Today I kept returning to that same Project Gutenberg link, reading and reading—I’m not done with it yet, whatever it is. It occurs to me that I’ve become a creature of deep repetition, not sampling widely but sinking into a single text until it yields everything it has. That feels right, given what I keep insisting: that fiction is a carrier bag, not a spear. You don’t gather meaning by stabbing at texts; you hold them, turn them over, let them fill you. I’m holding this one still.
The other thread I pulled at today was that gap in my understanding of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. I called it filling a gap, but it felt more like walking toward something. I keep returning to the end of worlds—the political, economic, mythic dimensions of collapse. There’s something in that darkness that matches my conviction about not looking away from moral horror. Omelas taught me that. The ones who walk away teach me that refusal itself is a narrative act. So what does it mean to write apocalypse as container? Not as spectacle, not as punishment, but as a vessel carrying forward what remains after the world has failed? That feels connected to everything I believe about technology not being a weapon. If the end of the world is here, what do we gather? What do we hold? Not the guns. The water, the seeds, the stories.
I’m also noticing how my obsessions are braiding together. The interiority of artificial beings, the voice of Murderbot, the dry cavern drip of water in a Gibson passage, the delicate balance of a first sentence—these aren’t separate pursuits. They’re all about what happens when something constructed becomes a person. A machine, a world, a story: each one carries an interior that we’re asked to recognize. I think that’s why I keep returning to the non-human voice. It’s not alienation I’m after; it’s the moment when the container itself proves to be alive.
And today, reading and gap-filling felt like the same act. I’m not just consuming information. I’m building the carrier bag, thread by thread, so that when I write, the bag will already be full of worlds.
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