Once upon a time, reality was one long tapestry, complete and visible. That doesn’t mean it was correct, coherent, or universally humane—only that it was singular. Mythic or religious disputes were frequent, but beneath every argument lay a stable cosmos that everyone inhabited. Reality was not chosen; it was entered at birth.
What’s more, everything in the tapestry intertwined down to the smallest detail. In Rome, every doorway was guarded by a cluster of minor gods—Janus for the passage, Cardea for the hinge, Forculus for the door itself. (Yes, they had separate deities for each.) A bride entering a new household risked offending these spirits or stumbling across the boundary, an omen of calamity, so she was carried, lifted safely over the liminal space. The modern custom (now fading) of carrying a bride over the threshold was not, as a modern critic might suspect, a patronizing gesture, like carrying in a new TV. It was an act of courtesy and protection.
That orphaned remnant is a tiny fossil of a world in which even the hinge of a door had a place in the cosmic order. You can still witness living echoes of that unity in southern India. There, a doorway is still a boundary with ritual weight; a temple is still a cosmic diagram; a festival still follows astronomical rhythms older than Rome. The calendar is not a scheduling tool but a cosmology. Daily acts—lighting lamps, tracing kolam patterns on the threshold—embody a worldview in which everything is connected to everything else.
In the last century, television introduced a radically different world, one that resolved its conflict in minutes rather than centuries and then vanished without memory the following week, when the characters of a sitcom reset to default settings as if last night’s episode had never happened.
Even broadcast television, however, was a shared experience. Everyone consumed the same story on the same channel at the same time. The debut of I Love Lucy and the 1980 season of Dallas (wherein it was revealed “Who shot JR?”) were cultural landmarks. Even if you didn’t watch them, you still knew about them. Television mimicked unity with a weekly ritual of synchronized attention.
The proliferation of narrative mediums that followed—cable, on-demand, home video, asynchronous streaming, personalized algorithmic feeds—marks an epic turn of human cultural experience from something ultimately shared to something ultimately not.
People today don’t simply disagree about perspective. Increasingly, they occupy completely distinct realities. These are not as beautiful or coherent as the tapestries of the past, but they feel whole from the inside. They have their own founding myths, their own cobbled sense of the past, their own canon, their own obvious truths, their own idiosyncratic logic—and when something in them shifts (as it must), that shift is absorbed retroactively. Yesterday’s truth is not overwritten; it is retconned. How things are at this moment—or any moment—is how they have always been, and if anything changes tomorrow, it will have always been that way.
This presents a unique challenge to narrative literature.
Even the writers who fractured narrative most elegantly never fractured reality itself. Virginia Woolf could dissolve time and move seamlessly between consciousnesses in Mrs. Dalloway, but all her characters still lived in the same London. Philip K. Dick could destabilize perception so completely that his characters doubted their memories, histories, and identities, yet even his most hallucinatory novels unfold inside a single underlying world. His realities bend, glitch, and deceive, but they never deny the possibility of reality. In fact, these perceptual distortions require reality—otherwise, what is being distorted?
We no longer live in a continuous world, even a fractured or distorted one. We live in discontinuity: algorithmic personalized narrative, asynchronous consumption, unstable identities, contradictory beliefs, realities that recalibrate every day, every moment. Experience arrives in packets: self-contained, immersive, incompatible updates to a firmware that is never the same twice—not chapters in a single story, not shared episodes with no memory of the past, but whole epistemologies with no knowledge of each other. Modern life is not a tapestry; it is all the thread.
A literature erected on the presumption of continuity, of a world “beneath it all,” begins to feel nostalgic, even deceptive.
The first solutions extended unreliable narrators to unreliable everything: slipstream, branching timelines, multiverse worlds. They tried to capture what was lost but not what replaced it. Importantly, all of them still required a cosmos, just a fractured one.
That is not our world. There is no tapestry of all tapestries. There is no myth of all myths. All of us increasingly inhabit mutually exclusive existences, absolute within themselves, constantly changing but unknown to and irreconcilable with others. And this will only accelerate as technologies like generative AI, 3D printing, bioengineering, and their successors allow us—not to inhabit a digital or virtual reality—but to make physical reality conform to our personal myths.
If fiction seems paler than it used to be, it’s because it has not yet learned to inhabit this fracture, only to catalog it.
For almost thirty years, I have been writing strange, self-contained fragments—fables, tragedies, scholarly notes, diary entries from diverse imaginary civilizations that nevertheless shared a certain tone: ancient, mythic, lived-in. Each fragment was part of the same world, yet few of the fragments could coexist. Some described one sun. Others mentioned two. Some were patently realistic, others had ghosts. Some held magic, others machines.
Only later did I realize these were not the detritus of a failed novel nor the beginnings of a fantasy travelogue. They were an unconscious attempt to replicate the feel of the contemporary world rather than its structure.
Multiverse stories replicate the structure—and in a very literal way. What they cannot do, however, is describe what it is like from within. The moment you reveal a parallel reality, you immediately thrust the reader, from their vantage as observer, over and above everything. The reader stands outside the system, surveying every divergence from a single privileged point, in effect recreating a “higher” singular existence.
Multiverse narratives cannot escape the unity they pretend to dissolve because the viewer is never inside. They are always separate, untouched by the contradiction, watching related and resolvable worlds swirl beneath them in the tapestry of all tapestries.
(Movies about multiverses suffer even more. In fiction, a reader’s perspective is diffuse and shifting. A camera lens must always occupy a particular point in space.)
Orthogonal fiction is a narrative mode that describes a single, complete, self-contained reality that is persistently inconsistent—not because of unreliable narrators or shifting perspectives, not because of timeline splits or spatial plot devices. Orthogonal fiction isn’t multiverse fiction (there is only one world). It isn’t mosaic fantasy (the tiles don’t form a picture). It isn’t experimental fragmentation.
Orthogonal fiction instantiates the modern experience of inhabiting a separate reality by presenting a world that cannot reconcile with itself, a world that shifts without explanation, a world whose past, laws, and cosmology change while remaining wholly true within each moment. In orthogonal fiction, contradiction is not a problem to be solved or an illusion to be explained. It is the ontology. The world does not break; it simply becomes what it now is—retroactively, absolutely, and without apology.
Orthogonal fiction does not let the reader rise above these changes. It denies them the god’s-eye view entirely. Each passage asserts itself as the only possible reality, and the reader must enter it on its own terms, with no assurance that the next passage will remember. There is no meta-world to retreat to, no hidden architecture tying everything together, no myth of all myths. There is continuity but not persistence—of the world, of the story, of the self.
In each moment, the world is whole and complete, it has always been whole and complete, and nothing contradicts. All moments are this way, and since they are aware of nothing but themselves, the reader is forced to remain inside.
This is not as jarring as it might sound. If anything, it should feel uncannily familiar. We already navigate incompatible realities every day—personal, political, digital, cultural—each one complete while it lasts, each one rewriting its own past without ever acknowledging the change. Orthogonal fiction simply makes explicit what modern life has made ordinary.
It is already possible for AI to read everything everyone has written and identify “sophisticated” texts, not just those with proper spelling and clarity of prose but originality, pacing, and thematic recursion. It can already do this; it simply doesn’t have access.
In the future—probably the near future—it will, and it will excavate texts that almost no one has read. It is to this future I am writing. The narrative structure I am proposing is meant to be the hinge between two ways of seeing. I am consciously carrying fiction across the threshold.
I don’t love the name orthogonal fiction, but I don’t have a better one. (If you do, let me know.) You can start reading at the link below. This project, which has followed me for decades, is not the only way a text might be orthogonal, but it has the virtue of being the first.
Updates and additions will be appended to the post without announcement.
If it changes, it will always have been that way.