From Screen People to Fiction Creep
In her book Screen People, Megan Garber argues that our regime of screens has turned us into “two-way people”: part flesh-and-blood, part digital avatar. On “two-way screens,” she writes, we are at once humans and images, both real and “mere tricks of the light.” Her analysis traces a cultural arc from the viral debate over the color of “The Dress” to a broader “post-truth” era, where it is harder than ever to distinguish fact from fiction and people from characters. This is the core of what might be called fiction creep: stories, spectacles, and online personas leaking into the way we experience reality itself. In that world, novels are no longer just entertainment; they become one more arena in which we test-drive selves, rehearse emotions, and negotiate what feels real.
When Characters Feel More Real Than Life
The blurring Garber describes is already familiar to devoted readers who form intense bonds with fictional characters. Essays on reading culture note how some women jokingly speak of “book husbands and boyfriends,” and claim certain authors as “besties” whose words feel aimed directly at them. Research has linked regular fiction reading with higher scores on theory of mind, suggesting that slipping into a character’s interior world can fine-tune our ability to sense what others are thinking and feeling. For many, books become safer, more reliable companions than real people during difficult seasons of life. Online, that attachment gets amplified by digital reading habits: fan forums, character memes, and endless analysis on social platforms. The emotional fluency readers practice with made-up people starts to look a lot like the way we now manage relationships with influencers, avatars, and strangers in our feeds.
AI Generated Novels and the Question of Authenticity
Into this already unstable boundary between fiction and reality enters AI generated novels and non-fiction. Tools like Youbooks tout a “multi-AI collaboration engine” that draws on several large models at once to produce long, publish-ready manuscripts, complete with internet research, user-uploaded source documents, and style samples meant to mimic a specific voice. A lifetime subscription to Youbooks’ non-fiction generator is currently advertised at USD 34.97 (approx. RM170) from a regular price of USD 540.00 (approx. RM2,650). The pitch is efficiency and scale: up to 300,000 words, more than 1,000 internal steps, and full commercial rights. But this abundance sharpens an existential question for readers: if a plausible book can be assembled from patterns, what does an author’s consciousness add? As AI-written titles flood online marketplaces, the idea of a singular, intentional storyteller becomes both more fragile and more precious.
Backlash, BookTok Culture, and Performative Reading
Not everyone is convinced AI belongs in literature. Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction winner Rachel Clarke has called literature written by artificial intelligence “the emptiest, most vacuous, object imaginable.” For her, the issue is less job security than trust and authenticity: the quiet bond between reader and artist, and the belief that a real person has wrestled with the material they present. That concern coexists with hyper-social bookish spaces such as BookTok and Goodreads, where reading becomes a performance: annotated margins on camera, tearful reaction videos, and carefully curated shelves designed for screenshots. Online book clubs and recommendation threads turn private reading into public identity work. In Garber’s terms, our “two-way” selves show up here too: one part solitary reader, one part content creator, constantly curating which stories—and which versions of ourselves—we want others to see.
The Future of Storytelling in an Algorithmic Age
For reluctant or emerging readers, the path into reading rarely begins with a canon list; it begins with relevance. Educators and authors have observed that breakthroughs often come when young people are allowed to read what they genuinely love, whether that is gritty contemporary fiction, graphic novels, or practical nonfiction about hobbies and survival. That insight may point to where human-written novels still matter most in an age of algorithmic feeds and infinite content: offering specificity, risk, and emotional stakes that are not optimized for engagement metrics alone. As fiction creep accelerates, stories will keep competing with every other digital spectacle on the same glowing rectangles. Yet precisely because reality feels unstable, readers may value the kinds of narratives that feel grounded in a particular mind and life. The future of storytelling may be abundant—but the work that lingers will likely be the work that feels unmistakably human.
