Plots That Don't Work Any More

It's hard to come up with a good plot right now, especially if you write in genre fiction. Everything changes so fast that an author runs a substantial risk of having events overtake their plot. SF author, Charlie Stross, knows this all too well; he's had to abandon more than one novel because he was blindsided by current events. 

He's summarized the problem of what he calls "dead plots" in a longish blog post. Here's a representative sample in which he discusses political thrillers (after he eviscerates mainstream fiction).

Moving forward, we come to some new nope-outs in fiction. First up, is using AI to rig elections. Interface, a 1995 novel by "Stephen Bury" (a pseudonym for Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George) was set in a then-near future that seems eerily prescient from today's perspective, focusing on the election campaign of a US presidential candidate with shadowy backers who has been fitted with an experimental biochip to prompt his public gestures and speech on the basis of feedback from a focus group of random voters. Of course, how you pick the training set for your AI is hugely consequential, and it's both funny and chilling to contemplate in the light of subsequent events — as is 1999's Distraction by Bruce Sterling, in which the Chairman for once missed the target by hopelessly optimistically setting the date for the USA's final political gridlock in 2044, rather than a couple of decades sooner. Again: neurocomputing, shadowy influencers and manipulators, emergent tech, and a political system that's unfit for purpose. If you put these two SF novels together with either The Whisper of the Axe or Prizzi's Glory by Richard Condon (author of The Manchurian Candidate) you basically get the American 21st Century redux. (In The Whisper of the Axe a talented African-American woman decides it's time for payback — payback for everything since 1639, that is. And in Prizzi's Glory, the third novel in the trilogy that starts with the much more familiar Prizzi's Honor, a Mafia family decide to go more-legit-than-legit and successfully take over the White House.)

All these plotlines are now dead. (Mob family in the White House? Political leader motivated by a total ideological committment to destroy their own country? AI-mediated-focus groups directing candidate public appearances? Politics causing gridlock and societal breakdown? Dead, dead, dead because they already happened, like the Moon landing.)

There's a lot more. It's an entertaining and thought-provoking novel, and may explain by so much genre fiction has turned to epic fantasy or far future space opera.