So here we are in 2017. What’s going to happen?

by Rick Blechta

I’m not going to belabour the fact that we’ve entered a new year. I sort of did that last week, or last year, or even 10 years ago on Type M. That’s right, there’s more than 10 years of history of this little blog we started, so I’ve done the new year thing quite a few times. Done it to death, actually.

So, where do I begin a new year of Type M posts?

Well, one thing I’ve been cogitating on is the change in mood the whole planet seems to be undergoing. I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that multiple governments my possibly take a more totalitarian turn. That seems to be happening in the US, France, and other European countries. Russia is a dictatorship in all but name only.

Will this lead to the rise in novels with a more dystopian viewpoint? (Merriam-Webster: from dystopia — an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives) Certainly we saw more dystopian fiction in the late ’40s and ’50s, but mostly confined to Sci Fi and speculative fiction. Is it now crime fiction’s turn?

Or — as I speculated a few weeks ago — will more cozies, with their comfortable “world view” be published? I certainly don’t mind reading something challenging, but there are times where current events are overwhelmingly grim and I want to escape into a book describing a more comforting ethos, so it would not be surprising to me to see more cozies on the shelf.

Or will things not change at all in the writing world? Certainly there are numerous examples of people just hiding their heads in the sand and ignoring the blatant lies and untruths that swirl around us daily. I, for one, have become an incredibly skeptical reader in the past couple of years. Even the most trusted journalistic sources are spinning the truth more than ever. Journalists or politicians flat out lie, and when caught, throw up their hands and say, “So what?” That attitude didn’t wash when my mom caught me lying, and it still doesn’t. But we seem to care not a jot these days when it happens, because it’s so prevalent. Maybe the plots of novels will continue much as they have for the past several years.

With the publishing industry still grinding at what seems a glacial pace, I don’t expect any changes in the type of stories being published being manifested until at least two years have passed.

But those two years are certainly going to prove “interesting”.