LW - "Deception Genre" What Books are like Project Lawful? by Double

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: "Deception Genre" What Books are like Project Lawful?, published by Double on August 28, 2024 on LessWrong. 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? Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org