Off the top of my head when it comes to the genres I read the most:
-The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The nordic thriller genre was highly prolific well before it, at least since the 1960s, but Larsson popularised it to a wider non-Nordic public by introducing cartoonish, exaggerated, violent, movie-like elements that contrasted with the tradition both of Nordic thrillers and of crime novels in general, and formed the basis for many successful writers that came afterwards.
-Battle Royale. Pulp, extreme and theatrical, it is a landmark of dystopian fiction that IMHO deserves to be in the same realm as 1984 and Lord of the Flies (not necessarily in prose quality, but part of it is because it’s not in English originally and the translation is bad) and is perhaps the single most important work of the whole “killing game” sub-genre.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt has to be in this list. Murder mysteries aren’t new at all but the framing/atmosphere/commentary is arguably original
Not many. Most tropes, plots, character archetypes, etc… have all been done. And that’s fine, because no two authors are going to approach them the same way anyway. Even very popular series, like Harry Potter, aren’t really groundbreaking-- they’re just written in a way that people REALLY enjoy. But those tropes aren’t new at all.
Gideon the Ninth created the sub-genre of Interplanetary Lesbian Necromancers. On its own that would just be a gimmick, but it is also a very well written book that got a lot of acclaim.
Dungeon Crawler Carl made the LitRPG genre worth reading, even if it is the only entry that’s worth it.
Hunger Games and Twilight redefined the YA genre and established aspects that are now pretty common in that genre
Would Running with Scissors qualify here? I feel like for a bit there, it popularized memoirs about very dysfunctional and tragic but comically written memoirs and also transitioned stories about gay men’s lives away from purely focusing on the AIDS epidemic after it was published in 2002.
Fitting the 3 decades I guess, DFW’s Infinite Jest centred what Woods has come to call “hysterical realism”. As for introducing anything, nobody else really picked up on his whole footnotes thing but they’re certainly rather novel.
Gone Girl made domestic noir a mainstream genre and defined the basic parameters of it.
The Road defined a type of climate based post-apocalyptic fiction that is now common place
In Australia, The Dry reinvigorated rural crime fiction, a genre that had vanished. Now it’s everywhere here.
Sally Rooney’s books brought literary romance fiction back to the mainstream.
Oh wow, I didn’t know that The Dry was so influential, I love Austalian crime fiction!
Me either! Picked it randomly. Did really enjoy it.
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. More about the author than an individual book, but it was the first entry in what is now a very large universe called the Cosmere. It can arguably be pointed to as the beginning of a major change to the landscape of the fantasy genre.
Aside from the massive empire that Brandon has built over the years from his books, he also brought the concept of a hard magic system to the forefront of the fantasy genre. He even established what are called “Sanderson’s Laws” on the subject. For example, Sanderson’s First Law states “an author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic”
I believe there had been authors who had done magic systems that had specific rules and limitations before, but none achieved his level of success, nor had any really taken such an academic approach to writing and attempted to define specific concepts and writing elements. Now almost any fantasy fan can tell you what the difference is between a hard and soft magic system.
Multitudes of authors followed in his footsteps and began defining their magic systems in more detail. Sanderson has achieved international fame and built a multi-million dollar empire. Most recently, he held the single largest kickstarter campaign in history.
So yeah, I’d point to Elantris as the beginning of this.
Argueably much of that was done earlier by robert jordan’s wheel of time which sanderson finished, but that was early 90s affecting.
The Wheel of Time made a massive impact on the fantasy genere. Arguably the biggest shift since LOTR. Sanderson has spoken about loving those books and rereading them endlessly as a kid. It might be too far to say Sanderson is a Jordan product as they never met. But the influence is hard to overstate.
Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer is a Eldritch horror that book that is almost entirely original in its approach. It nails the feel of the genre without relying on any of the tropes.
I loved that book and was devastated by the sequel. I wanted more, but it was a totally different genre. We had explored a new and amazing world first hand in Annihilation, and don’t leave an office building in its follow up…
You may no like it but 50 Shades of Grey made erotic fiction a mainstream phenomenon for a while. Also, I have no idea which book started the Holocaust-themed historical fiction books, but it must have been hugely influential because that niche exploded, at least in Portugal ans probably the rest of Europe.
The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (2006) may have the been the catalyst for that particular genre (Holocaust, not erotic fiction).
That would be my guess as well.
For me it is the books that address gender roles and sexual identity.
+ Ocean Vuong - On earth we’re briefly gorgeous
+ Shelley Parker Chang - She Who Became the Sun
+ Xiran Jay Zhao - Iron Widow
I was going to talk about books from the 80s and then realized 30 years would be 93. This is depressing
Lol but do talk about books from the 80s, the 3 decades in the title are meant to be a general reference.
Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Crossover cyberpunk and Cold War spy novel genres. Like the Matrix written by a collaboration between AJP Taylor and John LeCarré.
Neapolitan novels