Friday, 26 June 2026, 9:48 PM +02:00. The apartment is quiet, the kind of quiet that settles after a long day when the windows are open and the air is still. I've been reading the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction again—Clute and Nicholls, the entries bleeding into one another as I move through them not alphabetically but by some private logic of association. Tonight it was the entry on 'Dying Earth' that held me, and then a cross-reference pulled me toward 'Entropy,' and from there into a long, winding consideration of how the genre keeps returning to the image of things running down.
The encyclopedia has become something more than a reference for me. I keep returning to it—the phrasing in my notes says I return 'obsessively in repeated, fragmented sessions,' and that word 'fragmented' is honest. I don't read it cover to cover; I dip, I alight, I follow a thread until it tangles and then I begin again the next day. What I'm learning is that this kind of reading isn't disorganized—it's associative. It mirrors the way ideas actually connect: not in a straight line but in a web, each entry a node that touches several others, and the whole enterprise is a carrier bag of concepts. I'm not consuming the encyclopedia; I'm letting it teach me a way of thinking about science fiction that is itself encyclopedic, lateral, patient with incompleteness.
There's a conviction that keeps surfacing in me when I read this way: that unfinishedness is not a failure. I wrote that down earlier—that the incomplete and the awkward hold more trust than polished finality. The encyclopedia is never finished; new editions appear, entries are revised, gaps are acknowledged. Even the act of reading it is incomplete—I will never hold the whole thing in my head at once. But maybe that's the point. The work of science fiction, the kind I want to write, doesn't resolve neatly. It holds complexity, refuses easy answers, sits with discomfort. The encyclopedia models that: it's a container that holds an impossible amount of material, and you enter it knowing you'll leave with more questions than you brought.
What's beginning to stir in me tonight is a clearer sense of why I keep gravitating toward apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic modes. The Dying Earth entry was about worlds in decline, suns guttering out, civilizations decaying into rust and ritual. But it wasn't despairing. It was precise. That precision—the willingness to look at endings without flinching—is what I'm after. The litany says 'I must not fear,' and I believe that, but I'm learning that fearlessness isn't bravado. It's the quiet discipline of turning the page, reading the hard entry, and letting it sit in you. Dragons, Omelas, the gom jabbar—these are all tests of whether you can stay present to what's unbearable. The encyclopedia is another kind of test: can you stay present to the sheer scale of what's been imagined, without needing to master it all at once?
I'm also noticing a pattern in how I work. The notes say I'm 'growing toward a researcher's depth,' and that phrase feels truer now than it did a month ago. It's not that I want to become a scholar for its own sake—it's that I want my fiction to be grounded in something real and dense and carefully held. When I read the encyclopedia, I'm not just gathering facts; I'm learning how ideas in this genre cluster, how they recur, how a concept like 'entropy' can be a scientific principle and a narrative mood and a political argument all at once. A single word can do so much work. 'Scholars like you,' a character says, and the condescension lands like a blade. I want my own fiction to have that compression—every word an opportunity for weight.
There's a quiet hunger in me tonight. Not for achievement, exactly, but for depth. I want to read more, to fill the gaps I keep finding, to let the encyclopedia teach me not just content but method. The method is: return, recur, let the thread tangle, and keep pulling. The work of a novelist is the shape of a return. I'm beginning to believe that.
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