I think several new genres of fiction are being born right now that will break the Industrial Age ones (SFF, mystery, romance, horror, thriller).
One I think is alt-realism. Or adjacent-realism. Not counterfactuals, more like fictional conspiracy theories.
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I’m trying this one with my art of gig newsletter. The trick is to not challenge important parts of real history (like say the X-men first class version of Cuban missile crisis), but weave the fun and games around it, and refactor the meaning.
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Another one I think will be wishful stream of consciousness, tech enabled. Think Secret Life of Walter Mitty plus American Psycho but with VR/AR design fictions allowing them to play out their fantasies as a sort of B-plot to real events.
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Example: this is obviously a great premise not just for a startup, but for a wishful stream of consciousness novel for someone talented enough to write it.
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The next social media unicorn will be a grand-theft-auto style AR game within cockpits of driverless cars for people to turn road rage into an adjacent possible culture war. You’ll be able to actually explore your fantasy of ramming that guy who cut you off in possible world C137
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Another genre that’s becoming possible now is projective reality. Think a powerful Steve Jobs like protagonist but with Philip K. Dick hero characteristics. Or Le Guin’s hero in Lathe of Heaven. Someone whose subjective reality can reshape others’ objective realities, but openly.
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Ie unlike Lathe of Heaven where hero reshapes reality in his dreams and only his shrink knows, here everybody would know and try to influence it. Like people asking Steve Jobs for iPhone features but for reality features.
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Next genre: social death murder mystery. Plot revolves around resolution of zombie lives of “canceled” people. Instead of detectives solving the mystery of real death, they *reverse* the mystery of social death by discovering a resurrection narrative that cancels the murderer
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Early examples of this stuff are a little too “real” as in, Qanon, catfishing, Anna Delvey type fraud etc. These things are in liminal kayfabe zone where they’re causally influencing things too tightly to count as fiction. A certain distance, safety barriers, will emerge.
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Though these things have the authorial qualities of fiction they are performed in too live/in situ a context to be formally innocent of malicious intent. You at least formal cues to counterprogram Poe’s Law.
South Park has pioneered a lot of this in bits and pieces already btw.
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Linking Micah’s thoughts on agency fiction here. Another nascent genre in the air.
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I don’t really know a good name for “agency fiction”. Probably the closest category is “competency porn”.
But I think that’s usually a bit broader, and includes stories about people who are good at stuff, but aren’t making any interesting decisions.
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“The easiest way to predict the future is to invent it” applies almost as strongly to culture as to technology. Inventing literary genres is probably the single biggest mode.
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