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Action fiction: History and Key Facts

Action fiction is a genre in literature that focuses on stories involving high-stakes, high-energy, and fast-paced events.

By the Pop Culture Files editorial team••2 min read•✓ Fact-checked
Action Stories (Fiction House, Volume 16, number 1, December, 1940). Throughout the 1940s, Fiction House published a wide range of pulp magazines and comic books.
Fiction House · Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

Action fiction is a genre in literature that focuses on stories involving high-stakes, high-energy, and fast-paced events. This genre includes a wide range of subgenres, such as spy novels, adventure stories, tales of terror, intrigue ("cloak and dagger"), and mysteries. These kinds of stories use suspense, the tension that is built up when the reader wishes to know how the conflict between the protagonist and antagonist is going to be resolved or the solution to a mystery of a thriller.

The intricacies of human relationships or the nuances of philosophy and psychology are rarely explored in action fiction, typically being fast-paced mysteries that merely seek to provide the reader with an exhilarating experience.

Action fiction can also be a plot element of non-literary works such as graphic novels and film.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Action fiction by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.

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