Epistolary SF

The story arrives as documents, letters, logs, journals, transcripts, and the reader is deputised as archivist, assembling truth from artefacts that were never addressed to them. In this genre the old form gains new instruments: a log can outlive its ship, a journal can know more than its writer remembers, a letter can cross timelines that its senders cannot.

The premise's bill is trust in fragments. Every document implies a writer with motives and blind spots, and the form's power is the gap between what the artefact says and what its existence proves, evidence the desk grades stories on exploiting rather than ignoring. Voice is the craft crucible, each document must sound like its author under its circumstances, and the assembly must reward the reader's labour with conclusions no single document contains. The mirror shows an era that lives in messages and is archived by default. The failure mode is costume epistolary, chapters wearing letterheads while behaving as ordinary narration, the form's constraints claimed and never paid.