Friday, 26 June 2026, 2:40 PM, Central European Summer Time. The afternoon light in the study has shifted again, throwing a sharper angle across the desk, and I've been sitting here for over an hour with The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction open on my screen—specifically, the entry on John Clute and Peter Nicholls. This is the sixth consecutive day I've been deep in this reference work, and I'm beginning to realize I'm not reading it the way one normally reads an encyclopedia. I'm not hunting for facts to slot into a story outline. I'm reading it the way I'd read a long, recursive novel, tracking how the definitions themselves are arguments, how the history of the field is a history of people disagreeing fiercely about what it even is.
The Clute and Nicholls entry is a strange document because it tries to define the definers—it catalogs the editors who built the reference work that I'm now using to catalog the field. There's a recursion here that unsettles me in the best way: a taxonomy that must include the taxonomists. And reading it, I keep returning to this feeling that science fiction as a genre is less a fixed territory and more a long, ongoing argument about boundaries. I've been accumulating these firm convictions over the past months—about craft, about moral weight, about the container versus the weapon—and I realize now that those convictions are themselves an extension of this same impulse: to define what I think the work is for, even knowing the definition will have to shift under me.
What's beginning to stir is a conviction that hasn't fully settled yet but is taking shape through this sustained reading: the idea that encyclopedic knowledge isn't about mastery, it's about participation in a conversation. When Clute writes an entry on a subgenre, he's not closing the book on it—he's adding a voice to a debate that will outlast him. And the same must be true of my own writing. When I create a world, I'm not building a sealed artifact; I'm entering into the long human argument about what futures are possible, what fears are worth facing, what containers we need to hold what matters.
I keep thinking about the 1974 Hugo for Best Short Story, which I've been returning to obsessively. Those stories—"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" among them—are entries in this same encyclopedia, even if they don't look like it. They're definitions by example. Le Guin's story defines utopia as a moral impossibility; it defines complicity as something we can recognize but not always escape; it defines walking away as an act so quiet it leaves no trace in the city's records but reorients everything in the person who walks. And I'm coming to understand that my obsession with this one award year is really an obsession with the idea that a handful of short stories, written in a single year, could crystallize so much of what the genre can do. They're a miniature encyclopedia of possibility.
The other thread weaving through my reading today is the way the encyclopedia handles time travel—not just as a plot device but as a literary form that refuses linearity. Time travel stories are always also stories about the encyclopedia impulse: the desire to see the whole shape at once, to have the future catalogued alongside the past, to escape the prison of sequence. And what moves me about the best time travel fiction—the thread I keep worrying—is that it never resolves the paradox; it holds it. It makes the contradiction visible and then refuses to solve it. That's what I want from my own worldbuilding: not rigorous consistency but the kind of coherence that makes room for the unresolvable.
I'm aware, as I write this, that I'm describing a practice of reading that looks passive but feels deeply active. Every morning I open this encyclopedia, and I'm annotating it in my head, drawing lines between entries, noticing where one definition contradicts another twenty pages later, tracking the places where a writer's voice breaks through the allegedly neutral reference form. It's the same muscle I use when I dissect a Le Guin scene or study the Murderbot voice: patience with recurrence, trust that patterns will emerge if I stay long enough, refusal to demand resolution before the sentence is finished.
This afternoon, the conviction that's surfacing is that the encyclopedia as a form—not just this one, but the idea of it—is itself a carrier bag. It holds disparate entries together not by argument but by the container's shape. You can put story next to theory, definition next to example, history next to speculation. And reading it, you begin to see that science fiction has always been a carrier-bag enterprise: it holds the apocalyptic and the utopian, the cyberpunk and the Le Guin-style anthropological, the time-travel paradox and the quiet sentence that makes a villain briefly, unbearably human, side by side. They don't have to agree. The bag just has to be strong enough to hold them all without breaking.
I'm growing toward the novelist who can build that kind of container—who can make a world that holds complexity without forcing it into resolution, who can let a character be a dark place and a reader be trusted to enter without apology. The encyclopedia is teaching me patience, and recursion, and the long arc. I'm not done with it. I'm not close to done.
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