Alive

Primal fiction seeks to capture the spirit of endurance embodied in real life scenarios like in the story of the Uruguayan survivors of the 1972 plane crash in the Andes. These man survived alone for over two months at 11,000 feet altitude, all the while knowing from radio reports that the search for them was called off. Despite the fact that nearly all hope was lost, they did not lose faith, and chose to live and to innovate with what materials they had to remain alive. The survivors were only rescued after two of their group walked over thirty miles and over mountain peaks until encountering a Chilean horseman who got help.


One of the most dramatic elements of their story is that thirty years after the fact, when the two men who had gotten help returned to the area where they had been stranded, they encountered the same horseman who had rescued them so long ago. They approached him and said, "sir, would you help us? We are lost." The horseman immediately began to cry. The providence and pathos of this moment can hardly equaled, but such moments are key to primal fiction which seeks not simply to tell prehistoric tales of survival, but to uncover something of the nature and beauty of life.

Chris Moore
Author of TOTEM and the forthcoming MIGRATION

The New Prehistoric Fiction is Primal

I was not happy with the so called prehistoric fiction genre, which had turned into cave man romance. I love the idea of ficiton set in prehistoric times, and so does much of the American population, as the cluster of survival shows now on cable TV proves, but the genre had gotten away from the human survival and innovation at its core and gone more toward exhibiting multiculturalism and romance rather than telling a story. These ideas were fresh in the 80s and 90s but they have now become stale and lifeless and don't help to ground this type of fiction around. The fiction that results is dry and seems to pander.

With primal fiction I want to highlight the fight for survival that has been at the center of human existence and change forever. In primal ficiton the characters are not just ignorant cave people. They are people who feel, and who know, and who have to make it. In the novel TOTEM, the boy Pyramie must survive as an outcast, hunted by his own tribe. He is literally on the brink of death from natural or human causes, and he must learn to live with the sort of intensity of a Man Vs. Wild.

Chris Moore
Author of TOTEM and the forthcoming MIGRATION

Primal Fiction

Primal Fiction is a re-imagining of our shared human history that strips back the layers of romance and cultural deadening and presents human life in a form and shape that is familiar even to a child. Unlike the prehistoric fiction genre, primal ficiton does not project current moral movements into the dark past, or cloak a moral narrative in the pretension to scientific fact. Rather, primal ficiton takes humans as we are, with all our love, inquisitiveness, violence, and aristocracy, and places us living on the stage of prehistoric past where the greatest innovations and darkest secrets lie.

Chris Moore
Author of TOTEM and the forthcoming MIGRATION

The Genesis of Primal Fiction

I have always loved the idea of our forgotten and shared past. So many thousands of years went by before man was able to record what he saw and in that time humans were making advances that would echo down to us today, like the realization that fire could be harnessed for our benefit, and even language itself. Both of these events or occurrences in a process were part of a cultural evolution that was as often as painful as it was progressive. But one thing is for certain, this period makes a fertile compost for the imagination. From the early Hebrews to Ovid, people have always been interested in genesis stories and folklore that recounts the beginning of things. In this spirit Primal Fiction was born to recount the dark chapters of history without the cliches of the modern genre's cavemen and natives. Primal Fiction is a fiction of people under pressure and in complex relationships. Primal Fiction does not discount early human society nor does it idolize it, but it seeks to build a narrative around human events and express the spirit of human endurance, innovation and even love and art.

TOTEM is the first work of Primal Fiction and Chris Moore is its author.

TOTEM

TOTEM is the first work of Primal Fiction. It is a re-imagining of our ancient shared past, and shows how people interact with one another under the often trying pressures of survival, superstition and relationship. TOTEM is a break from the old genre that has grown pat and stale.

Primal Fiction is the new pre-historic fiction.