If it takes you two years to write a book, you owe it to yourself to ask the question, “What kinds of books will be popular in two years?” Reader preferences change over time, but sometimes they change rapidly. If you don’t keep up, you can get stuck writing a book people no longer want to read. 

As Yoda says, “Difficult to see the future is.” But difficult is not impossible. Causes have effects and the more you have a sense for the rhythms of the past, the better you can sense the future. 

For example, a few weeks ago, my five-year-old knocked a metal plate off the kitchen counter. As it fell, she put her hands over her ears. She knew from past experience that a metal plate hitting a tile floor is insanely loud. She saw far enough into the future to take immediate action.  

This is not prophesy or mysticism. There are no crystal balls in this episode. This is simply what the Bible would call “Understanding the Times.”

Like my five-year-old and the sons of Issachar, we can glimpse the future by understanding the times enough to take action now to prepare. 

How can you determine what will be popular in a few years? To help us understand the rhythms of history, I spoke with Alexander Macris. He’s an author, publisher, game designer, and polymath.

The Era of Flopbuster

In the last ten months, we have seen three of the biggest flops ever in video gaming.

Something has changed culturally, and big media companies are getting caught out of sync with the cultural zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history, as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.

Flopped Video Games

• Concord($200-$400 million loss)
• Skull and Bones ($200-$600 million loss)
• Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League ($200 million loss)

That’s over a billion dollars lost in ten months on only three games. One billion dollars is enough to build more than 4,000 homes or ten hospitals, but the money went up in smoke on games that probably would have done well if they had been released five years earlier. By the time the games came out, the zeitgeist had changed.

Megaflops in Hollywood have become so common in the last year that we have a new term: the “flopbuster.”

Flopbuster Movies

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
• The Marvels
• The Joker 2

Indiana Jones lost 200 million. Flopbuster. The Marvels lost tens of millions of dollars. Flopbuster. As we’re recording this, Joker 2 recently came out, and it may be the biggest flopbuster of them all.

Flopped Books

Publishers are not much better at avoiding expensive flops, although they are better at hiding the specifics. What they can’t hide is that most of the major publishers stay in business because of their backlists rather than their new titles, which flop most of the time. Again, it’s due to the major shift we’ve just experienced in culture.

Understanding the Times: Secular Cycles 

For those who pay attention to secular cycles, 2023 was likely a turning point between the third and fourth turnings. This is based on a historical cycle called the saeculum. The Romans wrote about it, Solomon may have alluded to it, and historians have tracked it closely for the last few hundred years. Anthropologists have been studying this for a long time.

If you want to learn more about the saeculum, I recommend the books Pendulum(available only on audio) and The Fourth Turning is Here (the Strauss and Howe theory).

If you don’t want to read 700 pages of history, here’s a summary of pendulum theory: Societies rotate through four turnings that, more or less, match nature’s seasons. Each turning lasts about 20 years, so if you live an average human lifespan for your era in history, you will live through all four turnings.  

• First Turning: The High (Spring)
• Second Turning: The Awakening (Summer)
• Third Turning: The Unraveling (Autumn)
• Fourth Turning: The Crisis (Winter)

The Unraveling is a period of weakening institutions and rising individualism. Society starts to fragment, with increased distrust in authority and skepticism toward established norms. Political gridlock, cultural wars, and economic disparity are common. This is the autumn of the saeculum.  

We are now entering the fourth turning known as The Crisis. It’s a societal winter where things are dark and cold, but each day is longer, with more sunlight, than the day before. 

The fourth turning is a period of upheaval, where society confronts existential threats, whether from war, economic collapse, or political revolution. Institutions are often rebuilt from the ashes during this phase as society comes together to face a common enemy or challenge. As institutions are rebuilt, the focus shifts from individualism to collective action and survival. There’s a sense of urgency as society is reshaped in preparation for a new era, which often requires individual sacrifice.

The previous fourth turnings were:

1. The Great Depression and WWII 1930s – 1940s
2. The American Civil War 1860s
3. American Revolutionary War 1770-1780s
4. English Civil War & Glorious Revolution 1640s -1680s
5. Armada Crisis & Gunpowder Plot 1580s

Note: The length of a turning is not always 20 years. It tends to very on several factors that you can learn about here.

Alexander: The numbers speak for themselves. Eighty years ago, it was 1944 and World War II. Eighty years before that was 1864, which was the height of the Civil War. Go back 80 more years, and it’s 1784 with the constitutional crisis after the American Revolution.

Since these turnings are approximately 20-year periods, we’re right in the middle of it. I think that’s why we all have this daily feeling of waiting for the shoe to drop. I wake up every single morning, turn on my computer, look at X, and wonder if today is the day the third world war started.

Thomas: I voted early today, and normally people are chatting and in a good mood. Studies have found that voting makes people feel good. But today, I noticed many people staring into the middle distance with an intense look on their faces. They were somber and serious.

It was really fascinating because this is very much like a fourth-turning crisis era, although the crisis is impossible to predict. I think historians will look back and include the COVID pandemic as a part of the crisis in the same way the last fourth turning was a combination of the depression and the war.

We don’t know what the next crisis is, and at the time of this recording, we don’t know who the President of the United States will be. We can’t predict specifics. It’s kind of like psychohistory, where we have a sense of the times, but we don’t necessarily know what individuals will do.

Still, it’s useful to get a sense of the times when you’re trying to write a book that is connecting with where people are.

With that background in mind, what do you see as the source of the flopbuster? The executives thought millions of people would want to pay to buy these games, read these books, or watch these movies. Why are these games failing so spectacularly that they can’t find any audience at all?

What do you see as the source of the flopbuster?

Alexander: Here’s my take. Most of the flopbusters are what we might call progressive in spirit. The creators are progressive. To be progressive is to believe in what used to be called the Whig School of History, in which everything just keeps getting better. The wheel of history grinds slowly, but it grinds forward. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.

So, if you are a progressive, and you look at the state of a culture war as you enter it circa 2012 in the Obama era, then by definition, as a progressive and as a Whig historian theorist, you expect the continued triumph of progressive values. For example, today, we have gay marriage, then we have support for transgenderism, et cetera, and we continue to get more progressive.

But that’s not actually what happened. We actually are experiencing a cyclical history where things are not continuing as they were. Rather, we’re entering a crisis. You basically see a trajectory that was expected to go increasingly upward is instead hitting a steep downward slope. The flopbuster is the gap between the curve they thought they were on and the actual arc of history.

Thomas: According to pendulum theory, the pendulum hit its apex in 2023, or at least that’s when they predicted the apex would be back in 2012, which means that according to pendulum theory, we’ve already started a downward turn.

They were expecting that pendulum to go up forever when, in reality, it didn’t. Now, changing directions doesn’t mean that it’s already swung all the way to the other side. It simply means the momentum has shifted.

In the Strauss and Howe theory, that means this is the fourth turning rather than the third turning.

How to Write 4th Turning Protagonists

Thomas: Let’s discuss specific tropes and story elements that I think will change based on this momentum shift.

I think this shift will change what readers look for in a hero. In the second and third turnings, we wanted relatable heroes.

In the third turning, people loved the antihero. The hero was complicated, struggling with a dark past and struggling with himself.

As we move into the fourth turning, and especially as we shift into the first turning, that antihero will become less appealing.

The Era of the Antihero Starts to End

If we look at popular stories from 80 years ago, in the early part of the fourth turning, we see that smoky, noir private detective who didn’t necessarily do the right thing because he wanted to. He wasn’t a good man, but sometimes he did good things, and sometimes he did bad things.

Smoky, noir detectives like Philip Marlowe declined in popularity compared to characters like Hercule Poirot who gained popularity as we moved through the 4th turning. 

The change didn’t happen overnight, but people do change enough that if you spend $200 million making a movie, you may not make your money back if it’s out of step with the zeitgeist when it releases.

The same phenomenon is true with books. The darker things are in real life, the more people long for self sacrificial heroes.

The antihero does the right thing for selfish reasons. The true hero does the right thing for selfless reasons. It’s the difference between Batman and Superman. When one is waxing, the other is waning. Sometimes Superman is more appealing, and sometimes Batman is more appealing.

Alexander: Batman and Superman are the antihero and hero of contemporary culture. However, how much resonance they have with the younger generation is arguable. Certainly, for our generation, those were the two tent poles.

Thomas: Captain America and Iron Man may be better examples. Captain America is the man who will dive on the grenade, whereas Iron Man struggles with doing the right thing for selfish reasons. But which is resonant and with whom it resonates is also really interesting. As society shifts, people shift at different paces, and not everyone gets it.

It’s not like everyone is suddenly different, but it changes over time. For instance, the Sopranos came out in 1999. It had a classic antihero story that would do well in a third-turning era. I don’t think the Sopranos would do well today. People don’t rewatch the Sopranos like they used to.

Alexander: Breaking bad would be another example.

Thomas: It’s very noir. You’re always wondering whether the protagonist is a good guy, a bad guy, or both.

From Affirmational to Aspirational Heroes

Thomas: Even the way we talk about fiction has changed. It was assumed in the 1970s that the protagonist was the hero and the antagonist was the villain. It was baked into the cake, and it will be again for our children. Another way to think of it is relatable heroes as opposed to aspirational heroes. In the second and third turnings, we wanted relatable heroes. In the fourth and first turnings, we want aspirational heroes.

Alexander: I call them affirmational heroes and aspirational heroes.

An aspirational hero is the hero you are not but wish you could be. You admire the hero for who he is. The affirmational hero is the person like you, who, because of circumstances, has become a protagonist.

There’s this great line in Neal Stephenson’s book where he says, “If only my parents had been killed when I was seven years old, I know I could have been the baddest man alive.” The hero protagonist has that thought, and that’s the affirmational protagonist. He’s a normal guy, but his wife gets killed, and so he becomes the vigilante.

How to Write 4th Turning Villains

Thomas: We see the same thing mirrored in the villains. When you have an antihero hero, you often have an antihero villain. And I have this new term I would like to submit to the lexicon of authors: The Terminator to Thanos Continuum.

In the original Terminator, the T-1000 is a pure force of evil. All he does is kill and destroy. You don’t reason with him or even talk to him. You don’t let him touch you because he’ll kill you. There’s no complexity to the T-1000 as a villain.

On the other end of the continuum, Thanos is the hero of his own story. He’s the protagonist of Infinity War. He is doing the right thing in his own mind, but he’s wrong about what the right thing is. Thanos has experienced trauma in the past, and it’s causing him to do bad things in the present. He is so compelling many viewers are convinced that #ThanosWasRight.

In pleasant times, a complicated of villain is very satisfying, but in difficult times, readers want to see the evil villian get crushed.

Termanids & Tyranids

The two video games that are crushing it right now in sales both have unambiguously evil villains. In Helldivers 2, you’re shooting alien bugs that are killing humans, and in Space Marines 2, you’re doing the same. There’s no complexity to the villains. On the Terminator-to-Thanos Continuum, these villains are all the way back at the T-1000, which was a villain from the 1980s. And you saw a lot of these kinds of villains in the 1980s. The Alien film had the same kind of villain.

These uncomplicated villains are purely evil. When they finally get defeated, it’s emotionally satisfying. It gives me hope that good really can conquer evil.

Alexander: My own role-playing game, Adventure Conqueror King System, has taken fire because the beast men and the monsters are innately evil. My sense is that you need and want to have innately evil antagonists. The adventurers need something that they can strive against and feel heroic about defeating, and that has been absent for about a generation.

In terms of villains, the height of the absence of innately evil villains was when the Star Wars franchise started to brag about the racial and sexual diversity of the Stormtroopers and the Grand Moffs. It was a genocidal empire that destroyed billions with the Death Star, but hooray, they’re diverse.

Thomas: I suspect the apotheosis of postmodern storytelling happened with the Joker 2. The antihero deconstructed in a subversive way. It checks all the boxes for postmodern storytelling, and it was obvious in the trailers. It is a deconstruction, and it’s subversive, and people are tired of that. I enjoyed it, but I’m not talking about me personally. People enjoyed the first Joker film, and it was a lot of those things to some degree. But now people see the trailer and say, “I don’t want to see that.” The people who did see it didn’t like it. It got a D cinema score, which is staggeringly bad. Movies with hundred-million-dollar budgets don’t get a D cinema score, and movies with $200 million dollar budgets never get a D cinema score.

It was a flopbuster and maybe the biggest flop of all time.

Subversion Fatigue

Thomas: Postmodernism gaining in popularity during the 2nd and 3rd turnings storytelling. But readers are getting fatigue of postmodern subversion. One of the first authors to realize this was Brandon Sanderson. Brandon Sanderson wrote a great essay about 15 years ago on why he stopped writing postmodern fantasy. His early Mistborn stories were postmodern and subversive. In his essay, he said those two characteristics made it easy to pitch to publishers because they were what publishers wanted, but those characteristics don’t make stories that appeal to readers.

Readers feel betrayed by subversion. Readers who want subversion rarely stick around for the normal bits before the subversion at the end. They don’t want their expectations subverted. They want their expectations delivered.

In difficult times, when there’s chaos around us,
we don’t want chaos in the stories we read.

Thomas Umstattd, Jr.

When there’s tranquility around us, we have a higher appetite for chaos in our reading. So, as the chaos of this fourth turning expands, there will be a greater longing for simpler, more direct, more earnest stories that are less cynical and ironic.

Alexander: And we’ll see stories where a powerful figure arrives to make things right by force and virtue.

I started writing a TV show, which I pitched during the third turning, but maybe I should repitch it because it’s about Aurelian Restitutor Orbis. He was the Roman emperor who rebuilt the entire Empire. When he took power, the empire had shattered into the Gallic Empire, the Palmyran Empire, and then the rump of the Roman Empire, which was split between the Senate and the Emperor. This one man rebuilt the entire Empire. Then he systematically defeats everyone and restores it, and that was why they called him Restitutor Orbis, Restorer of the World.

He’s largely forgotten today because he was overshadowed by emperors who came after him and led the empire into collapse. He basically halts the crisis of the third century, and I think that’s the heroic figure of the zeitgeist of the moment.

Everyone can see their problems, but no one wants to hear about how the problems are unsolvable and you should only look out for yourself. People want to see the problems and see a hero who rises to the occasion to solve those problems. I think that is the moment.

Thomas: Two fictional characters wax and wane with this saeculum, and they are Robin Hood and King Arthur. Historically, King Arthur has been very popular during a fourth turning, and Robin Hood is more popular during the second turning. Interestingly, there have been no popular Arthurian stories published recently. I think there’s a real opportunity here for a true Arthurian story without the cynicism or irony, where Arthur, as a powerful man, unites the powerful knights, puts them in a roundtable, and together they fight evil.

You’d be focusing on the Arthurian story, not on the Lancelot story, not on the betrayal, cheating, or adultery, but on Arthur uniting the kingdom and saving them from the barbarians.

The story of a powerful, morally good leader is, will resonate. I read a post on X where the reader said something like, “I want to see a story where the protagonist is the captain of the football squad, and he’s good.  He’s dating the leader of the cheerleading squad, and the bad guy is the loner doing magic.”

It’s a reversal of the typical YA story everyone’s been telling about the loner kid who does magic and the captain of the football squad is evil. Readers are tired of that. We’ve had that story. It’s time for a different story. Readers feel like the problems they face are greater than they can handle. They long for powerful leaders who can bring people together to solve those big problems.

Lancelot alone is not enough, but with Sir Galahad and the others, perhaps he is. If we put our swords and hearts together, we can defeat this common evil we face. I think those kinds of stories will become popular. But again, this is a decades-long process, so it doesn’t mean they’ll get popular overnight.

The 4 Turnings of King Arthur

Alexander: The Arthurian cycle itself was written over many centuries. You can actually trace all four turnings in The Arthurian mythos itself.

The fourth turning (The Crisis) is when King Arthur pulls the sword from the stone, goes forth, gathers the Knights of the Round Table, and restores peace to Great Britain moving into a first turning high.

Then you have the section when Camelot reigns, and the Knights are traipsing around the Enchanted Forest. They’re fighting giants and saving damsels, but it’s basically all good times.

They argue over who the greatest knight is, and that’s your second turning awakening. Then you get into the third turning (the winter unraveling) when Lancelot is hooking up with Guinevere, Mordred is causing problems, and Morgan the Fae is seducing Merlin.

Then you get into the fourth turning crisis, and King Arthur rises to the occasion. He puts the band back together. Lancelot comes out of retirement, and all is forgiven. They team up, Galahad finds the grail, and they defeat Mordred, he goes to Avalon, and Arthur dies. It’s all there.

Thomas: The American version of Arthur, which The Fourth Turning book discussed, is The Gray Champion by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I believe he wrote it in the 1830s, but it came back in two fourth turnings: the Revolutionary War and the one before that, the American side of the Glorious Revolution.

I think the story of The Gray Champion could be a great story for today. Have him return during the Civil War. Have him there in the mists of Normandy, and have him return in our current crisis.

Robert E. Howard had a character, Solomon Kane, which is arguably based on The Gray Champion. So I encourage you, if you’re curious about it, to read the short story of The Gray Champion. It’s in the public domain, which means Nathaniel Hawthorne is long dead. He doesn’t care. You can bring back the “gray champion” and put him in the current crisis, whatever it is.

4th Turing Nostalgia

We know that there’s always been a crisis in this era of history, but we don’t quite know what the crisis will be. As an author, you can offer hope. You can look back at what gave people hope in the past and use that to guide your fiction writing. Nostalgia is universal, but the nostalgia in the fourth turning tends to be for the last fourth turning.

The most popular film and book of the previous fourth turning was Gone with the Wind, and that movie was about the previous Fourth Turning in the Civil War. People are facing the depression. Storm clouds of war are brewing in Europe. Is there going to be another world war? Was The Great War not enough? This is the context of 1934 when Gone with the Wind comes out, and they’re looking back with nostalgia to an awful time.

Interestingly, in our current fourth turning, we are nostalgic for World War II. World War II movies are popular, but World War II books are even more popular. People are thinking about World War II quite a bit.

Alexander: Right now, you also see all over the internet that people are captivated by the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of Caesar Augustus and Trajan, et cetera. That’s a vibe I’ve been tapping into in my own work. Maybe I should do a World War II game or comic.

Popular Books from the Previous Fourth Turning

Thomas: One of the interesting themes of this fourth turning is the relationship between the individual and society, which is shifting.

In the crisis of a fourth turning, there is a call to everyone to die to themselves and sacrifice for the greater good. For example, “Give your sons to the war.” Mars, the god of war, demands sacrifice, and he only accepts the young and the healthy. We don’t send our sick and our old to war; we send our young and our healthy to war. Mars must be propitiated, to put it in the ancient Roman language.

Individual vs. Society

Thomas: In the 1930s and 1940s, the books The Grapes of Wrath and The Fountainhead were popular. Both books talk about that individual-versus-society relationship, but each offers entirely different answers through fiction. Those books speak to the zeitgeist of the time by telling us about the conversation but not about the answer. The books address the questions people were asking at that time.

Alexander: During that same time, they saw the rise of both fascism and communism, both making the call to put aside your individual selfishness and give yourself over to the state. If you’re an Italian fascist, you’re called to give yourself to the race. If you’re a communist, you’re called to give yourself to the class solidarity; “Workers of the world unite.” Or restore the Roman Empire as Mussolini wanted to do. It was the exact same message.

In the U. S., we found our answer to it as well: “Uncle Sam needs you!”  I think part of the reason for the emphasis on nostalgia towards the Civil War during the 1940s and the 1930s is the emphasis on the need for unity. Because they didn’t merely come out of the Civil War and hate each other. They came out of the Civil War, and they were all Americans. That was an important message at that time.

Thomas: The result of the crisis of the fourth turning in the past several hundred years is a rejuvenated era. The first turnings have interesting names historically. The Happy Days of the 1950s are a nostalgic time. We have the Gilded Age. (1870s) Before that, the time was called the Era of Good Feelings (1820s) because everyone was getting along. They’d worked their way through their drama to achieve The High, but they had to go through the winter to get to the spring of good feelings.

True Dystopian

Speaking of winter and spring, one interesting genre that was particularly popular in the last fourth turning was true dystopian. I’m not talking about cynical, dystopian-flavored stories like Divergent. Divergent isn’t a true dystopian book, even though it has a lot of dystopian elements. To write a true dystopian, you have to start with a utopian vision and then show its secret dark side.

To write a true dystopian, you have to start with a utopian vision
and then show its secret dark side.

Thomas Umstattd, Jr.

We saw true dystopian stories in the last fourth turning, such as Brave New World, Animal Farm, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. They were all published within a few years of each other.

In a true dystopian story, you start with the utopian vision that leaders present as the solution during a fourth-turning crisis. Different leaders and cultures offer various visions for a better future, each proposing a different path forward. While everyone agrees there’s a crisis, there’s no consensus on what a perfect future should look like. In a dystopian narrative, you reveal how this so-called utopian vision, championed by those in power, is actually dark, twisted, and deeply flawed.

For example, 1984 critiques fascism. Animal Farm critiques communism. Both tell us the utopian “solution” isn’t a beautiful solution at all. It’s actually a very dark, scary world. Maybe you’ve gotten rid of the humans, but now the pigs are as bad as the humans, and nothing has really changed.

Alexander: Brave New World more or less criticized technocratic, hedonistic, materialist neoliberalism.

Thomas: We need good dystopian stories to be written in the next few years. We need these utopian views of the future to be critiqued from the inside. Fiction is the only way to critique effectively.

Everything in Animal Farm traces back to events around 1921 when a group of sailors who initially supported the Bolsheviks rebelled. These sailors published some great essays criticizing communism, but their works were censored and had little impact on public discourse. Ultimately, they were forgotten or died in obscurity, though later the Communist Party celebrated their initial contributions to the revolution and ignored their criticisms, where they warned, “The communists are as oppressive as the czars.”

This same critique existed in essay form decades before George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It was only when Orwell fictionalized these ideas that they gained widespread attention. The ideas for impactful dystopian books that will be classics for generations already exist in essays. You just have to know where to look.

If you read those essays and write those stories, you could be the next George Orwell or Adolf Huxley. Each of these utopian views of the future is flawed. I know that sounds cynical, and we’re about to enter a non-cynical time, but we have enough history to know that utopia is never quite as good as it looks.

Alexander: That’s right. Ayn Rand also wrote a dystopian, which was semi-autobiographical, but it’s her only book with a truly tragic ending, and it’s my personal favorite of her books.

It’s important to stress that in the fourth-turning theory, the happy ending, the rejuvenation, is not guaranteed. The authors of The Fourth Turning stress that every time so far, the United States has emerged from its fourth turning rejuvenated, stronger, and better. But it isn’t inevitable, and the possibility that it might go wrong makes it emotionally powerful.

Subconsciously, we know that things could easily go really wrong. A simple mistake could lead to a third world war and nuclear annihilation, a bio pandemic, or market crashes, or an A. I. we don’t even understand.

So many things could go wrong. There’s no guarantee. That balance between predicting the new golden age and predicting the iron age gets challenging.

Thomas: We, the Living by Ayn Rand came out in 1936 in that window of dystopian stories.

We need that perspective, and we need novelists to give us that perspective. Strauss and Howell’s books are mainly for American audiences, but if you look at Russia’s fourth turnings, their stories are much darker and sadder. They’ve had some rough and extended fourth turnings. While a turning typically lasts around 20 years, sometimes they can be shorter. The Civil War fourth turning only lasted five years because the war was surprisingly decisive. The civilization of the South was far more fragile than Southerners realized.

War is a contest of civilizations, and while Southerners were good on the battlefield, they had built a very fragile civilization that was not able to withstand extended warfare in any meaningful way.

I want to free you all to start writing dystopian. This is your chance. I don’t think dystopian will work in 20 years (and it didn’t work 20 years ago), but I think now is your time. But it’s not the only kind of story that will resonate.

Escapist Literature and Heroic Tales

The Hobbit came out about 80 years ago, too. When people are in a crisis, they are looking for escapist literature. The tone of The Hobbit is very different from The Lord of the Rings. The tone of The Hobbit is much lighter, and the stakes are much lower, which makes it more of an escape.

In nearly every fantasy story today, the entire universe is at stake. To raise the stakes, novelists put the entire multiverse in danger. We keep increasing the stakes, believing it will make the story more intense, but it has the opposite effect.

I would argue that The Hobbit is a chiastic story following the two-act structure. The big cataclysm, the peripety, is Frodo finding the ring. At that point, he goes from being a passive participant to an active participant. He goes from a useless member of the band to a useful member.

People are longing for escape, and you have to understand what they want to escape from so you can craft a great escapist story.

Alexander: You can see what Tolkien’s readers wanted to escape at that time by the way he presented the idyllic view of English life. It avoids the ugly industrialization that was destroying the countryside at the time. You still have the well-mannered country Shire. There’s still mutual respect and affection between social classes. There’s no hint of communism and the labor movement tearing apart the Shire. When it does arrive in The Lord of the Rings, it’s presented in a villainous manner. You also see the camaraderie of the band of brothers going to war together, which I think reflects the World War I experience that had traumatized readers and writers at that time.

It’s all right there in this microcosm of the Shire and Middle Earth. The wise leader, Gandalf, was literally a “gray champion.” It’s all there in a beautiful way that’s accessible to children.

Thomas: And it’s completely devoid of cynicism.

Alexander: Yes.

Postmodern Cynicism Fatigue

Thomas: Compare The Hobbit to the noir of the 1920s and 1930s, such as The Big Sleep, that was declining at this time. They existed at the same time, but there’s an earnestness to The Hobbit that’s refreshing and escapist. I want Gandalf to be good. Frankly, I don’t want him to be harboring a secret in his dark past. I just want him to be good and to do the right thing. He can make mistakes, but I want him to be morally good. What makes The Hobbit escapist literature isn’t the dragons but the moral clarity it presents.

Alexander: In my own recent comic book, Star Spangled Squadron (Affiliate Link), there’s a character named American Eagle. He’s a firefighter whose superpowers manifest while he’s rescuing children from a burning school. He’s a married Christian father of two who coaches Little League, and when his powers develop, he goes and loyally serves the U.S. Government.

Readers often ask me, “Okay, what’s the twist?”

My response is, “The plot twist is that there’s no plot twist. He’s simply a good dude who loves his family, his wife, and his country.” To my surprise, when I polled readers, he was the number one most popular character in the book.

I have other characters like the sexy bad girl, the wisecracker, and the antihero, but American Eagle was the guy people loved.

Thomas: Subversion is becoming so wearying. I recently watched a music video that Saturday Night Live put out called The Smell of My Best Friend’s House. And it was this really positive, optimistic song about how much this young woman enjoyed nostalgically the smell of her best friend’s home and all the good feelings she had.

I was like, man, this is such a nice song. It’s so sincere. But I knew Saturday Night Live is a postmodern production. And I thought, “There will be a subversive twist that will ruin this.” Sure enough, the subversion halfway through the song was that the dad, the white man, was a serial killer, and “the smell of my best friend’s home” was all the dead bodies that were hidden around the house.

It was so fatiguing. I’m so tired of the same thing every time. It’s become so common that I knew it was coming. I knew there was going to be a twist, which was partly because I knew the creators of the show don’t have a hopeful worldview. They have a deconstructionist worldview.

The thing is, we’re running out of things to deconstruct. Disney soon will run out of old classics to remake. They will have deconstructed all their stories. They’ve already deconstructed their popular films. Now, they’re having to deconstruct less popular films.

I think readers are tired of postmodernism. They’re tired of that subversion and have a growing longing for sincerity. In a crisis, readers long for books and stories that offer the hope that there is good in this world worth fighting for. That core moral message is really appealing.

The nihilistic “everyone is bad and searching for their own self-interest” Game of Thrones type of story was very popular in the third turning, but it won’t be in the fourth turning. If HBO wants to continue making Game of Thrones stories, they’ll need to introduce some moral characters.

Alexander: That’s right. Interestingly, we’re seeing this shift not only in media and entertainment but in philosophy as well. For more than a generation, postmodernism has dominated philosophy. Postmodernism rejects the existence of objective fact, which means it rejects the existence of objective good and objective evil. It rejects the possibility of knowledge, and so it confines you to this nihilistic philosophy where everything is meaningless. Nothing is knowable. The only good is whatever benefits you at that moment.

That philosophical view is now being challenged by the next generation, which is bringing back scholasticism with its view that there is purpose and meaning. Theism is making a comeback in the philosophical community, to everyone’s surprise. The age of the new atheists has ended. I read a lot of philosophy, and I’ve seen it happen on my watch, so I’ve been trying to reflect that and incorporate it into my own world-building.

If you’re going to defend objective good, then objective good must exist. You yourself can’t be undecided about who the heroes are in the story. They have to be justified. The innately evil guys have to be evil, and there needs to be a reason for it.

One of the most popular IPs of the moment among young men is Warhammer 40K.

There’s this huge battle between third-turning and fourth-turning enjoyment of Warhammer 40K. The third turning says, “No, it’s all a satire. The god emperor of mankind is actually a tyrant. The space marines are thugs, and humanity is the villain.” The fourth turning says, “What are you talking about? The enemy wants to extinguish all human life. They’re literal demons. The god-emperor symbolizes Jesus, and the space marines are the new crusaders.” The two groups fight about how to interpret it. I’m going to guess from the success of Space Marine 2, which you mentioned earlier, that we’ll see that the fourth turning Warhammer 40K interpretation will win at the current moment.

Thomas: Interestingly, it’s the same message, but the third turning formulation of it is full of irony and cynicism. Those people’s children are hearing that message without the irony or cynicism, and they’re saying, “Let’s go on a crusade! Let’s crush the evil ones. Justice and good must prevail. Humanity must be continued. We are the descendants of the stars!”

In this cultural moment, we don’t know what the cause is, but we need the cause.

Alexander: Yes. You hear it in the way people talk about Elon Musk as the star prophet and how excited everyone got about his recent success with the rocket. The third turning group says, “Elon is a grifter. His money comes from the government. We’re never going to go to Mars. This is a pipe dream.” But the fourth turning group says, “I support whatever political system is spaceships. That’s my politics.”

A Growing Optimism

Thomas: It goes back to optimism. We’ve mentioned nostalgia for the past, but there’s also a growing optimism for the future. As society moves through the crisis, there is a realization that times are bad now, but times can be better for my children. I can make the world better through sacrifice and difficult action. Tough men will make good times, and my children will get to live in good times.

I felt that when I saw how the Starship was caught. For the first time in a long time, I felt hope that maybe the future could be better than the past. The reality is that my generation is poorer than my parents’ generation, and my parents’ generation is poorer than their parents’ generation. I could not afford to buy the house that I grew up in, and I don’t think my dad could have afforded to buy the house he grew up in. We’re slowly getting pushed out of Austin, and this is not unique to my family.

There’s a universal feeling across society, a sense that we’re falling backward. I feel like we’re not progressing as a family. But there’s this beginning dawn of hope that happens in the fourth turning crisis of winter. It is the coldest, most miserable time, but it’s also when the days grow longer.

Hope is beginning to emerge, and readers are beginning to long for stories that show that hope. I think Christian fiction really needs that right now.

Currently, nostalgia is popular in Christian fiction. Nostalgia is currently a strong trend in Christian fiction, often focused on idealized, “bonnet” tales of the past. However, these stories lack a forward-looking optimism, which may be why they’re not resonating as strongly as they once did. Readers are beginning to crave a sense of hope for the future, which these nostalgic stories don’t fully provide.

Christian novelists can write stories with the hopeful message that times won’t always get worse.

For example, income inequality doesn’t always get worse. In fact, in fourth turnings, the crisis tends to be experienced most negatively by those who are the most well-off. For example, the people who felt the greatest losses in The Great Depression were those who owned the most stocks.

People who were poor at the beginning of The Great Depression had nothing to lose.

Alexander: The situation was the same after the Civil War in the South. Who lost the most? The plantation owners.

Thomas: That’s right. During the Revolutionary War, John Hancock, once a wealthy merchant with an entire fleet of ships, saw his fleet destroyed before his eyes. He paid a high price for signing the Declaration of Independence and lost much of his fortune. Hancock was never as wealthy after the revolution as he had been before.

It’s a societal reset in a way, or at least it has been in the past.

Perhaps another element of escapism would be financial stability. Stories with financially stable characters may be a nice break for readers at a time when people feel their income can’t keep up with inflation and taxes. They’re wondering how they’ll make it. People who are looking for an escape may enjoy a book that features financially stable characters.

But I don’t think that’s universal because part of the appeal of true science fiction (not dystopian science fiction) is the prosperity. Nobody on the enterprise is poor.

Alexander: We are thinking about this in a fourth-turning way, but let’s consider stories like Fight Club or Office Space, where the problem for the young men in those movies was that they had no problems. They are materially well off, so they have to pick fights to satisfy their inner rebel. In Office Space, the character has a nine-to-five job that pays him well, and he’s miserable. It’s almost like a second-turning vibe that fosters the desire to be the rebel. Then you get into the third turning, and today’s younger generation can’t even imagine having a nine-to-five job that pays them well enough.

The fourth-turning story will take for granted that you have a stable, well-paying job, and because of that, you can consider what great things you will do.

Thomas: That reminds me of the show The Simpsons. When The Simpsons was first conceived, Homer Simpson was a loser high school graduate. But over the years, viewers have come to perceive him differently. My generation looks at him and thinks, “Gosh, he’s a high school graduate. He can support a family, and his wife can stay at home with their kids. They can afford to go on vacation. This is a dream!”

Alexander: Yes! He’s become an aspirational figure!

Thomas: How did Homer Simpson become aspirational? Because society has been unraveling. Social bonds and the economy have been unraveling. The social contract between the wealthy and the poor has been shifting.

Homer Simpson has remained steady, but the way viewers perceive him has changed. That’s a good illustration of how these turnings work. You can have the same story, but because of the cultural context somebody’s experiencing when they’re reading that story, it hits differently. Different parts of that story appeal differently.

A true classic will appeal to people at all points of the four turnings. The Hobbit wasn’t only popular during the fourth turning; it was popular in all the turnings. That’s one downside of the examples I shared from my research. The books I could most easily speak to were books that are still popular. Ayn Rand is still being read. In that way, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath isn’t a good example.

If you’re a literary agent wanting to research this, go pull the bestseller lists from 80 years ago and look at the forgotten books on that list. Determining why they were popular can give insight into what will be popular next.

Readers are longing for moral clarity, self-sacrificing heroes, financial stability, and hope.

Alexander: I just realized something. If I’m an executive at Marvel Studios and I’m listening to this podcast, I’m going find the person whose idea it was to kill off Captain America and fire him. Because who is Captain America? He’s literally the “gray champion” of the 1940s who beats Hitler. Captain America gets frozen in time and wakes up in the present day to be a patriotic hero. He is probably their most valuable IP for the zeitgeist of the moment. They literally retired him and brought in the new guy who’s a third-turning cynic.

Thomas: That was a financial mistake. But Hollywood’s mistake is an opportunity for authors. Hollywood is floundering and struggling to make consistent hits that resonate. One reason is that they’ve come to the end of their philosophy.

There is Nothing Left to Deconstruct

With a deconstructionist worldview, eventually, you have nothing left to deconstruct. Hollywood has lost the ability to create new IPs or tell new stories.

The new films flopped so atrociously that people don’t even notice they’ve been released and flopped. Only when you look at the financials do you see that Disney spent a hundred million dollars making some movie no one watched.

The next few years will be rough for Hollywood. They’ll have some hits, but I don’t know if they’ll have a Helldivers 2 or a Space Marine 2 that can keep the industry afloat, as those hits did for the video game industry.

The only TV show I’m looking forward to right now is The Daily Wire’s Arthurian story with Brett Cooper. I wonder if they’ll get Arthur right. Can somebody write a non-cynical, non-ironic, honest telling of Arthur? I would love to watch that story.

I think we’ll need a generational transition where a new generation of storytellers arrives on the scene. They’ll be more optimistic, less cynical, less ironic, and they’ll write heroes instead of subversive antiheroes. They’ll be able to tell a straightforward story.

One of the big criticisms of first-turning and fourth-turning storytelling is that it’s simplistic and commercial. This is something The Awakening turnings seeks to address. Each turning solves the problems of the previous turning and creates the problems that generate the next turning.

That’s why the wheel rolls round and round, and the complexity of storytelling tends to diminish. People in a crisis want simple rather than complicated stories. When you’re starving, suddenly Spam is appealing. When you’re feasting, Spam is disgusting. Spam has not changed; your hunger has. A reader’s hunger changes over time.

My hope is that this conversation gets you thinking about how you can make your story sync with where readers will be.

The principle here is to skate to where the puck is headed. If you ever watch kids playing hockey, they’re always chasing the puck. But with time, practice, and age, players learn that chasing isn’t a good strategy.

The correct strategy is to look at the puck, understand physics, and go to where the ball is going to be. The same is true in soccer. Professional soccer players spread out across the field, and they’re running to where the ball is going to be.

You can learn to do that as an author. You can be like the sons of Issachar in the Bible, who understood the times and knew what needed to be done. Because once you understand the times, the next step becomes obvious.

Misunderstanding the times generates confusion and leads to foggy thinking.

Complex Stories are a Luxury

Alexander: I have this notion that complex solutions are a luxury good. For example, imagine you’re constructing a dam that will generate electrical power. However, the construction of the dam will disrupt the migration of a specific species of salmon.

If you are a wealthy industrial powerhouse and the dam will only reduce the cost of energy by 5%, then the construction of the dam isn’t what interests you. You’re more interested in constructing the dam in a more complex way that will save the salmon. You happily will pay the extra 5% to keep the salmon safe.

On the other hand, if you have no electrical power at all, and this dam will let you heat your house in the winter, you don’t care about the salmon. You care about heating your house in the winter.

In that story, the construction of the dam itself is the very thing that’s taken for granted in the wealthier, flourishing times. Whereas in the chaotic time, the construction of the dam is the story. It’s simpler because you’re not considering the salmon and the ecological impact. There’s also something grand and beautiful about it that’s easy to overlook in a more cynical time.

Thomas: You’re exactly right and complex stories are a luxury too. Again, look at The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. The former came out in a first turning and the latter in a fourth turning. The Hobbit has a simple, episodic storyline and lends itself to a chiastic structure, where each chapter is its own short story.

By contrast, I don’t think anyone has ever described The Lord of the Rings as a simple story. It’s the kind of complicated story that would be popular in simpler times.

Alexander: That’s right. And The Lord of the Rings is the story that solidifies the founding myth. It justifies the good king has restored order, and now you’re moving into this good new age. Every turning has a story it tells itself, which justifies its actions, and The Lord of the Rings is very much that story for the post-World War II era in many ways. We’ve confronted evil and been victorious. Now, the good kings are in charge.

So, to get ahead of the puck, we’ve got to figure out what’s going to happen in the fourth turning and then write that first-turning book over the next 20 years like Tolkien did.

Thomas: I recently read The Fourth Turning is Here (Affiliate Link). In the United States, each generation has a name, and the names of the generations and eras often are picked by novelists and short story writers. For example, “The Gilded Age” is from Mark Twain’s short story criticizing that beautiful era after the short fourth turning of the Civil War. The Gilded Age was marked by railroads, skyscrapers, and manifest destiny. Mark Twain’s criticism was that it looks golden, but it’s merely gilded; it’s not gold to its core.

As an author, you might have the unique opportunity to name one of the unnamed generations. Not many authors are aware of this, so by listening to this episode, you’re getting a head start. For example, my children’s generation doesn’t have a good name yet. The fourth turning called them the Homelanders. I don’t think that will stick. Right now, they’re called Gen Z, and then there’s Gen Alpha after that. Poor Gen X was never able to get its own name. It got stuck with the letter. Other generations eventually will get a name.

If you can see culture and be aware of the times, your short story or novel might name an era or generation. That’s a cool opportunity for writers.

Start asking why.

Thomas: Alexander, do you have any final thoughts on matching the zeitgeist? How would you encourage an author who’s trying to navigate culture with their writing?

Alexander: I think you should go back and look at what was doing best in the last turning. Some people say it was 1929 to 1949 or 1930 to 1950. Evaluate what was doing well and why. You don’t want to copy it, but you do want to understand why it mattered. Then, bring that into the present day.

Thomas: I agree that understanding why it was popular is the answer. You’re not trying to retell Murder on the Orient Express. That’s not the answer. But understanding why that story did well is the answer. Why was Hercule Poirot such an appealing protagonist? Of all the Agatha Christie detectives, why was he so popular? Why did it shift over time?

Once you understand the why, your understanding will help you write stories that resonate in the present because there’s nothing new under the sun.

Be sure to check out Alexander Macris at his Substack, Tree of Woe.

A Note to Romance Authors

In all this talk about the Zeitgeist, we missed romance books. My little sister, who’s a huge romance reader, recently texted me with a message she wants me to pass along to romance authors. She’s been a voracious reader for years, and in over a decade of doing this podcast, she’s never asked me to share her thoughts with authors. But here’s her message to romance authors: “Please stop having the girl save the guy.” For her, it totally ruins the book and pulls her right out of the story. She doesn’t want to read about ‘girl bosses’ or damsels rescuing men in distress.

This topic deserves its own episode. It’s possible that during this fourth turning, we’ll see shifts in gender roles. Feminism gained momentum in the second and third turnings, and it’s appealing in good times, but during crises—like a draft—it’s less compelling. We’re already seeing an anti-feminist sentiment rising among young women who feel they’ve been sold a bill of goods. TikTok trends suggest that ‘girl bosses’ are on their way out, while a ‘trad wife’ aesthetic—focused on traditional homemaking and family life—is gaining appeal.

For many young women, the dream is shifting from giving their best years to a global corporation who hates them to spending time at home with children who love them. It’s not only about rejecting feminism but also the urban lifestyle. This is a fascinating turn. I don’t know if it’ll go mainstream, but it’s definitely growing on platforms like TikTok, where many young women spend their time.

So, if you’re writing romance, keep in mind that the ‘girl boss’ may not resonate as much with readers in the future. Like I said, we may do a full episode on this if I can find a good guest, but I wanted to pass along my sister’s message.

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