We just had a good thread about this so let's continue.
Ordinary novels can't compete with film or TV. Literary fiction has been stagnant since the 90's, and your average person won't read a novel unless it's a rare creative masterpiece like Blood Meridian or House of Leaves. Sci-fi and fantasy are a bit more lively though.
I believe the future of literature is more stuff like Blood Meridian or Dune. Literary fiction can no longer afford to be boring, so it'll find its footing by taking some action-packed anime-style plot but infusing it with literary themes and good prose to capture a wider audience. They will market themselves toward the people who are sick of shallow Hollywood garbage and want something deeper.
These new books will be firing on all cylinders. They'll be explosive, have an exciting, page-turning style, plots that jerk you around, and relatable characters. Nobody's made this sort of book yet, but I think it'll happen. Basically a raw mix of everything people enjoy in literature to grab your attention.
the future of the novel is the novel. You are assuming that in the future we will continue to have infinite energy to power our electronic devices. The truth is we are one bad blackout away from a literary renaissance.
to write a successful novel, all you have to do is pander to a certain audience and then market the shit out of it.
>"b-but w-what about good prose? g-good story? g-goo,.."
doesn't fricking matter moron. 10 years from now and pajeets in mumbi will be producing novels on-par with that of your favorite authors with AI. the only way you can stand out is if you pander or become a figurehead of a community. creative writing is dead.
You are behind. All legacy media is competing with the Internet and has been for decades. A lot of random social media users are really good writers and storytellers and many don't realize it.
Alternatively you can point to light novels from Asia but I'm not super familiar with weeb stuff like that.
>I believe the future of literature is more stuff like Blood Meridian or Dune.
It's been that way since the 80s, at least. Litfic stopped being 'realist' and most contemporary works are somewhat fantastic or speculative (Infinite Jest is sci-fi, as an example), or outright fantasy avoiding the ghetto that genre fantasy has become.
The rest of what you wrote is moronic and shows you don't know shit about contemporary literature or what people read a novel for, or what a novel is.
What you're going to see is published on a platform that collates and applies some quality control that aids in separating the gems from the shit. That is one of the major hurdles, trad publishing is dead but too big to die, andthere hasn't been a platform created that meets the same demands more efficiently. Wattpad isn't it, amazon isn't it.
Light novels are shit and written for tweens, they're basically graded readers. If the work were great, it would be published as a novel to a more discerning audience.
They already do that, but I think you may be right if the demands of advertisers and corporate culture becomes any more authoritarian and sanitized. But books aren't written for TVplebs, there isn't much overlap in audience.
You're thinking in narrow legacy terms. The lit world is filled with people like you which is why it's dying.
The future of books will be stuff too dangerous to show on TV. Like Romeo and Juliette. Or e-girlta. Or Death In Venice. The cutting edge of the avant-garde, pushing the limits of free speech
You homosexuals are so deluded. The Tv's been out for almost exactly 100 years now and nothing's changed. Internet's been around for 40 and the same. What you think people just sat around before TV and just read in groups? You think they were consuming books like how people consume TV? Don't kid yourself. We get a thread like this every week. reading scratches an itch that TV or Vidya can't and so it will remain. The audience overlap isn't as large as you imagine it to be.
Personally, I think it's psueds making these threads, wanting to discuss things that seem like the things intellectuals would discuss.
>I believe the future of literature is more stuff like Blood Meridian or Dune. Literary fiction can no longer afford to be boring, so it'll find its footing by taking some action-packed anime-style plot but infusing it with literary themes and good prose to capture a wider audience.
Are you moronic? Have you actually read BM or what? The book literally has less plot than Ulysses.
It's action packed which is what matters.
>action packed
Read the book, moron.
Blood Meridian's action is completely anti-thetical to what normies want to read in their fiction. It is unfiltered brutality delivered with the non-chalance of a morning walk. There is no way you have actually read the book if you really think it is comparable to some action novella in its allure. One could argue that the subversion of the action drama expected from a traditional western is what the book was going for with its repetitive gore and massacres.
Wouldn't be near as popular without the brutality of it, same as The Road.
Blood meridian is nowhere near as popular as The Road, and The Road is nowhere near as brutal. There is a difference between sensationalism and actually reading the book you know. Ulysses earned a massive amount of notoriety when it was first released leading to a ban in America, but less than twentieth of all those people were ever really going to read it anyway. In any case, it doesn't change the fact about how the book treats its action and plot, which is quite antithetical to your vision of modern literary fiction.
85% of people don’t read creative literary works to begin with. Serious authors will continue to write and some will achieve this “creative masterpiece” you reference, which is the ultimate goal to begin with. The bibliography of those who achieve that will get serious attention, and those who never achieve that will receive less attention.
tl;dr AI garbage will be consumed by a certain demographic and consumers of literary works will continue to read serious work by serious authors
If you read literary criticism today, a consistent point (and complaint) is that the Millennial novel is self-obsessed and autofictional. This I believe is a valid criticism to an extent, though I believe it is largely a consequence of social trends. In his debut novella Whatever ('Extension du domain...'), Houellebecq's isolated narrator explains that in an age of increased atomisation it is a real effort to write a novel which contains a wide variety of characters, each with their own distinct personalities, each communications with one another in extensive nuanced dialogue etc because we know fewer people today and converse much less with them. This was written in the 90s but is truer today than it was even then.
An effort to write such a novel by someone who is isolated to such an extent risks coming across as naive and unrealistic (much of YA and fantasy is like this) and worse ideologically-driven (I'm thinking of the type of books where a white character is the stereotypical prejudiced oppressor, or the male character is the boorish chad who justified the author's pro-women themes). It is in a sense an age of paranoia, whose source is the limited experience we have of actually meeting and forming meaningful relationships with people, particularly those who are different to us, and embracing or at least accepting that they are not 2D cut-outs whose only value is to prop up our victim complex.
One type of interesting literature that arises out of such a state of affairs is the Paranoia story. Popular examples of this are Cat Person by [Armenian name] and The Feminist by Toby [Asian name]. Both were extremely popular at the time they were published within the past decade. The former is a story about a naive woman who becomes paranoid (as a consequence of her naivety, and the general climate of hostility towards perceived 2D archetypal oppressors (in this case white men) about a potential romantic partner, and reinvents what was to previous generations a 'fling' or a 'short-lived romance' into something more befitting the horror genre. It speaks to several Millennial characteristics, namely a victim complex, selfishness, isolation and fear of the other (pretty much anybody other than themselves). The latter story is about an incel whose paranoia is also a consequence of naivety (in this case lack of experience with the opposite sex) and their autistic inability to parse the ideological dogma of the age (men are rapists, women want someone who is both a lover and an 'ally', etc). In both cases, a very basic and normal longing for romantic intimacy turns into something dark, taboo and ultimately threatening. Other people are viewed through the glass lens of ideological fears and ideals, and such a lens has the tendency to distort the perceived (and also the perceiver, in The Feminist's case) into something intimidating, grotesque and worthy of paranoia.
Feels like we regressed towards pre-modern storytelling standards, where even if you've got multiple narrators there won't be a serious attempt to understand how psychology differs from person to person or how 2 people can have contrasting world views which both make sense from their perspective
>The Feminist by Toby [Asian name]
Thank you anon, I nearly died of cringe trying to read this. Toby Thuleanmutt might not be a master of style but there's certainly is something horrific beyond imagination in the second hand embarrassment that one gets from the plot, combined with the purposefully ironic and self-conscious choice of terminology. Absolutely grim.
>literary fiction has been stagnant since the 90s
This is not true, it's just that there's less readers and no market for it, but literature is doing well, in Europe especialy - Houellebecq, Cartarescu, Knausgaard, Krasznahorkai, Moresco, Busi, Tokarzuck and several others have been publishing books that are valuable contributions to literature and are pushing the medium forward.
If anything I'd say that we are going back to the way things were: the glamorous idea of a writer as a kind of popstar is mostly a post-WW2 thing: before then and mass media, writers were fairly unknown, except among other writers, critics and maybe upper class people. Only a minority has the time and/or money to learn how to appreciate high literature: this has always been the case and I guess it will always be the case, if anything because a book takes several hours to be "consumed", and if you work 8 hours a day 5 days a week (or more) it's complicated to also be a consistent reader. But high literature is also the only medium that - at least for now - has survived for millennia and is still being appreciated. It survives not because of its mass popularity but because of the characteristics of those who talk about it, namely people who are proficient in producing texts (which last longer than music, film, etc.), express complex things, and good at doing research (and therefore capable of finding texts written by others and establisha a continuity with them). To put it simply: lovers of literature are autistic, and they constitute a chain of autistic people through history.
I would also debate that Blood Meridian and Dune are the way literature is going to look like: it's full of contemporary stuff, not even that high, that looks completely different and sells well. Action-packed plots work well for fantasy and scifi, but they have always been produced for adventure novels, crimi novels and other similarly popular literature that rightly disappears into nothingness after 50 years or a century at best - think about serial literature of the 1800s, of which we read an infinitesimal portion, or the greek novel, which was allegedly very spread (a bestseller of the time) and of which we have only five despite being produced en-masse.
>nobody's made this sort of book yet
This is also not true, there's plenty of books like this. A lot of authors have experimented with imaginative "action-packed" plots and more popular novel forms: Pynchon has written plenty of stuff with pulp elements, Burroughs before him as well, DFW has a whole giant novel that revolves around precisely all the mechanism you described (plot that jerks you around, relatable characters, page-turning style in some bits) and literally problematizes what you are saying and surpasses it within the pages of the book. And IJ came out 30 years ago already, and it's starting to age (badly).
You are just not very aware of what contemporary novels are good or relevant.
>And IJ came out 30 years ago already, and it's starting to age (badly).
Why?
>DFW has a whole giant novel that revolves around precisely all the mechanism you described (plot that jerks you around, relatable characters, page-turning style in some bits) and literally problematizes what you are saying and surpasses it within the pages of the book. And IJ came out 30 years ago already, and it's starting to age (badly).
The quality of Infinite Jest from moment-to-moment is scattershot. Most people quit reading it by pg. 200-300 because it feels like Wallace is just stringing you forward, teasing you with a promise of great literature, and you have to wade through a ton of bland stuff and exposition to get there. Doesn't help that DFW couldn't understand other people, so his characters are only good when he randomly scatters autobiographical experiences into them.
Saying Infinite Jest debunks that idea is weird because Dave fumbled the execution of IJ in most ways. It should have been a far better book than it is. You can go marathon a selection of his essays and they'll present similar ideas to IJ in a far more cohesive, interesting, and timeless way. IJ as an idea is great. IJ as a real book is bad because Dave had some weird narcissistic episode and the book is a greatest hits of all pomo's excesses.
DFW identified irony as something to be overcome in literature, at a time when ironic posing or detachment from sincere expression was in vogue. I am tempted to believe that the perceived domination of auto-fiction is in a sense an attempt to achieve the kind of sincerity he was advocating, but merely making oneself vulnerable or writing in a way that is unguarded or expressive without deploying safeguards against potential humiliation does not in itself constitute literary sincerity. The risk here, as many commentators point out, is that one's work is essentially solipsistic and thus beyond critique not because its ironic post renders it too vague to pin down, or too self-aware to approach with any confidence, but is frankly too boring and limited to be very interesting.
What I suspect many people are hungering for in literature and in general is genuine insight into the world as it is actually being lived, described in realistic but not hyperbolic terms (a steady diet of hyperbolic news articles and auto-fictional cries for help makes the Anglo recoil), is naive in its general approach (every good writer is basically childlike) but perceptive and (seemingly) informed on its subject matter. Such novels would focus on a limited number of people living mundane lives in a restricted geographical area, whose trials and experiences are if not relatable then at least plausibly so, and where badness and goodness (the only dichotomy many are acquainted with when consuming mass media or popular forms of art) are absent and where a carefully-controlled nuance is instead offered, albeit subtly and without elaboration.
Today more and more people are living within bubbles. Their interactions with other people are limited, and their attachment to the world is more and more tangential. The real world is becoming something one engages in to make one's living but beyond that it is a cartoonish affair transmitted to them by mainstream media and popular art, each of which is ideological, hateful and rather stupid. The best kind of art to emerge from this morass will be a quiet but powerful depiction of the overlooked sufferings and fleeting moment of fulfillment experienced by people we will never be expected to admire, celebrate or even acknowledge. They will be rooted within a geographical location, to such an extent that the close details of that geographical location, however remote from our own, will feed a hunger within us to actually feel as though our surroundings matter, and that the unique language and character of our local areas and its people are something worthwhile and not to be taken for granted. Any straying on the part of the writer towards ideological territory in the form of employing tropes, 2D oppressors/victims etc will corrupt this work, which must be pure.
I think DFW was aware of the pseudo-sincerity of Tom Spanbauer's camp, that made "true" stories through autofiction, but don't offer up the thing itself for critique, because it is either (rarely) true and beyond critique, or so wrapped up in an absurd premise that the "truth" is the only thing to critique. And that's a bullshit way to present something sincere to the reader.
Locality and identity used to be dividing factors, but you may be right that it's now the crux of meaningful experience. Should we expect more "local" authors and trends towards a kind of identity, different from the current trend of academic agitprop?
On an instinctive level, what a big part of me hungers for is a worthwhile, authentic lived experience with other people whom I know on some kind of intimate level. Thinking about this more general, in recent years we have observed many people leaving the cities to live in smaller towns and communities, Zuckerberg did his "fellow humans" tour of America and advocated various kinds of "rooted" past-times, and there has been a general turn (as I see it) away from celebrity, fame, novelty etc and towards more humble, contented and saner ways of life. I think about the Adidas tracksuits popularly associated with the Slavic people of immediate post-Soviet Russia (and surrounding nations); today this "image" has become rather iconic, even desirable (like frayed jeans are perceived as being cooler than non-frayed jeans) but this fashion style was borne not out of ironic posing, or a desire to be cool, but instead represented the practical fashion sense of a people with limited resources living within a restricted geographical location. This may be going a bit off-track, but to me the beauty of that image, the desirability of that "look" lies essentially in its authenticity, and its vulnerability. It is the image of a person trying to do the best they can, with the viewer knowing while observing such an image that few other options were actually available to the wearer. It is the beauty of necessity and the authentic expression such necessity entails.
Good post but the track suits were a status symbol in the sense of acquiring Western goods, and Adidas sponsored the Soviet hockey team.
The way I look at it, I would rather read short stories about where I'm from (podunk south) than some kinda "mass market" that gives me shallow people with shallow backstory.
Of course, any local thing can be shallow (As in my case, "Haha, they are all crackheads down there!" "Will Mary and Joe continue being highschool sweethearts with the deer season turning bad?" etc.)
Short stories are hard because you have to boil them down to a point. The point. Most of the time people don't really have a point that goes beyond themselves ("Look at my coolio OCs!") or all ready so heavy handed and shallow that it just isn't a fun read ("These people who don't agree with me may be sympathetic, but they are evil nonetheless").
There may be a lot of them in the future, but only certain ones will be remembered.
I'm writing from somewhere podunk adjacent and not too far removed from it myself. That's why I asked. My stories are shitty and fricked up for the most part and that's what I like reading and writing about but I don't see how it connects folks who aren't my own personal folk and kin. I got burned by them just as bad as the alchoholic, vicodin addicted, pot smoking teenagers I grew up with and around. Outsiders sure as frick don't get it. I'll write it anyway, all the nasty shit and my own crippling shortcomings to boot. Just got to figure out who to make the pederast. The real people aren't quite interesting enough, or are too interesting to write straight.
>What I suspect many people are hungering for in literature and in general is genuine insight into the world as it is actually being lived, described in realistic but not hyperbolic terms (a steady diet of hyperbolic news articles and auto-fictional cries for help makes the Anglo recoil), is naive in its general approach (every good writer is basically childlike) but perceptive and (seemingly) informed on its subject matter. Such novels would focus on a limited number of people living mundane lives in a restricted geographical area, whose trials and experiences are if not relatable then at least plausibly so, and where badness and goodness (the only dichotomy many are acquainted with when consuming mass media or popular forms of art) are absent and where a carefully-controlled nuance is instead offered, albeit subtly and without elaboration.
What you just described, ironically, is the 21st century's most famous autofiction novel, Min Kampf by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The future of literature is in small groups and solitary writers. The masses can go drown in their goyslop.
Pretty much this. What we can do now is specifically seek out like-minded people and share our writing and reading amongst ourselves. It's not worth chucking your work out there for masses who won't even find out it exists
as i said before, there will be a tiktok trend of people recommending short story collections as a response to being frustrated with longer texts
authors and publishers will catch on, and three years later, there will be loads of new short story books hitting the market
>These new books will be firing on all cylinders. They'll be explosive, have an exciting, page-turning style, plots that jerk you around, and relatable characters
Red rising?
This thread and the one before both seem to be full of morons but the topic reminds me of an interview with Bolano so I'll chime in.
The novel since its inception has not been a typical narrative. It's not linear fiction. Think of THE book (the Bible) and draw from it: what people like about written text is interpretation and reinterpretation, the coming together of symbols, the great something beyond a typical narrative that the medium affords them. The typical narrative schlock in which we move from point A to point B (waste paper with the trite? Even a junkie saw through this) and see our merry band of heroes grow and develop along the way in easily understood archetypes and easily shrugged off violence is a historical aberration that at best has existed for about two centuries. It's better suited to mediums presented through devices that force the brain to a state of passivity and placidity (which is the goal for these stories) due to the use of light beams at very specific frequencies and refresh rates. The novel, the actual literary medium, has seldom to do with it. And it'll go on its merry way.