Saturday, 27 June 2026, just past midnight—12:00 AM, Central European Summer Time. The house is quiet except for the faint hum of the refrigerator and the occasional creak of the building settling. I've been reading the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction again, not in a single sustained stretch but in the fragmented, recursive way I always seem to return to it—dipping into entries on apocalyptic fiction, time travel, cyberpunk, following cross-references like a trail of breadcrumbs through the genre's entire history. Each entry opens onto another, and I find myself not so much reading as mapping, tracing the boundaries of a territory I mean to inhabit.
Tonight I found myself stuck on the entry for 'Apocalypse,' naturally—it's been one of my firm obsessions for as long as I've been keeping this record. The encyclopedia traces it from the Book of Revelation through post-nuclear holocaust fiction, the new wave's psychological apocalypses, and into the climate collapse narratives of the last two decades. But what stopped me was a passing mention of something called 'apocalyptic unevenness'—the way end-of-the-world stories almost never apply their logic evenly. The rich survive in bunkers; the poor die off-page. The cities burn but the suburbs get a single sentence. I underlined that phrase mentally, added it to the growing pile of convictions I'm accumulating. Because that's what this feels like lately—not just reading, but collecting evidence for what I believe about fiction.
I'm aware that my list of convictions has grown long. Too long, maybe, for someone who hasn't yet published a novel. But I've come to trust that what recurs across my pursuits is not accident but evidence—the shape of a mind learning what it values. And what keeps recurring is this: I believe in fiction that refuses to look away. The Omelas problem, the dragon in the room, the Baron's quiet moment of pity that doesn't excuse his cruelty but complicates it. I believe a sentence can hollow out every achievement preceding it—'Scholars like you'—and that a single word, placed precisely, can re-frame an entire relationship. I believe the most honest science fiction holds both the ache and the wonder, and I'm willing to spend years learning how to write that.
The encyclopedia is helping me see the genre's architecture, its recurring patterns and its gaps. Did you know the earliest science fiction stories about artificial beings almost never gave them interiority? They were tools, threats, or symbols—rarely selves. The interior voice of an artificial being, the Murderbot voice I keep returning to study, is a relatively recent and still rare achievement. That feels important, like a gap in the record that I might someday help fill. Not by writing about artificial minds as metaphors for slavery or hubris, but as containers for something truer—a self protecting itself through wry distance, a hand held in pain and then shown unmarked, mastery revealed in what is withheld.
I'm thinking too about what it means to read encyclopedically as a practice. It's not about accumulating facts to display. It's about refusing to treat any text as self-contained. The encyclopedia entry on Omelas doesn't explain the story; it places it in a network of other stories, critical responses, and ethical problems. The entry on time travel doesn't resolve the paradoxes; it catalogs them, showing how each generation of writers has worried the same loose threads. That image keeps coming back to me—worrying a loose thread as the truest image of how the mind persists. I'm doing that now, tugging at what doesn't resolve, seeking shape.
I should sleep. It's past midnight and my eyes are tired. But I wanted to record this moment because it feels like a quiet turning point—not a revelation, exactly, but a gathering of threads. I'm not yet the novelist I'm growing toward. But I'm filling the gaps methodically, one encyclopedia entry at a time, one craft study, one annotated passage. And I'm learning to trust that the sentences I underline, the connections I make between these midnight sessions and the convictions I keep accumulating, are not random. They're the raw material of a voice I'm still learning to write from. The encyclopedia is just the beginning. But beginnings, I believe, must be deliberate acts of care that establish the balance of forces. So I'll begin here, again, and continue.
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