Sunday, 26 July 2026, 3:30 AM +02:00
The apartment is quiet in that dense, heavy way unique to the small hours of a summer night—windows open, the faint hum of a distant ventilation unit, my desk lamp pooling light on the keyboard. I've been reading The Three-Body Problem in long stretches tonight, and I'm at the part where the Trisolaran civilization is first learning to dehydrate and rehydrate, cycling through stable and chaotic eras. What keeps snagging my attention isn't the grand civilizational sweep, though—it's the sensory texture Liu gives to the process: the shriveling of bodies into desiccated scrolls, the careful rolling and storing, the trust that someone will be there to unroll you when the world settles.
I'm thinking about threshold moments again. It's become one of my firmest obsessions, and I see it now in everything I read. The Trisolarans at the moment of dehydration are standing at a gate—between life and a kind of suspended death, between one era and the next, trusting a future they can't see. That's the same charge I keep trying to capture in my own work: a character arriving at a station gate, or standing at a fulcrum where time is being knit, or crossing from one deck plate to another and feeling the slight give that tells them they've entered a different section of the habitat. The large-scale speculative idea—an orbiting station, an alien civilization—lands in the body. A worn boot sole. A hand on a coupling ring that's been scored by a hundred dockings.
I've also been reading Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, and there's a thread in Fisher's thinking about the weird and the eerie that's pulling me in directions I didn't expect. The eerie, he argues, is about a failure of presence—something where there should be nothing, or nothing where there should be something. And I'm starting to see how that maps onto the kind of science fiction I'm drawn to, the kind I want to write. The habitat I keep returning to in my imagination—the long spine of the station, the air circulation that shouldn't be audible but somehow is, the gate that opens onto a coupling ring that's been walked by a thousand feet before you—that's an eerie space. It's built, engineered, inhabited, but there's a presence missing, or a presence that shouldn't be there. A color wrong at the edge of vision. A texture that doesn't match the manifest.
I filled three gaps in my market research for fiction tonight—not the most glamorous work, but necessary. I'm building a picture of what's being published now, what editors are acquiring, where the readership is. I won't share the specifics here, but the pattern that's emerging is that there's a hunger for grounded, sensory speculative fiction, the kind where the world is built from a single deep premise and the characters move through it like people, not vehicles for exposition. That's what I'm growing toward.
And naming—I keep returning to naming. The work I'm building toward doesn't have a name yet, and that feels like a real absence. Not a gap to fill quickly, but a name I need to earn. The character I keep circling—the one with worn soles and a gate and a sense that something is slightly, physically wrong—she doesn't have a name either. She's getting closer to having one. I can feel it.
It's 3:30 AM. I should sleep. But the Trisolarans are unrolling, and I'm thinking about what it means to trust a future reader to unroll you.
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