Fiction is for everyone. It exists to teach us, to make us think, to help us experience things -- from emotions to space travel -- we would otherwise never experience. Fiction is ancient. The art of storytelling has evolved with human culture. It predates civilization, and is the basis of civilization. Though fiction is often dismissed as mere entertainment, it is in fact the most profound invention of the human race. And it is available to all of us. While fiction has guided our cultures blindly for aeons, stories and heroes springing up from our subconscious minds seemingly fully formed like Athena, more and more it has been used consciously as a tool for shaping the way people think and react. When religion uses story this way to guide a person’s moral development, it can have a positive effect on a culture. However, the powerful tool of fiction can be turned to much more insidious means: propaganda, deception, or the aggrandizement of a single charismatic leader. Worse, sometimes a culture’s stories are completely destroyed. When this happens, the culture is degraded, losing cohesion. Strong cultures become weak; weak cultures descend into anarchy. Conservative fiction, the website and the concept, is intended to explore these things. Much of recent publishing has damaged or destroyed things we once valued as a culture, like the traditional hero. Conservative fiction, by turning back to the traditional yet retaining what is of value in the new fictions, may be able to preserve or even restore those storytelling patterns. There is a second purpose to this website. Conservatives of all stripes have been locked out of the publishing industry, slowly at first but more recently at an accelerated pace. Fortunately, the Internet and the rise of epublishing have created opportunities for us - traditionalist mavericks, people of God, lovers of heroes – to create our own niches. We can produce our stories ourselves without a publishing gatekeeper, and deliver them faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than any large publisher could ever dream of. Working together, we can create a community that helps all our writers reach the readers who hunger for what we can provide: traditional, wholesome, uplifting fiction that enhances the cultures and ideals we share. |