In the story of Rip Van Winkle, a British-American colonial villager living on the east coast of America in the 1760s falls asleep only to wake 20 years later, having slept through the American Revolution. Perplexed and disturbed by the new world he finds, he has nonetheless been spared the hardships and sufferings of war. I have often thought that the digital revolution has much in common with the American one, and that I would like to be spared the hardships of the messy years we are living through – the conflict between digital publishing and established publishers, the declines and booms, the false hopes and future projections, the compromises that in hindsight might have proven fatal – and to awaken when one side or the other is victorious and a workable peace has been established.

Imagine my surprise then when – after a flight to America, some appalling jet lag and some ill-advised sleeping pills – I woke to find myself in 2043. Although I was awake in that future world for only a short time, I used my time to chart that most important of issues: the future of fiction. I then fell asleep again and returned, alas, to our current interregnum in which, to quote Gramsci, "the old is dying and the new cannot be born" and culture is little more than "morbid symptoms" of unresolved conflict. The result is the first of two reports, from memory, of what I saw in 2043:

1. The popular multimedia retro-hybrid 'title'

First of all it's important to get terminology right: not books but "titles". While in our current time we still talk of "books", in 2043 this word fails to describe the plurality of "reading" material available – even the word reading is not entirely appropriate. While books in the sense of objects printed on paper still exist, the preferred name to designate the multiplicity of forms is titles (this sounding better than the popular digi-phrase "content").

In 2043, titles exist on many formats including ebooks, paperbooks, limited handmade "artisan" editions, enhanced ebooks, phone-texts, audiobooks, apps, film adaptations, TV series, computer games, merchandise, user-interactive franchises and fan-rewritten fan-fiction, while the most successful titles are "synergized" across all these platforms. The publishing houses of my day have merged with broadcasters, agents, casting agents, film studios and games designers into global consortia who now hold monopolies. The result is that there are only 10 or so globally successful titles each year and that the rest of the market is almost entirely demonetised.

In 2043, the vast majority of all "published work" is self-published fan-fiction and with the cheapness of automatic printing machines and with free digital platforms these exist both as digital content and as paper versions. With 800m new titles every year, these works are derivative and based upon previously existing works of fiction.

Popular titles mostly consist of alternative-universe depictions of franchises from our era and these include the title Ziggy Potter and the Spiders from Mars and Twilight – New Bloods, Series Five. These titles, however, have close to zero market value and are symptomatic of the widespread devaluation of cultural content that the slow process of the digital revolution unleashed in the west.

2. Franchises outlive their authors and inter-breed

To my surprise, waking in 2043, I felt I had slept only a day. This is because many of the titles which I had known in my time, not only still existed but seemed to be all that was visible in the cultural spectrum.

Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code were still highly revered and new sequels, prequels and series based on these titles were being generated at an extra-ordinary rate. Twilight and Fifty Shades had come to exist in strangely mutated hybrid forms which included films, pop songs, musicals, cartoons, sex toys.

Furthermore, their original authors were no longer attached to these enterprises. It was explained to me that successful authors from my time had set up franchises and through various changes in copyright law had permitted fan-fiction (which in the case of JK Rowling, amounted to millions of pieces of writing across the net), on the condition that the originator retain a percentage of profits. This worked well for fans as they could then, if they were lucky (at odds of around 100,000 to one) be honoured by having their derivative writings turned into the "New Harry Potter" (or Twilight or Fifty Shades) - a privilege akin to winning the X-Factor by singing a cover version. Competition for such honours in turn legitimated and fuelled the life of the first versions. The "original" authors then, had left the fans to generate the content for the serial continuance of their successful brand names.

This system is further promoted by mainstream media who have created Reality TV series such as Write On – a cross between the Apprentice and Britain's Got Talent – around the thousands of competing wannabe writers who strive to be the lucky amateurs chosen to continue the existing franchises. Their products are, by necessity, unoriginal but sometimes lead to interesting cultural creations. One such phenomenon is the tendency to mashup different franchises - creating curious hybrids.

The result is titles such as Shades of Hermione – a pornographic Potter serial, and The Twilight Code – in which vampires save the Catholic church. Such titles were extremely popular in the 2020s and 2030s and now exist as valueless artefacts of what in 2043 is seen as the era of decadence.

3. The Wiki Novel

Back in 2012, at the Edinburgh International book festival World Writers' Conference, and then subsequently on a BBC broadcast debate with myself, the novelist China Miéville announced that he welcomed the digital revolution with its concept of an "open text" which could be re-written by its readers, the plot changed, other characters introduced.

He promoted the idea that technological innovation might in this way empower readers to become writers and for them to take an author's work into new and exciting places. This, I understood, would mean that fans might generate "alternative universe" versions of a book through downloading copies of a book then adding to or deleting its text in the same way that Wikipedia is compiled. This, at the time, troubled me greatly. What about the autonomy and the art of the text, I protested? What if someone took the crime out of Crime and Punishment? Or if some authoritarian government rewrote 1984? What if someone added pornographic sections into the Diary of Anne Frank?

It transpires that both Miéville and I were right in part – he in his euphoria for the "inevitable" technological innovation and I in my fears. In 2043 there is indeed a pornographic version of Anne Frank, but there are also 45,000 alternative versions and one of them, The True Story of Anne Frank (a meta-fiction about the "secret" authors of the book), is a controversial best seller. It claims that the diary was itself a work of fiction (passed off as real) and used for propaganda purposes by Zionists. Is this true or itself a politically motivated fiction? Is it morally permissible to allow sacred texts to be rewritten?

As Miéville pointed out, the original text still exists and could be deferred to but I was concerned that within such a hall of mirrors truth was not so much hidden as obliterated in multiple reflections. I note also that in 2043 one of Miéville's books has been re-mashed. The City and the City has been rewritten over 40 times by fans and the most popular title, outselling the original in volume (and containing the entirety of the original within it while selling at a fraction of the price), is The City and the City and Zombies.

4. The Future is the Past – The Old is New (again and again)

As I looked around and saw remakes, prequels, sequels and the continuation of characters and franchises from my own era, retro-styled in perfect pastiche, it alarmed me to discover that no new culture had been created at all since around 2018. Time seemed to have stopped at that point. Had there been some kind of cataclysm that had turned all eyes back with nostalgia to safer times? Or some manufactured form of amnesia among the masses to make them consume exactly the same thing cyclically without realising it? Was this really the outcome of the digital revolution? The absolute lack of authors, musicians and filmmakers producing new content came as a shock as I was rather fond of the outdated ideas of "innovation" and "invention" and the idea that history was going somewhere rather than in circles.

It was explained to me that after several decades of getting "content" (see "culture") for free, the populace could not even imagine paying for new characters or new stories and that the media monopolies found it too financially risky to invest in the creation of fiction that had no track record. Throughout the 2020s and 30s (before the Great Betrayal, the Long Flatline and the New Era) only that which was done before had any value, and this terminal state of capitalism seemed unable to generate its own values.

I recalled that between 2009 and 2013, cinema had gone through a similar pattern of entropy, the top 10 films from 2010-2013 being largely sequels, reboots, prequels and remakes. In 2013, 31 sequels and 17 reboots were released, and these included: the sixth X-men film, Fast and Furious 6, Die Hard 5, Scary Movie 5 and Paranormal Activity 5, Iron Man 3, The Hangover 3, and sequel/prequels for The Muppets, The Smurfs, GI Joe and Bad Santa.

I noted that popular music, too, had become dominated by retromania, repetition and a chronic lack of innovation – a ruse which, although it could attract temporary fame, did not create any new culture or pay much in the way of monies to the copy-artists. This was compounded by the fact that the former promise that recording artists losing money to internet piracy could earn a living wage through selling tour tickets, turned out to be a false prediction – the rot setting in around 2011. This led to bands having to seek corporate sponsorship, which resulted in even more cultural conservatism and a demand that content be little more than cover versions with the zero risk of the already known. If those of us involved in fiction had been more concerned and less elitist in 2013 we would have seen that the same crisis in creativity would come to the behind-the-times book industry when it finally caught up.

5. Algorithms become authors

The digital revolution had championed itself as removing the middleman, first doing away with the need for warehouses, then bookshops, then small publishers, then small agents, so around 2025, the final middleman was removed to ease the flow between reader and content – the author. The first novel written by computer was in fact released in 2008 – called True Love, it was a "variation on Leo Tolstoy's 1877 classic Anna Karenina but written in the style of Japanese author Haruki Murakami". The experiment – by a Russian-based digital operation – was later published and took only 20 minutes to generate the 320-page novel, which used plot and sentence structures taken from 17 other books within the romance genre. After the success of such early experiments (with readers being unable to spot the difference between computer and human-generated texts) titles started being written entirely by the algorithms, with text being generated from computer hybridisation of the Google archive of all known books.

All that a "writer/user" needed to do was to enter the name of a character, a location, the genre and a list of titles within the genre that he or she would ideally like the book to resemble (in much the same way that one would create an internet dating profile for oneself). The algorithms then generated the characters and narrative, according to the page-by-page systems used in the designing of film scripts in the era of the last days of Hollywood and popularised by many "how-to-write-scripts"online courses and apps. This took the idea of formulaic novels one step further by actually discovering formulas present within novels and reduplicating them. Algorithmic novels also performed better in the market as they were re-edited automatically to factor in audience appreciation levels according to previous successes.

Further plug-ins allowed the book to be written in the style of an existing author. One such title was Twilight and the Sea, which constructed a new vampire romance with the authorial voice of Ernest Hemingway.

The populace in the 2030s greatly enjoyed algorithm-generated writing and believed that it took the backache and lonely slog out of the enterprise of both writing and reading (taking on average a mere 10 minutes to generate an 80,000-word title).

Not only that but an "author" could, for a small additional payment, generate many variables of stories and authorial styles and test them all to see which one would be a hit, before choosing which title to take a gamble on and then of course mash them up: an example of this was the algorithm-generated series: 72,000 Shades of Sodom Success, which analysed and merged the authorial styles of De Sade, EL James and Brazil's most powerful businessman, to mashup the content of 120 Days of Sodom, Fifty Shades of Grey and 12 Steps to Financial Success, thus generating 72,000 new titles from all the variables (120 x 50 x 12).

The result of all of this is that titles were written by computers and then barely read by their own audience, an audience who nonetheless wanted to have been seen to have read the title and who "shared" their "like" of that title – it was rumoured also that the majority of Likes and Shares that these received on social media were also fake, created by bots and persons paid to generate fake Likes and Shares

6. Twenty tears of Stagnation

Due to algorithms, demonetisation and piracy, by the 2030s, western culture had effectively ground to a halt. No new fiction was created at all. The bestseller lists (and the vast majority of the unsuccessfuls) consisted of second-generation work. In music and film it was the same.

So why was this death spiral of creativity so inevitable in all art forms? I recalled that Francis Fukuyama in his book, The End of History and the Last Man (1989),depicted late capitalism under western liberal democracy as the bittersweet but triumphant end point of History. He claimed "The end of history will be a very sad time" in which all of our conflicts had been resolved, not by revolution or courageous ideological battle, but by economic calculation and the satisfaction of consumer demand. A banal peace. A cyclic eternal present. One of the unexpected consequences of this would be that cultural production would grind to a halt. "In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history." To my alarm, Fukuyama was proved right and this explained why in 2043 Hermione Granger and Edward Cullen were revered as demi-gods. This perpetual caretaking of a stagnant archive however seemed to satisfy the older generation as it proved to them that they had lived through the greatest moment in human history; they were perfectly happy to see its highlights replayed over and over, no matter how much this strangled future cultural production.

Many even tried to justify it by using eco-cliches, talking about the "recycling" of culture in positive ways. I dug deeper into the history of the twenty-teens and discovered the economic root to the stagnation of culture. While the great era of cultural innovation (the 20th century) was superseded by the great era of tech innovation, what made the tech revolution so powerful was precisely its parasitic dependence on the cultural era before it (and the 100-year investment that had gone into it and which was called modernism). The mass of consumers after 2010 would only buy their expensive new smart-tech-pads and tablets on the condition that these systems provided free unlimited access to the entire archive of previous cultural commodities – all films, music, books etc. In our blindness in 2013, we took only tokenistic steps to prevent this cannibalisation of culture by tech companies.

As Silicon Valley did not invest in the creation of any new culture and their businesses grew larger than those of the cultural content creators, forcing them into austerity and conservatism, the problem of who exactly would or could invest in new content arose. It was however masked by the euphoria of the binge years of free digital content, with consumers believing that the reserves of nearly a millennium of culture, could last indefinitely in rehashed forms.

By 2043, in a pattern similar to that of the exhaustion of cheap oil reserves, the well of culture had been drained dry. All of this could have been avoided if we had paid attention to Jaron Lanier back in 2010. In You are Not a Gadget he (citing a Bear Stearns report) claimed that Silicon Valley believed that "content from identifiable humans would no longer matter and the chattering of the crowd with itself was a better business bet than paying people to make movies, books and music".

By the time he published Who Owns the Future? the evidence was mounting that this analysis was correct and that action had to be taken to prevent impending disaster. But the west failed to take heed and by 2032 it had forfeited its former role as the leader in cultural creation, and for that matter as evangelist and engine of cultural freedom. It would take another 11 years for the culture to recover from the aftermath of the digital revolution. And it did, or at least it began to.

The complex cultural peace that followed the end of the digital revolution in 2032 mirrors the economic reconstruction of Europe after the second world war. Just as the United Nations was created in 1945 to "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war", culture is now safeguarded by international law, born out of a multilateral commitment to ensure that "this must never happen again". In 2043 the world is rediscovering and rebuilding the art of "fiction" – the production of "new texts" – which had ceased in the "lost decade" of the 2020s.

You might think the digital revolution ended with a rising of the masses, with demonstrations against those who had allowed the west to become culturally bankrupt, with a noble struggle on the barricades in the name of saving fiction, but sadly this was not the case. The masses could not have cared less that they were now consuming billions of bite-sized chunks of derivative user-generated content, machine-made mass-culture manufactured by media conglomerates. Consumers in the west continued to do what they had been taught to do – accumulate as much content as they could for as little money as possible and to hell with the consequences.

The masses did not rise to rescue culture from the end days of free-market capitalism, and neither did the leftist intelligentsia or the free-speech liberals. Instead it emerged that these western intellectuals had been exploited as useful idiots to infiltrate, demoralise and demonetise the west – the culmination of a KGB plan that had been in effect since the cold war. Stalinists and Khruschevists encouraged writers such as Doris Lessing, George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells to subvert western culture with disruptive propaganda and recruited hippie/Maoist students to infiltrate American campuses and demoralise the west through sexual liberation and anti-establishment protests.

Looking back from 2043 a clear line can be drawn from the 60s revolutionaries of cultural Marxism to the creators of the digital revolution, the filesharers, hackers and dot.communists who saw themselves as "revolutionaries" fighting capitalism.

These “useful idiots” who proliferated in the decade after 2013 – among them many activists promoting unlimited file-sharing and the end of copyright – had unwittingly pushed the west into economic decline, leaving it vulnerable to economic takeover by an aggressive, authoritarian, communist state – one which would abolish "internet freedom" forever. By 2032, a destitute west accepted the terms and conditions of the post-digital peace as proposed by the new world leader: China. The joke really was on the dot.communists, whose "manifesto" had been intended somewhat ironically, and on creative-commons evangelists such as Cory Doctorow who felt they were determining the "future of the future" by giving their books away for free.

Such "visionaries" had, without realising it, been working (without pay) for the Chinese ministry of state security.

China saves the future of fiction

When China became the world's leading economy in 2024, the west was forced to admit it was not leading the world in anything other than debt accumulation and demonetised commodities. The yuan became the world's reserve currency in 2032, leaving the west with no say in determining the form of the global economy, the internet, publishing or fiction. The world of 2043 is one of state-enforced firewalls and paywalls, of state censorship and surveillance through the net – the reverse of the carefree one we knew in 2013 in which we all threw away our rights to privacy in the name of "sharing". People are now wary of all social media – mechanisms for surveillance, propaganda and behavioural manipulation. In this the useful idiots in the US played no small part by legitimising snooping through the activities of NSA/CSS/Facebook.

The internet in 2043 is no liberator, sweeping away authoritarian regimes, but rather offers "bread and circuses" to the masses they oppress, distracting them from the complex and time consuming task of political organisation with pirated movies, free porn and LOLCats.

China entered the digital revolution late and as a result had a chance to learn from the mistakes of the west. It witnessed the demise of western bookshops, the shrinking of publishing houses to three vast monopolies and the freefall of ebook prices. It saw how zombie mashups had cannibalised the western canon and realised that Marx was right: capitalism left to its own devices would devour itself.

While the west frittered and Twittered its time away, China – with its mandatory state-enforced literacy programmes, its veneration of high literature and lifelong-learning, its vast guaranteed audience, its government-funded, five-year cultural development plans, its state-owned publishing houses and bookshops, its state-run economic planning – and writers' unions came to be the only hope for the survival of literature. Writers, musicians and film-makers scrambled to "break into the Chinese market" as they once strove to "make it in the USA".

The long tail falls off the end of the cliff

The utopian internet belief, popular from the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace through to the euphoria around digital self-publishing in the long tail, led our generation to believe that there would be thousands of new writers forging a brave new future in digital publishing, shaking the foundations of the old elitist media corporations.

Writers would be able to support themselves financially on the net through the blossoming of a new economic paradigm, pitching their tent on the profitable middle ground between mainstream hits and niche content.

However, the profitable middle section vanished in the long flatline of the 2020s, with a vertical boundary between mass-market, manufactured mainstream hits and self-published content given away for free.

In the late 20-teens, the long tail shrank to a mainstream peak with a vertical drop off (or cliff) and a long flatline extending to infinity after it, with millions of self-epublished titles being given away for free. The smooth arc between the big sellers and the millions of wannabes had vanished, with the middle ground of writers abandoning the project of making sustainable sales from the net. A gathering flood of media mergers, which began in 2013 with the fusing of Random House and Penguin, culminated with culture reduced to conglomerates such as CBSFlix Random Penguin releasing a handful of mass products a year, each with a budget of $200m

Warning bells first sounded in 2012, when it emerged that half of self-epublished authors earn less than $500 (£300) per imprint a year. Devastating confirmation came in 2013, when it was revealed that JK Rowling had written a book under a pseudonym (Robert Galbraith). Rejected by many mainstream publishers, this book lurked unseen among the hundreds of thousands of books by unknowns on the internet and sold only 500 copies in four months. As soon as it was revealed that she was the real author it shot immediately to number one position on Amazon and became a global bestseller.

The message was clear – if you don't have a name already you won't get seen, let alone read. At the turn of the millennium 80% of a publisher's profits would come from 20% of its authors, encouraging imprints to invest across a large spread of writers. By 2013 the ratio had shifted, according to Jonny Geller, joint chief executive of UK literary and talent agency Curtis Brown: "Now it's more like 96 to 4." This meant that the reinvestment in authors also shrank proportionally.

While the long tail was good at selling used and discounted culture, cheap and secondhand products and used furniture, it could not create and monetise new culture. In 2020 writers saw the long tail had flatlined and decided to get out of short-selling themselves, echoing musicians such as Radiohead and Atoms for Peace, who decided back in 2013 that streaming services such as Spotify were 'bad for new music' and withdrew their work. According to Nigel Godrich, the sometimes 6th member of Radiohead, "New artists get paid f–k all with this model. It's an equation that just doesn't work". As professional musicians and writers vanished from the long tail it became totally demonetised in the years that became known as the "lost decade".

The great betrayal

It wasn't just writers with publishing deals who fled the long tail. Again and again, the lucky few outliers within the self publishing long tail who managed to build a reader base jumped ship into the arms of mainstream publishers, accepting big-money multi-platform publishing deals in a process which came to be called the great betrayal. This caused a storm within the digital diehards who had believed that writers could (and should) survive through online sales and without the big corporations. After all, wasn't the digital world revolution meant to be destroying the big corporations, not feeding them? As each successful Kindle author jumped ship, self-epublishing was further demonetised, as everyone who could abandoned the system for the promise of global deals with mainstream publishers. These "traitors" effectively turned self-epublishing into a self-sifting slush pile for mainstream publishers. The net then became a means of free market research for corporations: if you could make sales through self-epublishing you could have a following to be built on when you went mainstream. The opposite was also true, if you couldn't build a paying audience online you had proven that you would never succeed.

To be a hit online in the 2020s you had to undercut all competition, the ensuing race to the bottom ensuring hundreds of thousands of authors started giving their books away for free. With consumers expecting ebooks should cost at most a few cents it became impossible for anyone to make any money from self epublishing.

When corporations tried to fix prices at higher, more sustainable levels they found themselves overruled by market-friendly governments, who unwittingly forced corporations to stop re-investing in R&D and new writing.

The lost decade and the necessary 10,000 hours

Between 2020 and 2030 – the lost decade – the number of ebooks multiplied by a factor of three, but as publishers became more risk averse the majority of this activity happened beyond the measurable economy. Unable to earn money from writing, authors racked up debts in the attempt to self-epublish on the dead plateau of the flatline, finding it impossible to dedicate enough time to their craft to become skilled, or even proficient, let alone to experiment and make new discoveries. Time is money and this generation was unable to put in the 10,000 hours required to perfect their talent.

The middle class of professional culture makers was decimated, the social capital of their skill-base allowed to sink into neglect. With the decline of bookshops making publishers much more wary of giving shelf space to new novelists, the talent of younger writers was aborted before it was even born, let alone nurtured.

The crash of 2032-34

In 2043, the crash of 2032 cannot be fictionalised. The powers that be in new world economy have documentation of the exact facts and no-one is permitted to share or alter these facts.

It is said that a global economic situation close to that represented in The Road by Cormac McCarthy was a "near miss". In 2043, everyone is very pleased that that did not transpire and grateful to the People's Republic of China for coming to the aid of the west, and no more is ever said about it – or, if it is, it is censored by the magnificent Chinese firewalls.

Literature survives by going meta

After the collapse came the new peace, according to Chinese rules. China had valued the western tradition more highly than western net-capitalists, but where and how could the canon be rebuilt? For over 20 years no "new fiction" had been generated; the last generation of "professional writers" had passed away in the 2030s. Chinese ownership of the net – with copyright protection a bedrock of the new economy, state censorship and the imprisonment of free-information activists – ensured that the west could not revert to its old ways of file sharing cannibalisation. The west was forced to write fiction again.

Around 2038, in the post-digital doldrums, the first of the new generation of western fictions appeared. These did not feature characters as we knew them before, but real people: authors from the 20th century. Among the top 20 titles of 2043, no less than eight were fictionalised accounts of these authors' lives. This brought to mind books from my own time, such as Colm Tóibín's reimagining of Henry James in The Master and the re-picturing of Virginia Woolf in The Hours by Michael Cunningham, or the film versions of the life of Sylvia Plath. In 2043, this phenomenon reached its zenith with fictional re-imaginings of the lives Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, JD Salinger, Margaret Atwood, and even Tóibín himself.

The rewriting of great authors' lives was done in earnest as an act of reverse amnesia and willed learning. As so much real history had been lost in the digital revolution, the only way to bring these authors back to life was to invent their lives. The great rebirths from this time included Sartre, Camus, Orwell, Christie, Kafka, Joyce and EL James. Although prizes for fiction still existed they had become meta-book prizes. One popular title was Hilary's Mantle – an alternative universe depiction of the author time-travelling within the era of Thomas Cromwell. Literary fiction was being recalled as a golden age, each of its heroes kept alive through re-fictionalisation of their biographical details.

This was not the reinvention of fiction that may have been envisaged, but it was a start. The one problem this genre faced was that as AL Kennedy had pointed out decades before (and I paraphrase): "The lives of writers, if they are any good as writers and committed to spending their lives at a desk, should not really be worth writing about."

The welcome return of a lost form

Another form that re-emerged under Chinese guidance was serialised fiction, monetised through subscription.

While the mass of consumers in 2043 had been de-habituated from paying for one-off-cultural products, a serial that unfolded over time could hook them in and persuade them to invest their time and money. Here, the "freemium" model first developed in China with computer games - offering free samples, but requiring payment to get the whole package – proved to be sustainable and marginally profitable, facilitated by the use of paywalls and micro-payments.

Subscribing to such a stream had much humbler origins, back in 2013, with the subscriptions to Netflix or JK Rowling's Pottermore. Just as Dickens, Henry James, Herman Melville, Alexander Dumas, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky published novels in newspapers and magazines in the 19th century, "writers" in 2043 now create long serials, some of which stretch even beyond their own lifetimes.

Mooks and the first superhero in half a century

In 2043, the largest fictional form in the world are multimedia, multi-platform titles based on what we knew as "comics" - these are called "emooks" (derived from mooks) – a form somewhere between a comic, a book and an enhanced ebook - first created in Japan then popularised in China.

The leading global work of fiction in 2043 is a comic/emook/tvseries/game/filmseries produced by a team in China, called Toxic Man – the first "new" superhero to have been invented since 1989. It is no coincidence that this was also the year that the Berlin wall fell, communism was pronounced "dead" and that the world wide web was "invented". There is also great irony in that when the west lost its enemy it was ironically unable to invent any new superheroes for itself.

Back in 2013, we realised that western superheroes were in the terminal stages of recycling, but we failed to read the signs correctly. This first "new superhero" in half a century was invented in China in 2032 and coincided with the year that China rose to power. The tale of Toxicman, or "Toxi", is seen by many as a parable of the fall of western capitalism; this is a hero who is a victim of his own superpowers and is cursed to kill all that he touches (they melt to death in a toxic slime).

Living fictions

Fiction in 2043 is leaner, but more alive than ever. Through harnessed and planned use of digital technology it is now part of the fabric of life. In 2043 people no longer see titles as individual products (free or otherwise), they see fiction as a stream of content, as an alternative living world that unfolds in many media alongside their own lives. They check in to see how a story is developing in their absence for fear of missing any developments. These characters are well maintained, original and credible as they are authored by teams of specialists who are raised and nurtured by the state-run publishing houses. When a character dies it does not return to be cannablised by the market.

Fiction exists in 2043 as a series of alternative realities and fictional characters "live" and go about daily activities – with updates available by the minute – in much the same way that avatar inhabitants of Sim City, Second Life or My Smurfs Village once existed without their users. While since 2032, the reusing of characters from previous eras is frowned upon (due to the rapid burn-up of content in the past) it is not uncommon to still find a stray Raskolnikov, a Winston Smith or a Madame Bovary passing through the same virtual village alongside new characters which have for the first time in half a century been allowed to live and grow in the years of hope and progress that followed the dark days of the digital revolution.

History is (a) fiction

There is, however, one problem that persisted in the new post-digital peace, and that is the question of historical facts and their verification. In the desire to save true history from the digital morass of mashed-up facts and to establish an empirically true history, mankind has to file through the trillion files of textual mess created by the digital revolution and by those who attempted to make money from corrupting the lives of historical figures. After all, in 2043, there are no professional critics or specialists left to judge what is real history any more – academia has had to change its face to remain profitable and serious journalism sadly, did not survive. Thus, we will never know for sure if Katie Price was a struggling author in a garret, as the sad and moving title Price of Fame depicts.

The digital revolutionaries burned the original books in the last days of their battle, they saw real historians as dated and elitist, and they replaced the dusty paperbook tomes with what they thought were exciting, constantly updated, hive-mind Wiki-texts.

Thus the people of 2043 will never know if it is true that the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima almost 100 years before. The facts have been changed too many times by jokers, pranksters, the politically motivated and those who sought to create scandal so they could be "liked" and "shared".

We will never know the degree of historical truth there is in the bestseller Chez Che – a fascinating expose of the secret gay adventures of the famous Bolivian revolutionary in the San Francisco of the 1980s. Or whether he died in Cuba alongside his comrade Elvis Presley as some surviving webfiles declared.

For better or for worse in these post-digital days of tentative peace and reconstruction, history itself has become a fiction.

First published in the Guardian. 12^th August 2013

Ewan Morrison’s new novel - For Emma - has just been published and is available from Amazon, from order through bookshops and on all ebook formats.