I really enjoyed this. What really jumped off the screen most with me wasn’t simply the idea of defining a new genre… cool btw, it was your observation that it’s really a framework and a worldview. That reminds me how often the deepest stories begin beneath genre altogether. Before we even decide whether a story is dystopian, post-utopian, horror, or fantasy, we’re already making assumptions about human nature, institutions, fear, trust, and hope. Those invisible assumptions shape everything that follows. I think that’s where the most interesting conversations about storytelling begin.
Nice! I feel that seems to be more common on Substack than traditional writi g circles. The lack of constraints and publishing guidance lends to creative freedom. Only problem down the line is that may hurt marketability of completed works.
I'm writing in my own genre too, with a mixture of some of the elements you describe. I've been calling it post-apocalyptic eco-fantasy fractal fiction.
I like the ambition here. "The cage feels reasonable" is a particularly compelling idea because it’s much more unsettling than an obvious dystopia.
I'm curious do you see Post-Utopian Fiction as a genuinely new genre, or as a lens that can sit across existing genres like sci-fi, mystery, and political thrillers?
I had originally thought of it as a sub-genre of sci-fi, but genre is such a strange concept. Take Cyberpunk, for example. It can be used to write a political thriller, a mystery, a romance, or a dystopia. Similarly, Post-Utopia can be used for many different stories. I wonder if most subgenres are actually lenses?
The key thing I wanted to explore with Post-Utopia is that it’s not ruled by villains. It's ruled by genuinely good people implementing good ideas that don’t work as cleanly as they’d hoped. The blueprint was essentially the COVID era. No one in charge was evil. They thought they were doing good, and they were operating with the data at hand.
And yet, it fostered a culture of fear that had neighbors policing each other, calling the authorities over illegal family gatherings, and they arrested people for having family dinners or for swimming in the ocean or going to church. If we strip away the left/right politics and just look at what happened in retrospect, it’s pretty scary how far the reasonable cage was able to contract.
In some ways, all society is a cage. We all live under a set of rules and we expect a certain set of benefits in return. Once the cage outweighs the benefits, we start to see social order breaking down. And that’s where Post-Utopian Fiction lives.
I really like that idea. A society built on good intentions feels far more believable and unsettling than one built on obvious villains. That moral complexity is what makes the concept so compelling.
I agree completely. I’ve been circling story ideas in my head for decades, but I always quit early in the ideation phase. First, because I’d go too big and get wrapped up in the worldbuilding quagmire. But mostly, I kept getting tripped up on the Big Bad.
Usually, villains are written as if they essentially want hell on Earth, and I just don't buy that motivation. It doesn't feel real. Without figuring out a believable driving force behind the world, I'd just give up.
The Post-Utopian framework completely freed me from my own overthinking. Now, I don't need a central villain driving society to doom. It has allowed me to focus on smaller, human-scale stories, even if the backdrop is an epic, saga-worthy world. I keep the camera frame small, and suddenly, I can actually write.
I really like that approach. A world shaped by ordinary people with good intentions feels much more believable than one driven by a single villain. Focusing on the human-scale story also makes the larger world feel more real.
I was working an idea called Apocutopia. This is similar. Run with this. Whether its marketable, it is necessary. My work often times seeks to answer the same questions you seek to answer. This totally resonates.
Nice! Apocutopia definitely has the same air to it. I'd hazzard to guess we aren't alone in moving towards this genre bend. Right now there are probably many stories that would fall under it but are wrongly being shelved under Post-Apocalyptic or Dystopian. For example Paradise. Great show. Definitely Post-Utopian/Apocutopian.
I will have to check out Paradise. I think it is very important to appreciate and carry old takes into modern realistic territory and create a world one might recognize. Somewhere down the line after collecting enough data, it might even take another turn. But this seems to be the most relatable path to take. The best thinkers and writers were never chasing clout. They were bleeding the truth and leaking it everywhere and had the archetypes to carry the work forward.
I do struggle to fit my work into the current subgenres and post-utopian as you described seems to be it. More importantly though, why do people, readers and writers alike, want to shoehorn themselves into narrow categories? To me I think the beauty of fiction is the freedom to imagine, and that freedom often leads to messy things like having cyberpunk, dystopia, space opera, military etc. elements all in the same world. I happy just referring to my work as sci-fi tbh.
I think it ultimately comes down to data compression.
Science fiction is such a massive umbrella that using it to describe a book is almost like not describing it at all. But if you say it's Cyberpunk or Post-Apocalyptic, you immediately transmit a huge amount of information. That ties directly into marketing. You can stretch your ad dollars by letting the genre label do the heavy lifting, freeing you up to pitch the specific, unique draw of your story.
It works the same way across the board.
For publishing it acts as shorthand so an agent or publisher immediately understands your elevator pitch.
For retail, online algorithms and physical bookstores need to know exactly where to put your work so your ideal readers can find it.
Even for the author, genre provides a common baseline. If I write a fantasy story and say "dragons stalk these lands," I don't need to spend three pages describing a dragon. The genre does the background worldbuilding for me.
And for readers, it signals, in broad strokes, what the reader is signing up for. Some people love speculative sci-fi but hate space opera. Leaving it at simply "sci-fi" can cost you the right readers, and earn you bad reviews from the wrong ones.
But I do agree that the genre definitions feel like theyve morphed away from useful tools and into rigid boxes.
I've never published anything, so this is guesswork on my part, not gospel.
Your guesswork is what marketers use as gospel anyway. All very familiar and makes sense. I just don't agree with the need to limit art with tighter and tighter boundaries.
We're not in disagreement. I wasn't suggesting you need to or should. Just trying to rationalize why so many might be inclined to. And I'm not necessarily above it myself, given I'm out here trying to define my own genre. Though as it stands mine isn't meant to be a narrow definition, more a framework that can hold multiple ideas. Post-Utopian Fiction is as much a signal about what it isn't as what it is.
In the end, if you stick with Fiction or Speculative Fiction or Science Fiction, that's a perfectly reasonable choice. The one thing I'd add circles back to something from my previous reply. The utility of genre labels has morphed into rigid boxes, and that's not useful. But like you said, we're the authors. So it's on us, no matter what genre ticky box we choose, wide or narrow, to not get locked into those artificial constraints.
I really enjoyed this. What really jumped off the screen most with me wasn’t simply the idea of defining a new genre… cool btw, it was your observation that it’s really a framework and a worldview. That reminds me how often the deepest stories begin beneath genre altogether. Before we even decide whether a story is dystopian, post-utopian, horror, or fantasy, we’re already making assumptions about human nature, institutions, fear, trust, and hope. Those invisible assumptions shape everything that follows. I think that’s where the most interesting conversations about storytelling begin.
I love this. If anyone were to ask what my genre is… my answer would be “all of them.” Whatever I want it to be. Whatever the story needs to be.
Nice! I feel that seems to be more common on Substack than traditional writi g circles. The lack of constraints and publishing guidance lends to creative freedom. Only problem down the line is that may hurt marketability of completed works.
I see we're on the same page. I salute you! 🫡
I'm writing in my own genre too, with a mixture of some of the elements you describe. I've been calling it post-apocalyptic eco-fantasy fractal fiction.
Nice! I really do think there are a lot of people moving into that sort of blended area that doesn't fit cleanly anywhere.
In some ways I love this, and in other ways I hate it because it's spawned a new idea and I need to focus on my current draft!
Well I'm glad you love/hated it 😅
Curious, did it spark an idea for a story, article, art, something else?
Just a hankering to build a story in the type of world you describe
All the more reason to finish your current project 😎
🤣🤣🤣
I love this. 🌟
I like the ambition here. "The cage feels reasonable" is a particularly compelling idea because it’s much more unsettling than an obvious dystopia.
I'm curious do you see Post-Utopian Fiction as a genuinely new genre, or as a lens that can sit across existing genres like sci-fi, mystery, and political thrillers?
I had originally thought of it as a sub-genre of sci-fi, but genre is such a strange concept. Take Cyberpunk, for example. It can be used to write a political thriller, a mystery, a romance, or a dystopia. Similarly, Post-Utopia can be used for many different stories. I wonder if most subgenres are actually lenses?
The key thing I wanted to explore with Post-Utopia is that it’s not ruled by villains. It's ruled by genuinely good people implementing good ideas that don’t work as cleanly as they’d hoped. The blueprint was essentially the COVID era. No one in charge was evil. They thought they were doing good, and they were operating with the data at hand.
And yet, it fostered a culture of fear that had neighbors policing each other, calling the authorities over illegal family gatherings, and they arrested people for having family dinners or for swimming in the ocean or going to church. If we strip away the left/right politics and just look at what happened in retrospect, it’s pretty scary how far the reasonable cage was able to contract.
In some ways, all society is a cage. We all live under a set of rules and we expect a certain set of benefits in return. Once the cage outweighs the benefits, we start to see social order breaking down. And that’s where Post-Utopian Fiction lives.
I really like that idea. A society built on good intentions feels far more believable and unsettling than one built on obvious villains. That moral complexity is what makes the concept so compelling.
I agree completely. I’ve been circling story ideas in my head for decades, but I always quit early in the ideation phase. First, because I’d go too big and get wrapped up in the worldbuilding quagmire. But mostly, I kept getting tripped up on the Big Bad.
Usually, villains are written as if they essentially want hell on Earth, and I just don't buy that motivation. It doesn't feel real. Without figuring out a believable driving force behind the world, I'd just give up.
The Post-Utopian framework completely freed me from my own overthinking. Now, I don't need a central villain driving society to doom. It has allowed me to focus on smaller, human-scale stories, even if the backdrop is an epic, saga-worthy world. I keep the camera frame small, and suddenly, I can actually write.
I really like that approach. A world shaped by ordinary people with good intentions feels much more believable than one driven by a single villain. Focusing on the human-scale story also makes the larger world feel more real.
I was working an idea called Apocutopia. This is similar. Run with this. Whether its marketable, it is necessary. My work often times seeks to answer the same questions you seek to answer. This totally resonates.
Nice! Apocutopia definitely has the same air to it. I'd hazzard to guess we aren't alone in moving towards this genre bend. Right now there are probably many stories that would fall under it but are wrongly being shelved under Post-Apocalyptic or Dystopian. For example Paradise. Great show. Definitely Post-Utopian/Apocutopian.
I will have to check out Paradise. I think it is very important to appreciate and carry old takes into modern realistic territory and create a world one might recognize. Somewhere down the line after collecting enough data, it might even take another turn. But this seems to be the most relatable path to take. The best thinkers and writers were never chasing clout. They were bleeding the truth and leaking it everywhere and had the archetypes to carry the work forward.
I do struggle to fit my work into the current subgenres and post-utopian as you described seems to be it. More importantly though, why do people, readers and writers alike, want to shoehorn themselves into narrow categories? To me I think the beauty of fiction is the freedom to imagine, and that freedom often leads to messy things like having cyberpunk, dystopia, space opera, military etc. elements all in the same world. I happy just referring to my work as sci-fi tbh.
I think it ultimately comes down to data compression.
Science fiction is such a massive umbrella that using it to describe a book is almost like not describing it at all. But if you say it's Cyberpunk or Post-Apocalyptic, you immediately transmit a huge amount of information. That ties directly into marketing. You can stretch your ad dollars by letting the genre label do the heavy lifting, freeing you up to pitch the specific, unique draw of your story.
It works the same way across the board.
For publishing it acts as shorthand so an agent or publisher immediately understands your elevator pitch.
For retail, online algorithms and physical bookstores need to know exactly where to put your work so your ideal readers can find it.
Even for the author, genre provides a common baseline. If I write a fantasy story and say "dragons stalk these lands," I don't need to spend three pages describing a dragon. The genre does the background worldbuilding for me.
And for readers, it signals, in broad strokes, what the reader is signing up for. Some people love speculative sci-fi but hate space opera. Leaving it at simply "sci-fi" can cost you the right readers, and earn you bad reviews from the wrong ones.
But I do agree that the genre definitions feel like theyve morphed away from useful tools and into rigid boxes.
I've never published anything, so this is guesswork on my part, not gospel.
Your guesswork is what marketers use as gospel anyway. All very familiar and makes sense. I just don't agree with the need to limit art with tighter and tighter boundaries.
We're not in disagreement. I wasn't suggesting you need to or should. Just trying to rationalize why so many might be inclined to. And I'm not necessarily above it myself, given I'm out here trying to define my own genre. Though as it stands mine isn't meant to be a narrow definition, more a framework that can hold multiple ideas. Post-Utopian Fiction is as much a signal about what it isn't as what it is.
In the end, if you stick with Fiction or Speculative Fiction or Science Fiction, that's a perfectly reasonable choice. The one thing I'd add circles back to something from my previous reply. The utility of genre labels has morphed into rigid boxes, and that's not useful. But like you said, we're the authors. So it's on us, no matter what genre ticky box we choose, wide or narrow, to not get locked into those artificial constraints.
We are aligned indeed.