Speculative fiction writer Alexander Weinstein has built a career exploring the emotional and technological fault lines of modern life. Known for his short-story collections Children of the New World and Universal Love, Weinstein examines dystopian futures shaped by intimacy, technology, and loss. One of his stories even became the basis for the acclaimed film After Yang (A24, 2021), launching him into television and screen adaptation.

Yet after years of writing conflict-driven narratives, Weinstein finds himself questioning one of fiction’s most sacred assumptions: that conflict must be the central engine of every story.

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The Gospel of Conflict — and Its Limits

Writers are taught early that story equals struggle. Desire meets obstacle. Tension rises, peaks, and resolves. It’s the backbone of everything from Shakespearean tragedy to contemporary realism.

But Weinstein wonders if this framework is less universal truth and more inherited tradition.

What if awe, wonder, transcendence, or hope could drive narrative just as powerfully?

Rather than eliminating conflict altogether, he imagines stories where struggle becomes secondary — a texture rather than the motor. This shift, he suggests, could free fiction from an endless recycling of jealousy, violence, betrayal, and psychological drama.

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Are We Trapped in a Western Story Machine? Humor, Awe, and Expanding Structures

Weinstein traces our obsession with conflict to Western literary and psychological traditions — from Shakespearean melodrama to modern psychoanalysis, where every narrative becomes a problem to be solved.

The result? A canon steeped in suffering.

While these stories can be brilliant, they may also perpetuate a narrow vision of human experience — one where meaning is always born from pain. He asks an uncomfortable question: Are we endlessly recreating the same emotional structures because we don’t know how to imagine alternatives?

Searching for different narrative engines led Weinstein to writers like Tom Robbins and Italo Calvino — authors who use absurdity, levity, and imagination to dissolve traditional realism.

But one story in particular crystallized a new structural possibility: The Dream of the Consortium by Steven Millhauser.

Rather than escalating conflict, the story unfolds in expanding layers of wonder — like ripples spreading across water. Each new development grows more astonishing than the last. The tension comes not from danger, but from anticipation.

Where will the awe lead next?

Weinstein now experiments with similar “spiral” structures — narratives propelled by curiosity, beauty, and revelation rather than confrontation.

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Spirituality as Story Engine

This evolution is deeply tied to Weinstein’s spiritual life. A graduate of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School and Indiana University, he has also spent years immersed in Indigenous spiritual practices, ceremony, and plant-medicine traditions.

These experiences shifted his perception of scale.

Personal drama — who betrayed whom, who failed whom — began to feel small compared to larger human questions: healing, community, transcendence, collective survival.

His upcoming work explores what he calls spiritual speculative fiction and even shamanic speculative fiction — stories that engage unseen worlds, ritual, and transformation rather than marketplace drama.

Some of these stories may not even be meant to “sell” in the traditional sense. Like ritual art made of ice that melts in the sun, their value may lie in the moment of experience itself.

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The Problem of Language

One of Weinstein’s great struggles is practical: how to capture transcendent, embodied experiences in words.

Writing itself is an act of focused, analytical thought — almost the opposite of the expanded consciousness found in spiritual or psychedelic states. Yet great art, he argues, has always attempted this impossible translation.

If poetry can do it, if music can do it, why not fiction?

The craft simply hasn’t developed enough tools yet.

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Rethinking the Canon We Pass On

Weinstein believes the dominance of conflict-driven storytelling is reinforced by what we teach. Students are fed a steady diet of literary suffering — tragedy, despair, quiet domestic misery — through writers like Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, and William Shakespeare. Meanwhile, other voices and structures remain marginal.

He challenges the idea that everyone must absorb texts like Dante’s Inferno to become a serious writer, pointing instead to contemporary poets like Andrea Gibson whose work speaks directly to modern emotional realities.

The future of storytelling, he suggests, lies not in abandoning conflict — but in expanding the menu of narrative possibilities.

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Holding the Mystery Open: Toward a More Spacious Fiction

Can this question ever be resolved? Weinstein isn’t sure — and thinks that might be the point.

Some mysteries lose their power once fully explained, like a magic trick revealed. The unknown creates awe. It invites exploration.

Rather than replacing conflict with a new dogma, he envisions an ever-growing landscape of story forms — each opening doors to new emotional and spiritual experiences.

Conflict will always be part of human life. But it doesn’t have to be the only story worth telling. There is also: the tension of wonder, the fear of losing transcendence, the joy of expanded awareness, the awe of belonging to something vast.

Music already expresses these states without narrative struggle. Poetry often does too.

Fiction, Weinstein believes, is simply beginning to catch up.