The DoOver stories on SOL are among my favorite stories on the site. Is DoOver a recognized genre outside SOL? If so, does it use the same name?
The DoOver stories on SOL are among my favorite stories on the site. Is DoOver a recognized genre outside SOL? If so, does it use the same name?
The SOL doover rarely has equivalent on other sites. That doesn't means that these kind of stories do not exist elsewhere, there are plenty of them, they are just badly classified as:
* S/F, Fantasy
* Time Travel
* Isekai
* Time loop
* Reincarnation
There are some listopedia do-over dedicated list on Goodreads.
In case of soup tags, instead of category, timeloop & alternate history are often a good match.
Note that in romance, do-over often means start over.
So a search for Do-Over in the title will not be very fruitful.
As Gauthier says, the term is not standard, but the genre definitely exists. Heck, I know of a couple book series that are, effectively, anthology series of do-over novels. It's a HUGE trope in Chinese webnovels, and the popularity of those has had a bleed-over effect.
The tags he suggest are good ones to start, though isekai almost always means transmigration to another world/timeline — but a few are closer to what we call Do-overs here.
There are Russian isekai novels. I don't speak Russian, so I've no clue if they are any good. One cover had Trotsky killing Stalin with an iceaxe, another had a triumphant Hitler, which suggests they are more along the lines of Harry Turtledove's alternate history stories, instead of the "lonely salaryman reincarnates on a world full of big titty elves" variant favored by Japanese.
Easy to discount it as trash, and just weird shit, but it's actually extremely troubling shit.
I have not looked into those myself, but I have read others review those, and they are absolutely terrible war propaganda and alternative history wish fulfillment stories full of imperial grandeur. The common cookie cutter plot is that a modern or near future Russian soldier randomly find themselves in the body of ____ at the year ____ and proceed from there to deliver great military victories for the Mother Russia and/or deliver devastating defeat to her enemies, namely, Great Britain, US, and allies.
Allegedly there's a whole subgenre of a war against Ukraine, written even well before the 2014 when the war started. But mostly it's about defeating or destroying the US and allies in any number of ways in whatever time period, either on Russia's own, or with whatever likely or unlikely allies. Of with, fighting alongside Hitler's Germany is a clear favourite. You see, the only error of "Comrade Hitler" ways really was the treacherous attack on the USSR (disregarding the historical truth that USSR was in preparation to attack him, but the whole genre is about disregarding history, so that's a redundant quibble). If that little mishap could be corrected there's no obstacles for cooperation against the real enemies.
In Light Novels/Web novels, this type of plot is often called Regressor (the MC whose consciousness migrates back to an earlier time in his timeline). Similar to Isekai, but not quite.
Yes, but it's not a big genre. There have been several YA and middle grade series that use the Do-Over premise.
It definitely shows up in published books, but maybe not often enough to be a named subgenre, or at least I've never heard a name for it.
Replay by Ken Grimwood is about a man who repeatedly dies in his 40s and wakes up in his 20s and eventually finds a woman who's also caught in the loop. The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August by Clare North is about a man who relives his life from birth when he dies and is part of a large(ish) society of people who do the same and help each other out. Both great books.
It's a big subgenre of litrpg, too. Usually system apocalypses where the world becomes magical and everyone is eventually killed but one person is sent back in time to try and change history.
Another term I've seen is Second Chance, but that is so generic that it can mean many things when describing book plots.
The DoOver stories on SOL are among my favorite stories on the site. Is DoOver a recognized genre outside SOL? If so, does it use the same name?
Sure, but it tends to be a bit different most times.
One can say that it dates back to Mark Twain, and A Connecticut Yankee is a kind of "Do Over". The same with Groundhog Day, which is a Time Loop story, not unlike Looper.
However, I only know of one other author that has really played with this concept in the way it is done here, and that was "Replay" by Ken Grimwood. In that 1986 novel a man died when he was 43, then went back in time to where he was 18. Then when he reached the same moment at the age of 43, he died again and started all over again.
I read it when it first came out, and thought it was amazing. It won several awards, but sadly the author died as he was writing a sequel. And they have been working on a movie of it for over a decade, but it seems to be stuck in development hell.
That is probably the first novel I can think of that actually plays with the idea of somebody repeating their own life. And it was written years before even Groundhog Day.