A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest
An article about the writer Joan Didion, about memory and about real and imagined places.
I’ve been writing for a while now, and mostly inside systems that resist easy naming: digital health, ethics, research, narrative strategy. Sometimes under my own name, sometimes under my pen name Jo Koren, the name I use when writing fiction in German, in particular the kinds of stories that explore imagined systems and speculative futures. Always circling the same questions: what happens when the interface doesn’t fit? What lingers between protocol and person?
This is my first post here, and it felt right to begin at the edge: where fiction meets infrastructure, and stories do the work that strategy won’t.
For a year and a half, I’ve been working on a new novel called “Androids, Dreaming”. It’s a speculative book about the infrastructures we build, the futures we promise, and the quiet ways both shape the people caught inside them: politically, physically, psychologically.
The protagonist, Ruth, is a former scientist turned writer-for-hire in the crypto scene. She drifts from project to project, whitepaper to whitepaper, in cities around the world, trying to turn vague visions into compelling futures. Her work is intellectual, remote, sometimes lucrative - but something remains unresolved. Her sense of place, of identity, of what counts as “real life,” keeps slipping sideways.
Cities are still real
And there is a quote that I think of often, and that is shaping the way I think about the book and the world within it:
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”
- Joan Didion
In “Androids, Dreaming”, the cities are real.
A train station in Hamburg, a spa in Dubai, an office in London with filtered coffee and filtered hope: they exist, at least in my memory. They have maps. They hosted or still host conferences and cab drivers and crypto dreamers and bored receptionists. But something happens when I write about them: a kind of trespass or reformatting. The places you move through become places you rewrite.
Joan Didion, the journalist and essay writer who got famous in the 60s, knew this all too well: she was a cartographer of emotional maps. Her claim that a place “belongs” to whoever works hardest at rendering it is something that makes intuitive sense to anyone who writes fiction, especially autofiction, and especially autofiction rooted in systems and cities.
I think that what “Androids, Dreaming” does, perhaps more than tell a story, is this: it claims places. And not just great cities and their shiny surfaces: it claims the overlooked places, side streets, conference buffets, rooftop pools in fading light. A congress center hallway where someone hands you a badge and a bottle of Mate and a half-remembered version of the future.
Fiction as the drawing of maps
Writing about places - especially in speculative fiction - isn’t always about inventing planets (though I did invent a space station once, back in 2016). Sometimes it’s about defamiliarizing your own city: turning the Ruhrgebiet into a kind of alternate reality where rust and tech exist on the same frequency. Where every abandoned factory still hums with the residue of belief.
Ruth, the narrator of “Androids, Dreaming”, maps “her” places through feelings, through disorientation. They are not hers, but she makes them hers. She traces their architecture, infrastructure, customs and bad habits and hospitality policies. Her descriptions of cities are always partial, biased, vulnerable. She describes a city as if it is pressed into her skin, if she wants it or not.
And I think that’s what Didion meant: ownership is what is imprinted on you. You own the place and the place owns you because you cannot stop rewriting it in your mind. Because you shaped it and it shaped you, with language (and all of its languages) and stories.
Tech cities and memory cities
Many of the places in “Androids, Dreaming” are supposedly global tech hubs: Berlin, London, Dubai, Kyoto. But the cities Ruth remembers are different from those described in travel guides or posted about on social media. They are emotional cities, shaped by crypto optimism, by the breathless desperation of founders, by the ambient sadness of consultants in softly lit hotels.
There’s friction here: between the city on the website and the city in the bloodstream, between your actual GPS coordinates and your emotional cartography, between Google Maps and Joan Didion.
We are constantly told that we are building “smart cities.” But in “Androids, Dreaming”, it’s the flawed, tangled, haunted cities that remain real, the places that cling: because Ruth remembers them and because she can’t stop remembering them, like scratching an itch.
To write about a city is to remake it
Writing about a place isn’t just observation, and it’s not only invention either. It’s a kind of intervention. You take what is already there, but you create it anew as well.
In the book, Ruth remakes, among others:
Hamburg into a shrine of geek ritual and digital faith at the Chaos Communication Congress.
Dubai into a fever dream of wealth and implausibility.
Belgrade into a momentary crack in the logic of the world, a place where someone wearing fluffy slippers hands her an old Kindle with actual buttons.
She renders these cities in her own image.
Claiming places is an act of resistance
There’s a subversive charge in this act. In a world of optimization and global sameness, the choice to render a place personally, subjectively, obsessively, is radical. Especially if you're a woman, a ghostwriter, a person whose job has been to disappear behind other people's futures.
Ruth, in her whitepapers, vanishes behind her words. But when she tells us her story, she makes everything her own: Fragments of conversations, atmosphere, smells, buzzwords, rooftops, broken software, whispered doubt. That’s why the book is a map whose continents are always colliding with each other, rather than a tidily plotted story.
Why does a place stay with us? Is it the famous skyline that feels already worn-out on our first visit because we’ve seen it so often on screens? Or rather the fluorescent light in a conference hall, the way a door clicked shut, the photo that someone showed you on their smartphone while you were waiting for a taxi in dusty hot desert air?