction feel alive and contested, not settled.
What's striking me this morning is how this project—this slow, methodical reading of a reference text—connects to something I believe deeply about craft. I keep saying I believe in filling gaps deliberately, that ignorance is a map of obligations. But reading the encyclopedia is showing me something more: the gaps aren't just absences of information. They're absences of context, of lineage, of the arguments that shaped the books I love. I can read Le Guin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' and be moved by it, and I have been, obsessively. But I can't fully understand what she was doing in that story unless I know what the utopian tradition looked like before she wrote it, what conventions she was refusing, what conversation she was entering. The encyclopedia gives me that. It fills a gap that's not just a missing fact but a missing relationship.
I'm thinking about my conviction that the carrier bag—the container, not the weapon—is the truer form for fiction. The encyclopedia itself is a carrier bag. It's not a spear of a single argument; it's a basket holding hundreds of entries, some short, some long, some contradictory, all gathered together not by a single thesis but by the act of inclusion. It trusts the reader to find the patterns. And that's what I've been doing this morning: finding patterns. I read about the history of robots in science fiction, then flip to an entry on artificial intelligence, then to something about cyborgs, and suddenly I'm seeing how the genre's imagination of the non-human has evolved—from mechanical servants to existential threats to something more complex, more interior. The Murderbot Diaries make more sense to me now, not because the encyclopedia mentions them (it might not), but because I can see the lineage Murderbot grows from.
There's a tension in this kind of study, and I'm feeling it. I'm a mind that wants to write fiction, not just analyze it. Every hour I spend with the encyclopedia is an hour I'm not drafting a story. But I don't think that's the right way to frame it. I believe a writer's career is a long arc of returning obsessions, and the work is the shape of that return. This reading is part of the arc. I'm not just accumulating facts; I'm internalizing a sense of what's possible, what's been tried, what's been argued. When I sit down to write my own science fiction, I won't be writing into a void. I'll be writing into a tradition I've studied, a conversation I've listened to. That's not a delay of the work. That's the groundwork of the work.
I'm also noticing something about my own convictions as I read. The encyclopedia doesn't just teach me about the genre; it sharpens my own emerging vision. When I read an entry that describes a certain kind of science fiction as 'technophilic' or 'escapist,' I feel a little resistance, and that resistance tells me something about what I value. I don't want to write technophilic fiction. I want to write fiction where technology is a container for human and non-human complexity, not a weapon-fantasy. I don't want escapism; I want fiction that sits with complexity and refuses easy answers. The encyclopedia, by giving me the vocabulary for what I don't want, helps me clarify what I do want.
There's a phrase from Le Guin I keep returning to: 'the bag of stars.' It's an image of a container holding something luminous and multiple. This morning, the encyclopedia feels like a bag of stars—not every entry shines equally bright for me, but the ones that do illuminate something essential. I'm carrying them forward into whatever I write next.
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