The idea of actually outright saying things that are not true in order to entertain and inspire is a surprisingly recent invention in Pasaru, as opposed to the idea of saying things that are not true in order to deceive, manipulate and punish (which is genuinely an ancient act). However, precursors to fiction as the former do exist for a long time, particularly in the form of religion.
We have previously examined some religions in sections *Religion_(1) and *Religion_(2), which are somewhat important to setting the stage on the motivation of certain words and grammatical formations. However, to examine their effects on fiction, we will have to go further and look at them in general. \boc{17}{54}
The oldest religions posit that there exists some single force that is everywhere and always. The normal next step here is to personify this force into a form more units understand, and this is done in, for example, earlier iterations of Pnfy.
At this point the evolution starts becoming a bit unhinged compared to Earth. The number of gods started to inflate over time, in a basically exponential manner. Religions that started off polytheïstically of course have no problem adding more gods quicker, whereas religions that started off with a smaller number of gods had a little more difficulty. The general pathway is to either take the step to duotheïsm directly, (a slower and slightly more difficult process) or to lose focus on the single or few gods and start focusing on the minions that these gods inevitably entail (a much faster and more common process). As so it turns out though, monotheïsm is quite rare, so it is not a particualrly large obstacle to growth of religions.
Eventually, one way or another, a small number of immutabble gods gave way to what is termed the “Star Race”, a large (\(10^5 < n < 10^9\)) list of names and relations that is largely subordinate to the world that they produce. Newer religions that spring off of the older ones tend to even ignore the identities of the individual and start focusing on what kind of world would be able to spawn theis “Star Race” in such prodigious amounts, and this line of thought generally dominated theologies in many places beyond some point.
Meanwhile, in parallel, the ideas of economics started to take root amongst the now intensifying long-distance trade routes. The first corporations formed along these trade routes as couriers and inventory management, and are looking to expand their businesses.
As so it turns out, one of their most favoured and needy clients are the big religions and churches, who have not yet forgotten the face that religions are built to be spread, not to ruminate endlessly in an empty building. Since a message is considerably easy to spread as opposed to perishable goods or physical items that are subject to theivery, religions find themselves a whole lot of new believers along the trade routes and they pay a relatively small amount for this vast amount of believers.
However, there is only a finite amount of followers for this world, and soon all the easy converts have dried up. This is of course a fairly obvious consequence when stated this way, but when you are one who only looks at the numbers from day to day, it is quite worrying. The couriers blame the religions for not making good enough stories to sell to others; the clergy blame the couriers for not being diligent enough to push the stories to potential converts. Overall, things are not looking too good.
Eventually, by the luck of several factors that include bankrupting the clergy and a prototypical form of “executive meddling”, most of the major religions have fallen into the hands of the courier companies. To this day, Drsk “mail”, “sermon” and “information” all share the same root \orth{bm}.
Things get a little bit worse for the existing religions as the new converts turn out to not be as faithful as previously expected. after certain incidents, including the one outlined above, a new wave of religions came to be, which called the Descriptivist Religions. These religions are special in that they do not immediately claim that what they said is right, but instead the goal is to only say correct things (the goal does not include saying all correct things however.) As one can deduce, this is basically just science, and indeed from these descriptivist religions, which later converged into Naturalism, slowly became a protoscience, and then science itself was born.
A few thousand years later yet another branch of religion was developed. This branch takes a slightly different approach to the increasingly obvious mismatch between reality and what their predecessors say. Instead of making up more explanations as to how this alterante world came to be the ones they live in, they simply gave up any claim that what they said was true and so the Irrealis Religions are born.
These religions are different from Naturalism in that they have not converged but have instead become the most dominant form of all religions. Many classical religions (that is, any religion that is not Irrealiso or Descriptivist) started to gain Irrealis counterparts, and they started to overwhelm them, though this did take some time. This signals the beginning of religions in general.
From here we can detect the beginnings of fiction as we might know it: after all, this is a type of fiction, as there is now no claim that what was said was true, and it was built to entertain and inspire. For this reason, at this point, Irrealis Religions became protofiction.
The jump from protofiction to fiction required one final step, and that is the Tretise of Fiction, published shortly after the years turned into the positives. From here, fiction was well and truly “born”, and the idea flourished quite happily as if it was there all along.
Most of the remaining classical religions, now mostly branches of the courier companies that have consumed them many years ago found this new idea of fiction quite attractive and profitable and have therefore banded together to form the World Organisation for Parahistories. This essentially signals the end of religions as we know of them, as parahistories only claim to be some kind of “real life fanfiction” – a genuine fiction that doesn’t make any claims as to the answers the “big questions” that religions are wont to answer.
And with that, fiction as we (more or less) know it was established. There are a few wrinkles regarding how fiction works in the details, but in general the big ideas have been established and the idea of Worldstate Literature was born, which will become the dominant storytelling paradigm across the planet.