Eight fictional books that read like reality television

Natalie Zutter is a playwright and pop culture critic whose work has appeared on Reactor, NPR Books, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.

At Paste magazine she tagged eight fictional titles that read like reality television. One title on the list:

The Family Experiment by John Marrs
For Fans of: The Rehearsal

John Marrs’ dystopian thrillers envision futures in which DNA tests forcibly match up soulmates (The One) and the government pushes marriage while punishing singledom (The Marriage Act). Set in the same universe, The Family Experiment puts a speculative spin on an increasing issue in our society: overpopulation makes it so that many couples can’t actually afford to start families. The bizarre solution is to raise virtual children via artificial intelligence—but to make it more palatable, the government turns it into a reality show. On The Substitute, ten couples will spend nine months raising their AI babies from birth to eighteen years in a condensed experiment—and the winning couple will be forced to choose between keeping their virtual child or erasing them in order to conceive a flesh-and-blood baby. Of course it immediately brings to mind the bizarre turn that Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal took, when he inserted himself into another woman’s experiment in child-rearing, only for him and the child actor to become too emotionally invested in what was supposed to remain a hypothetical scenario.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue