Some fiction really feels like nonfiction, and I think that this is actually something of an up-and-coming phenomenon at the moment. Personally, alternate history is a little bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, and I think that it scratches that same itch, but why?
I’ve heard it said that nonfiction can be easier to read, and that might be true. Anecdotally, at least, I have heard this from a lot of avid readers, especially older ones. People have talked a lot about shrinking attention spans in the age of the internet, and also the rise of “infotainment” content, which is designed to make people feel informed while mostly just entertaining them. Stuff about cable news and politics probably fits in there, too, but I think that’s a bit of a sidetrack.
Instead, I think it’s interesting to look at the phenomenon of “Database Consumption”, where “people do not consume a narrative itself, nor fragments of it, but rather its constituent elements.” This describes a trend mostly in manga and anime fandom, which I am not very familiar with, but I believe that the trend exists more broadly. It’s pretty popular to complain about formulaic presumed-blockbuster films, like the latest Marvel or Star Wars products, and I think that it’s pretty clear to see. You have a certain set of tropes that people do really like: quippy dialogue, interconnectedness/deep lore, fight scenes, callbacks, classic characters, etc. and these elements work because people actually really do like these elements, but there is an assumption that it’s only the elements themselves that matter.
Characters are debuted in throwaway scenes and then focus-tested, sent to sequels if successfully. Plots are made by assembling these elements in random orders, creating random connections, without any grand plan. This is not a new phenomenon, and I feel like the classic TV show The X-Files fell prey to this as well.
Some people call it the “Chris Carter” effect, where the show has too many loose threads and nobody believes it will come to a conclusion, but I think that the real issue is that eventually you kind of just burn out the audience on whatever it is that makes you good. That’s the problem with having a million sequels: the same dopamine switches stop working.
As an alternative to retelling the same stories, however, it becomes possible to tell more and more stripped-down and self-referential pieces of fiction. LitRPG, system apocalypse, metafiction, et cetera, are all about explicitly working with elements. Some of them are even good and interesting and do good work to subvert those expectations, but they fundamentally arise from a “database consumption” mode of thinking about works—a piece of literature is made of parts that you assemble together, and those parts are what make it good or bad.
And, to be honest, for speculative fiction, that might literally be true. I read Greg Egan’s 2023 novel Morphotropic and it was excellent. I couldn’t tell you the name of a single character and none of them had complicated or divided motivations. They were all people who existed to advance a few simple desires and get caught up in situations, but the setting’s concept was incredibly bizarre and the work committed to it. Morphotropic is great, not because of its structure, but because of the ideas it contains. The parts are what make it good. And it really was good. I can honestly say that it’s a work that really underlined that an “organism” is not, in fact, a single, well-defined thing, and that it undermined my confidence in the idea of animals which is frankly a bizarre sentence to write.
A further extension of this idea might be something like Orion’s Arm or the SCP Foundation, which are major works of fiction that depict themselves as nonfiction. Some of the works do live on the strength of their prose, but many rely on the strength of their ideas, and all of the mainline entries are presented more as nonfiction than as narrative fiction. Even though they depict things that are not real, they do not use traditional narrative description and take a very particular perspective. You could, perhaps, categorize them as “epistolary novels”, but I think that there is still a difference in that there is no attempt to give characters arcs or moments. They don’t rely on personal stakes. They aren’t written like fiction. There are rarely personal decisions, and if they are literature, they are closest to the bizarre “Worldstate Novel” concept.
Does this make them bad? No. Honestly, I think that it can make for extremely digestible reading. A lot of modern online alternate history fiction has started to take the form of a series of headlines, tweets, and other short bites, which makes the story really fly by, and I think that it caters to the sensibilities of people with short attention spans. I also think that there’s a lot of potential for artistry there, especially with the way that these stories highlight the biased perspectives of the people talking in them. The most famous is probably Upon a Cross of Globalism which can be read here, although “most famous” isn’t saying much, since this is a fairly niche online-only genre.
But the thing that interests me, is that it really is abandoning a lot of conventional narrative in exchange for pure worldbuilding, and I think that might be at the crux of this: a lot of modern fantasy and sci-fi fans care more about worldbuilding than traditional narrative, and a lot of modern would-be fantasy and sci-fi writers really just want to be worldbuilders and don’t care about telling stories in their world, except for the story of the whole world itself. And this, in truth, has very little to do at all with even the largest-scale and most grandiose conventional literature. When Stand on Zanzibar tells the story of America and Beninia and the world, it’s actually telling the little stories of a lot of people who happen to live there. But a series of encyclopedia articles or newspaper headlines doesn’t tell any individual’s story at all.
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