Now, after everything possible has been done to the form of the novel the whole future of fiction seems to hang in the balance. Will anyone, apart from scholars, read at all in the future? Surveys suggest that relatively few people read books even now and that of those, the majority tend towards genre -- romance, crime, horror - much of which echoes the conventions of traditional narrative in terms of plot, structure and character. "Serious" fiction seems to belong increasingly to academia and the academics, to the creative writing class and the beleagured intellectual rather than to the public at large. It has become too frail and etiolated a plant to survive out there in the world among the crashing music, the clamour and the cartoons of contemporary life. Novelists wish to be read but realism in fiction is no longer a device that can animate characters who inhabit this modern world; their desires, their love affairs, their very selves are now so muddled by commodity fetishism, consumer homogeneity and a chaos of contemporary cultural imperatives that it is now almost impossible for authors to animate and illuminate character in the ways that they were once able to do.