{"id":38184,"date":"2017-04-18T03:00:48","date_gmt":"2017-04-18T07:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38184"},"modified":"2017-04-17T09:55:27","modified_gmt":"2017-04-17T13:55:27","slug":"examples-of-the-paranoid-thriller-genre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/18\/examples-of-the-paranoid-thriller-genre\/","title":{"rendered":"Examples of the “Paranoid Thriller” genre"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise<\/em>, J. Neil Schulman<\/a> discusses a type of book that he characterizes as the Paranoid Thriller:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably no surprise to anyone who\u2019s read my books, but I\u2019m a long-time fan of what might best be called the Paranoid Thriller.<\/p>\n

\u201cParanoid Thriller\u201d isn\u2019t a book publishing category. You won\u2019t find such a classification in the Library of Congress, or in the shelving system of Barnes and Noble. Amazon.com has the most cross-referenced indexing system of any bookseller I can think of and even it doesn\u2019t seem to have that as a sub-category of fiction.<\/p>\n

Technically \u2014 because these stories are often set in the \u201cnear future\u201d or \u201cthe day after tomorrow\u201d or sometimes in an alternate history \u2014 the Paranoid Thriller is a sub-genre of science fiction. But usually, beyond the element of political speculation, there are none of the usual tropes of science fiction \u2014 extraterrestrials, space, time, or dimensional travel, artificial intelligence, biological engineering, new inventions, scientists as action heroes, virtual realities, and so forth.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure even this list shows how outdated I am when it comes to what\u2019s being published as science-fiction these days, which within the publishing genre has abandoned all those cardinal literary virtues of clarity, kindness to the reader, and just good storytelling in favor of all those fractal fetishes that previously made much of \u201cmainstream\u201d fiction garbage unworthy of reading: dysfunctional characters, an overwhelming sense of helplessness and despair, and of course hatred of anything ever accomplished to better the entire human race by old dead European-extraction white men.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The Paranoid Thriller is step-brother to the Dystopian novel, such as Yvgeny Zamyatin\u2019s We<\/em>, Ayn Rand\u2019s Anthem<\/em>, Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/em>, and George Orwell\u2019s Nineteen-eighty-four<\/em>, and brother to the espionage novel \u2014 everything from Ian Fleming\u2019s James Bond novels to John Le Carre and Tom Clancy\u2019s spy novels; and at least kissing cousin to alternate history thrillers like Brad Linaweaver\u2019s 1988 Prometheus Award-winning novel, Moon of Ice<\/em>, about a Cold War not between the United States and the Soviet Union but between a non-interventionist libertarian United States and a victorious Nazi Germany.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some examples of the Paranoid Thriller:<\/p>\n

In books, let\u2019s start with Sinclair Lewis\u2019s 1935 novel It Can\u2019t Happen Here<\/em>, the story of an American president who rises to power by enforcing a Mussolini-type fascism in America, published three years after the movie Gabriel Over the White House<\/em> enthusiastically endorsed such a presidency, well into the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who did it for real, and a year after Adolf Hitler became the F\u00fchrer of Germany.<\/p>\n

Three years before Jack Finney\u2019s novel The Body Snatchers<\/em> was serialized in Colliers, Robert A. Heinlein\u2019s 1951 Doubleday hardcover novel, The Puppet Masters<\/em> crossed genre between futuristic science-fiction and the Paranoid Thriller \u2014 in effect creating an entire new genre of Paranoid Science-Fiction Horror \u2014 in which unlike H.G. Wells\u2019 invaders from Mars in The War of the Worlds<\/em> who had the decency to exterminate you, the alien invaders instead jumped onto your back and controlled your brain making you their zombie.<\/p>\n

But then again, Heinlein had already created the Ultimate Paranoid Thrillers in his 1941 short story \u201cThey\u201d and 1942 novella \u201cThe Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag\u201d \u2014 over a-half-century before The Wachowski Brothers\u2019 1999 movie The Matrix<\/em> \u2014 in which the entire world is a vast conspiracy to convince one man of its reality.<\/p>\n

Jumping two decades forward I\u2019ll use as my next example Ayn Rand\u2019s 1957 epic Atlas Shrugged<\/em>, in which the Soviet- refugee author warned how the United States \u2014 by following the path of a kindler, gentler socialism \u2014 could end up as the fetid garbage dump that had devolved from her once European-bound Mother Russia.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, J. Neil Schulman discusses a type of book that he characterizes as the Paranoid Thriller: It\u2019s probably no surprise to anyone who\u2019s read my books, but I\u2019m a long-time fan of what might best be called the Paranoid Thriller. \u201cParanoid Thriller\u201d isn\u2019t a book publishing category. You won\u2019t find such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,53,13],"tags":[898,67,476,37,478,85],"class_list":["post-38184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-politics","category-usa","tag-alternativehistory","tag-aynrand","tag-espionage","tag-matrix","tag-robertheinlein","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9VS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38184"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38187,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38184\/revisions\/38187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}