The 2020s have been an exhausting six years marked by a fracturing society and an increasingly surreal reality, with its literature reflecting exactly that. We’ve spent the last half decade living through a meat-grinder of rolling global quarantines, algorithmic doomscrolling, and the kind of unchecked AI acceleration that used to be strictly confined to a Ghost in the Shellprologue. With the real world getting smaller, meaner, and infinitely more unhinged, the sprawling epics of the 2010s just don't cut it anymore.