A few years ago, I began to lose faith in my normal trade, journalism, with its reliance on facts. Sophisticates argue there’s never been any agreement about reality, that news in the golden age of mainstream media was simply the dominant “narrative” put forth by TV networks and establishment papers. It’s true that important facts have always been contested, but today, with millions of social media accounts and thousands of podcasts and YouTube channels to choose from, more than a third of Americans think, for example, that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, when there is simply no evidence to support this claim.

Among all the historical threats to the free press – constant abuse, denial of access, intimidation by regulatory or legal means, criminal investigation and defamation law – the greatest is this forever war on reality. “Legacy media” has become a term of abuse, but its fall from authority is an epistemic catastrophe. Most of the public has no idea how much effort and money news gathering requires, how many rounds of reporting, editing, and fact-checking a story goes through before it reaches the public and drowns in the new media “ecosystem.” Serious journalism is a little like the independent English-language papers in certain authoritarian countries that are allowed to publish because they’re only read by a handful of elites and have no effect on the broader society. It’s not just that persuading readers to change their minds on important questions by presenting evidence and arguments has come to seem quixotic. Journalism can’t even establish what’s true, let alone what people should think about what’s true.

Why do journalists keep at it? In most cases, not because they imagine their reporting will strike a blow for justice, or hold the powerful to account (the powerful are pretty much unbound), but because they still believe that facts matter; because it’s important to set down what’s going on in the world, for posterity if not the present; because they love the craft; because it’s what they do. But any honest journalist knows that this has become a Sisyphean act of faith.

So in late 2021 or early 2022, around the time truth disappeared, I started to think about writing a novel. Among the alternatives to journalism, fiction was not an obvious choice. I’d published two novels in the 1990s and, as the philosopher David Hume said of one of his books, they “fell dead-born from the press.” Trying again a quarter century older seemed like bad odds. For one thing, did anyone still read fiction? I mean literary fiction, the kind with complex characters, subtle themes, and careful attention to prose style. Those novels are gone from the bestseller lists – it’s all genre stuff now. The novel ceased long ago to occupy the cultural centre, giving way to movies, then TV series, video games, social media posting, and AI content. The novelist as voice of a generation no longer exists. Literary fiction has become more like classical music – the eccentric taste of a diminishing set of the devoted. A book group that reads classic novels has the air of a circle of medieval monks solemnly bent over illuminated manuscripts, studying and preserving them through dark times until some future century rediscovers the literature of the past.

Some fiction fell victim to the clamour of reality. Starting around the 9/11 attacks, and never really stopping, there’s always another shock to pull you out of the immersive state that reading or writing a novel requires. One benefit of this turn to the outer world of facts was a brief golden age of nonfiction books and articles, writing that aspired to the literary quality of the best fiction while informing readers about politics and war and poverty. People who once regularly read novels and stories began to abandon them for book-length journalism, memoirs, biographies, magazines, newspapers, and websites. Imagination began to seem a pallid substitute for reality. The meaning of a story shrank if it didn’t happen.

This intense interest in news of the world ended with the construction of the Tower of Babel that is the smartphone. People acquired the ability to absorb each shock of reality, each new mental stimulus, every second, anywhere. Bombarding the brain with pixels and bits turned out to be bad for the cause of literature. When, in 2018, Jonathan Franzen remarked, “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction,” he was criticised for being a highbrow snob, but he was on to something – and it’s true of reading fiction as well.

You can flit back and forth between a nonfiction book and social media (though you’ll lose a lot), but the willing suspension of disbelief does not survive frequent interruption. Works of the imagination need unbroken attention. Mine has gotten worse; don’t tell me yours hasn’t. By now we’ve moved beyond a post-literature culture into what some are calling a post-literate age, taking us back several thousand years to communication by images and symbols. Over the past two decades, the number of Americans who read for pleasure daily has dropped by 40 per cent, from 28 per cent to 16 per cent; the trend among children and teenagers is even worse. In 2023 almost half of Americans didn’t finish a single book. Surveys show that a big loser is fiction. Perhaps this plague of illiteracy has played a role in the disappearance of truth and, with it, liberal democracy.

So why write a novel now? In my case, because it’s the literary form I know best and love most. I wanted to be a novelist from the age of 14. Back in high school English in the late ’70s, nonfiction was never assigned — it wasn’t considered literature. I never heard of Hiroshima or The Fire Next Time; as far as I knew, the only way to be a prose writer was to be a novelist. This misguided notion kept me pounding away at failure until well into my thirties, when I finally accepted that fiction was not my strong pitch. I gave it up for journalism, and soon discovered that nonfiction could offer some of fiction’s narrative pleasures – scenes, characters, intricate structures, suspense, revelation. Dickens proved at least as useful to my job as the annual report of Human Rights Watch. While writing a magazine piece, and especially a book, in my free time I tried to read only novels. I wanted to rid my head of the soul-killing language of politics and foreign policy in which I was immersed, and replace it with the sound of fiction. For a couple of my nonfiction books I even tried to base the voice and structure on a specific novel. But faith in a project always came from the interviews, research, experience – facts. Until it no longer did.

I didn’t turn to fiction for a complete escape from reality. I never cared for sci-fi, fantasy or magical realism. Nor am I capable of producing a novel with finely wrought observations of daily life. Writing doesn’t pour out of me in an overflow of imagination, which is why those earlier efforts at fiction were less than triumphs. Besides sheer narcissism, the main impulse that makes me sit down to write is political. A quarter century of journalism taught me that the sentences come out better when I feel strongly about the human rights and wrongs. The crisis of democracy is overwhelming, and I couldn’t force myself to push it out of my mind long enough to write a novel about something else entirely. I wanted to get as far as possible from exhausted particulars to explore a deeper reality. I wanted to evoke the feeling of being alive right now: the fragility of truth, the ideological pressures, the hatred among groups, the fractures within families, the radical idea that humanity itself might be ending. And I wanted to see every side of this drama. The Emergency is a political novel: a long-established society undergoes a collapse and upheaval in which extreme ideas take hold, dividing the generations and classes and leading to violence. But I wrote it as a fable, set in an unnamed place and time, the more remote, the better. Now that it is finished, there’s no barrier left between me and the facts. This excursion into fiction has restored my appetite for them. Building a world that doesn’t exist and exploring it for a couple of years made the one in which I live more alive and urgent than the familiar facts made it seem. Fiction does that, if we let it, if we keep it. You wake up from a long and vivid dream to find that the world is clearer, closer.

George Packer is an award-winning author and a staff writer at The Atlantic, where a version of this essay was first published. His novel The Emergency ( Pan Macmillan.) is out now.