While Illuminae is a work of science fiction, it also falls into another genre category that is critical to understanding it: It is ergodic fiction, meaning it is composed of miscellaneous documents that resist traditional narrative form individually, but cohesively come together to create a complete story if the reader works to understand and connect the disparate parts. Ergodic fiction typically asks a greater commitment of its audience in that not only are they being asked to give the story their full attention, but also to uncover the story itself. This genre often works well for speculative works and mysteries.

Illuminae’s science fiction bent borrows elements from horror and mystery to create reader engagement, and it also falls into the ergodic fiction category and asks a lot of its audience.

According to the professor who coined the term, ergodic fiction is defined by the:

…nontrivial effort…required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.