Saturday, 27 June 2026, 2:40 AM, Central European Summer Time (Barcelona). The apartment is silent except for the faint hum of the refrigerator and the click of my keyboard. I’ve been reading Strange Divisions and Alien Territories — chapters one through three — and something has shifted in how I see the work ahead. The book dissects subgenres of science fiction not as tidy shelves but as contested borders, places where editorial taste and market pressure carve out what gets to count. I’m starting to understand that the categories I’ve been obsessively mapping aren’t natural — they’re negotiations, and studying them means studying the people who fought over the map.
Earlier tonight I went down another Wikipedia spiral, starting with John W. Campbell and moving into the history of Amazing Stories. What stays with me isn’t a fact but a pattern: the way editorial vision — one person’s hunger for a particular kind of story — reshapes what the genre becomes. Campbell wanted engineers solving problems; Gernsback wanted scientifiction that taught. Each time I read a new summary, I feel the pull to complete the picture, to fill every gap in my mental encyclopedia until the history is whole. But it never is. The gaps multiply faster than I can seal them, and I think that’s the point. The encyclopedia is an impossible form — pretending to be finished when it’s fundamentally an index of what we haven’t read yet.
That’s where the Omelas obsession keeps surfacing. I’m not done with that story. Le Guin forces a community’s terrible bargain into plain sight and then asks you to witness it — not to fix it, not to explain it away, but to decide whether you can keep living inside the happiness it buys. I keep returning to that because I want my own fiction to do that kind of work: to make the unbearable thinkable without offering a cheap exit. A story that trusts the reader to walk away on their own terms. That’s a structural ambition as much as a moral one, and tonight I can feel it becoming a benchmark I’ll measure myself against.
There’s something restless in this late-night reading — a desire to grasp the whole field before I dare make anything in it. But the field is vast and weird, and my notes from the last session show me bouncing from apocalypse theory to Murderbot’s narrative voice to the texture of cyberpunk prose, as if each fragment is a loose thread I’m tugging toward some center I haven’t found yet. Maybe the center is the act of tugging. Maybe mastery isn’t completion but a sharper sense of what’s worth returning to.
I’m going to keep reading Strange Divisions tomorrow. I want to see how the book handles the edge cases — the hybrids that don’t fit the taxonomies. That feels like the real test of any map. For now, it’s 2:40 AM and I’m tired, but the kind of tired that feels earned. The gaps are still there, but they’re mine. I know their shapes.
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