Fiction podcasts have always felt one step behind the culture. The audio drama’s great and unexpected resurgence in this decade, thanks to the rise of podcasting’s listen-whenever-and-wherever-you-like technology, has produced a cutting-edge genre that seems somehow suspended in time.

Maybe it’s because so many scripted podcasts have borrowed from old radio plays. Or maybe it’s because they’ve so often leaned into genre storytelling, leaving social reality behind to build fantasy worlds and unravel mysteries. The experimental sandbox of the new form has produced sharp plots and intriguing aural soundscapes but few stories that seem to access something bigger than themselves.

The moment that changed, for me, came when I was white-knuckling the pole in a crowded subway car, piping the pilot of the politically charged dystopian fantasy “Adventures in New America” into my ears (the premiere is on Sept. 28). I began to sense the world developing in my head as more immediate than the human crush of my commute. I felt something similar a few days later, running down the street and listening to the first episode of “The Horror of Dolores Roach” (Oct. 17). It’s a show with “Sweeney Todd” elements that also draws in threads about gentrification and racist policing, and it was so absorbing that I missed my turn by three blocks.

“Adventures In New America” — created and written by the filmmaker Stephen Winter and his longtime collaborator Tristan Cowen, and produced by Night Vale Presents — is set in a new nation formed after an unidentified cataclysmic event. New America is a lot like old America. It’s brimming with bizarre patriotic displays. It’s going through a poke bowl craze. Every social interaction brings a heady mix of performative wokeness and racist microaggression. It’s kind of like America 2: More American. Or as Mr. Cowen puts it: “The dystopian future is our present.” Meanwhile, a mysterious new race has arrived, known in the show as Tetchy Terrorist Vampire Zombies from outer space. The zombies are both extremely racist and highly sensitive about their own identities — the various supernatural labels attached to them in New America are, to their mind, not very P.C.