Review
Nonfiction examples come more easily to mind.
There was recently a miniseries on nebula.tv (subscription-walled, sorry) called The Getaway where all six contestants on a Survivor-style competition show think they're the one person with the special saboteur role, and half the show is the producers trying to keep them from noticing that without ever actually lying.
Even more extreme, there's an old British show called Space Cadets where the producers try to convince the subjects that they've been launched into space when in reality they're in a set in a warehouse.
I discovered John C Wright's Golden Age trilogy thanks to one Eliezer Yudkowsky, who mentioned it multiple times in his notorious Sequences. By the end of the first book i was expecting something very much in the deception genre you've mentioned — a tragic psychological horror about an unreliable narrator being gaslit about the nature of reality. This is a genre i really enjoy, and i kind of hoped for a novel-length version of Scott Alexander's The Last Temptation of Christ.
I did not get that, the trilogy goes in a wildly different direction. But saying whether for better or for worse — heck, even saying if it's a good or bad book — would constitute massive SPOILERS for anyone who discovered this book through Yudkowsky. (If you know why he dropped it, it should be obvious).
I kept hate-reading it.
The Three Body Problem Trilogy by Liu Cixin (books and Neflix series) features two prominent deceptive subplots. I think it fulfills Deception Genre criteria because the reader does (eventually) get the warring perspectives of both the deceivers and the deceived.
Here are the two subplots, in cryptic shorthand to avoid spoilers: 1)The 11-D proton-sized situation 2) WBs vs WFs.
"Okay, Beatrice. There was no alien, and the flash of light you saw in the sky wasn't a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and refracted the light from Venus -- Men in Black
The TV Series "Dark Skies" .. in which the US Government is orchestrating a coverup about the involvement of giant prawns from outer space in the Roswell incident, the JFK assassination, the shootdown of Gary Power's US spyplane, erc.
It's not a book, but if you like older movies, the 1944 film Gaslight is pretty far back (film production standards have improved quite a bit since then, so for a large proportion of people 40's films are barely watchable, which is why I recommend this version over the nearly identical British version and the original play), and it was pretty popular among cultural elites at the time so it's probably extremely causally upstream of most of the fiction you'd be interested in.
I agree that Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is an example.
Almost but not quite an example: Edmund Cooper's The Overman Culture. It is obvious to the reader from the outset that the characters cannot be when and where they think the are (evacuated from London during World War 2).Maybe not enough deceiver's perspective to count.
Also not quite: Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun.
Seconded Book of the New Sun. But note that Wolfe also writes in an obtuse high-literature style that might be offputting to the typical ratfic reader, which made me drop BotNS the first time through; you'd better read some of his short stories first to get some priors.
I think you could argue plausibly that the climax of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In the Sky has aspects of this, though it's subverted in multiple interesting spoilery ways.
In fact, I think you could argue that a lot of Vinge's writing tends to have major climaxes dependent on Xanatos Gambit pileups based on deception themes.
An existing subgenre of this with several examples is the two-timer date. As I recall, it was popular in 90's sitcoms. Don't expect INT 18 tier scheming, but it does usually show the perspective of the people frantically trying to keep the deception running.
This almost certainly will not satisfy the desire that motivated your question, but just for the sake of thoroughness, we might notice that the 2014 TV show Ascension is about 70 people who believe they are on an inter-generational space ship going to Alpha Centauri, but they are really on Earth. The writers are mainly interested in exploring class differences, 1960s American society and a murder, and there's very little treatment of "conspiracists frantically trying to keep the deception running".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries)
I watched it, and cannot even recall the motivation for the deception.
When the Seagulls Cry by Ryukishi 07 is practically Online Algorithms: The Visual Novel, or even Infrabayesianism: The Visual Novel. I find it hard to recommend though, because while the concept is interesting and the mysteries good, the writing is overlong and the worldbuilding cringe. (Or maybe i just hate VNs as a medium).
Minor spoilers (explaining the story's premise):
The main meta-story is a murder mystery game for two players: the “detective” and the “witch” who presents clues and insults the detective's intelligence by presenting him elaborate “supernatural” non-explanations. (The last part is not in the rules, but it's traditional.) The main plot point in that story is that as the witch player begins to lose, she starts cheating, retroactively changing the mystery solution, constrained only by the facts presented to the detective. Soon it becomes apparent that cheating is in fact expected, and the detective has to brute-force all solutions Absurdle-style.
Major spoilers (for ongoing rationalist drama): Grokking the ontology presented in Seagulls led me to understand how people may become Zizians.
See also Gwern's more spoilerrific review.
I and perhaps other LessWrongers would appreciate reading your review (of any length) of the book, since lots of us loved HPMOR, the Sequences, etc, but are collectively skeptical / on the fence about whether to dive into Project Lawful. (What's the best way to read the bizzare glowfic format? What are the main themes of the book and which did you like best? etc)
I loved Project Lawful/Planecrash (not sure which is the actual title), but I do hesitate to recommend it to others. Not everyone likes their medium-core S&M with a side of hardcore decision theory, or vice-versa. It is definitely weirder than HPMOR.
Something that threw me off at first: it takes the mechanics of the adapted setting very literally (e.g. spell slots and saving throws are non-metaphorical in-universe Things). That's not normal for (good) game fanfiction. The authors make it work anyway -- perhaps because clear rules make it easier to produce solvable puzzles -- but it took some getting used to.
The glowfic format is strange, yeah, but it doesn't read much different. It does make for a clearer delineation of character perspectives (e.g. compared to an omniscient narrator), and the portraits/icons carry more weight than one might expect. The main drawback I noticed was that, without chapters, clear "you can stop reading and go to bed" breaks were sometimes quite far apart.
(also I had to take Stylus to the CSS to render it comfortably readable, but that's every site on the internet these days)
Spoiler free again:
Good to know there’s demand for such a review! It’s now on my todo list.
To quickly address some of your questions:
Pros of PL: If the premise I described above interests you, then PL will interest you. Some good Sequences-style rationality. I certainly was obsessed reading it for months.
Cons: Some of the Rationality lectures were too long, but I didn’t mind much. The least sexy sex scenes. Because they are about moral dilemmas and deception, not sex. Really long. Even if you read it constantly and read quickly, it will take time (1.8 million words will do that). I really have to read some authors that aren’t Yud. Yud is great, but this is clearly too much of him, and I’m sure he’d agree.
I read PL when it was already complete, so maybe I didn’t get the full experience, but there really wasn’t anything all that strange about the format (the content is another matter!). I can imagine that *writing * a glowfic would be a much different experience than writing a normal serialized work (ie dealing with your co-authors), but reading it isn’t very different from reading any other fiction. Look at the picture to see the POV, look at who’s the author if you’re curious, and read as normal. I’m used to books that change POV (though usually not this often). There are sometimes bonus tangent threads, but the story is linear. What problems do you have with the glowfic format?
Main themes would require a longer post, but I hope this helps.
My opinion, very briefly:
Good stuff:
Stuff that might be good for some and bad for others:
Bad stuff:
My question is, Can I download an offline copy of it -- either text or spoken audio?
The audio consists of 195 episodes, each of which can be individually downloaded, but can I get it as a single audio file (of duration 150 hours or so)?
There is a epub version at https://www.mikescher.com/blog/29/Project_Lawful_ebook.
(Alternatively, you could open each glowfic thread, select "show flat" or option like that, then print/parse the resulting page, obtaining a few PDFs which can be merged afterwards.)
I thought this review was fine: https://recordcrash.substack.com/p/mad-investor-chaos-woman-asmodeus
This post is spoiler-free
I just finished Project Lawful, a really long, really weird book by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The book's protagonist is a knowledgable and perceptive target. A conspiracy forms around the target to learn from him while keeping him from finding out that helping them is not in the target's best interests. The book is written from the perspective of both the target and the conspiracists. The target notices inconsistencies and performs experiments to test his false reality while also acting in the fabricated reality according to his interests. The conspiracists frantically try to keep the target from catching them or building enough evidence against them that he concludes they have been lying.
This is a description of (part of) the plot of Project Lawful. But this could be the description of an entire genre! If the genre doesn't already have a name, it could be the "Deception Genre."
Another work in this category would be The Truman Show, which fits the deception and the target's escape within a <2hr movie runtime.
Other stories with lying don't really have the same structure. Walter White in Breaking Bad is trying to keep his crimes hidden but isn't constructing a false reality around the cops or his family. Death Note comes close, though Light tries to mislead L about specifically who Kira is and how the Death Note works rather than constructing an entire false reality around L. Many stories about dystopias have the protagonists discover that their realities are false, but fewer of those feature the perspectives of the conspiracists frantically trying to keep the deception running.
Do you know any other stories in the Deception Genre?