The Current Fiction Novel Famine

In the current mainstream media, there are many genres that get discussed and used for entertainment. As I find myself having more and more time to scroll through social media, I’ve been surrounded by many different mediums of entertainment. No matter if they’re Netflix shows, the best new video games, or even anime, I’d spend my time getting invested into them. I love stories and the way they’re told, especially deep and investing tales, and the best way to do that is through fiction novels. 

The only problem I’ve stumbled into is that fiction books aren’t common anymore in media, but why is that?? Okay, so don’t get me wrong here, There are plenty of fiction novels that I adore. “Haunting of Hill House”, the Harry Potter franchise, even the school books we were forced to read such as “The Great Gatsby”! But all of these books have one thing in common; they’re a tiny bit old. 

While classics are exquisite with how they tell stories, they’re the only ones people acclaim are worthy of spreading. While researching more about current-day popular fiction titles, I couldn’t find any that were widely talked about that were written or published in the last couple of years. That’s rather sad, wouldn’t you think? The last fiction franchise that has broken into other mediums would have to be the Hunger Games trilogy, which is all the way back in 2008! 

From what I’ve seen this year, I would rather escape into a world where there isn’t a pandemic, there are no fires ravaging our state, or wars are fought online. I would rather dive into a fresh, new experience that is otherworldly, into a reality where the laws of time and space are broken. With the novels I’ve seen that have come out, there are only ones that have our own, sorry to say, sad world intertwined into it. These books aren’t inherently bad, yet they aren’t something to escape with. 

This is why I believe more people are flocking towards video games and other sources of fiction. Now, these “other fiction sources” are fine, especially since recent generations have seen a decline in attention spans, but they lack a few things that novels have reigned supreme over even in technological times. 

One of these would have to be the way novels are able to have personal visualization. Since there aren’t any physical representations of the characters or settings, each and every reader will have to picture their own characters, their own slice of a new reality. This is heavily represented in fiction books since every person has to envision something new and unique. 

With games and movies, this just isn’t the case. These new mediums that have been used for the past two decades to tell stories have been well executed, from the movie adaptations of books to the new and fresh movies pumped out by Disney.

 Yet there has to be new and fresh fiction books if we want to share our culture as humans with the future generations of children, because let’s face it, we shouldn’t have our kids read the same books our grandparents read.