"Deception Genre" What Books are like Project Lawful?

Nonfiction examples come more easily to mind.

There was recently a miniseries on nebula.tv (subscription-walled, sorry) called The Getaway where all six contestants on a Survivor-style competition show think they're the one person with the special saboteur role, and half the show is the producers trying to keep them from noticing that without ever actually lying.

Even more extreme, there's an old British show called Space Cadets where the producers try to convince the subjects that they've been launched into space when in reality they're in a set in a warehouse.

I discovered John C Wright's Golden Age trilogy thanks to one Eliezer Yudkowsky, who mentioned it multiple times in his notorious Sequences. By the end of the first book i was expecting something very much in the deception genre you've mentioned — a tragic psychological horror about an unreliable narrator being gaslit about the nature of reality. This is a genre i really enjoy, and i kind of hoped for a novel-length version of Scott Alexander's The Last Temptation of Christ.

I did not get that, the trilogy goes in a wildly different direction. But saying whether for better or for worse — heck, even saying if it's a good or bad book — would constitute massive SPOILERS for anyone who discovered this book through Yudkowsky. (If you know why he dropped it, it should be obvious).

I kept hate-reading it.

The Three Body Problem Trilogy by Liu Cixin (books and Neflix series) features two prominent deceptive subplots. I think it fulfills Deception Genre criteria because the reader does (eventually) get the warring perspectives of both the deceivers and the deceived.

Here are the two subplots, in cryptic shorthand to avoid spoilers: 1)The 11-D proton-sized situation 2) WBs vs WFs.

It's not a book, but if you like older movies, the 1944 film Gaslight is pretty far back (film production standards have improved quite a bit since then, so for a large proportion of people 40's films are barely watchable, which is why I recommend this version over the nearly identical British version and the original play), and it was pretty popular among cultural elites at the time so it's probably extremely causally upstream of most of the fiction you'd be interested in.

I agree that Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is an example.

Almost but not quite an example: Edmund Cooper's The Overman Culture. It is obvious to the reader from the outset that the characters cannot be when and where they think the are (evacuated from London during World War 2).Maybe not enough deceiver's perspective to count.

Also not quite: Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun.

I think you could argue plausibly that the climax of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In the Sky has aspects of this, though it's subverted in multiple interesting spoilery ways.

In fact, I think you could argue that a lot of Vinge's writing tends to have major climaxes dependent on Xanatos Gambit pileups based on deception themes. 

An existing subgenre of this with several examples is the two-timer date. As I recall, it was popular in 90's sitcoms. Don't expect INT 18 tier scheming, but it does usually show the perspective of the people frantically trying to keep the deception running.

This almost certainly will not satisfy the desire that motivated your question, but just for the sake of thoroughness, we might notice that the 2014 TV show Ascension is about 70 people who believe they are on an inter-generational space ship going to Alpha Centauri, but they are really on Earth. The writers are mainly interested in exploring class differences, 1960s American society and a murder, and there's very little treatment of "conspiracists frantically trying to keep the deception running".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries)

I watched it, and cannot even recall the motivation for the deception.

When the Seagulls Cry by Ryukishi 07 is practically Online Algorithms: The Visual Novel, or even Infrabayesianism [? · GW]: The Visual Novel. I find it hard to recommend though, because while the concept is interesting and the mysteries good, the writing is overlong and the worldbuilding cringe. (Or maybe i just hate VNs as a medium).

Minor spoilers (explaining the story's premise):
The main meta-story is a murder mystery game for two players: the “detective” and the “witch” who presents clues and insults the detective's intelligence by presenting him elaborate “supernatural” non-explanations. (The last part is not in the rules, but it's traditional.) The main plot point in that story is that as the witch player begins to lose, she starts cheating, retroactively changing the mystery solution, constrained only by the facts presented to the detective. Soon it becomes apparent that cheating is in fact expected, and the detective has to brute-force all solutions Absurdle-style.

Major spoilers (for ongoing rationalist drama): Grokking the ontology presented in Seagulls led me to understand how people may become Zizians [LW · GW].

See also Gwern's more spoilerrific review.