I started noticing this trend in the early 2000s, when I’d walk into a bookstore looking for something I couldn’t quite name. Something with weight to it. A story that took seriously the things I was quietly wrestling with. Things like the question of what kind of man I wanted to be, what I owed to the people in my life, what it meant to act with honor in a world that had largely stopped using the word. I was looking for the PKDs, the Robert E. Howards, the Tolkiens, or any of the classics I loved retold in a way that was familiar to me. What I saw was an ever-increasing catalogue of fiction written specifically for women. So, I’d leave with nothing, or with something that didn’t quite fit.
It wasn’t that the books were bad. It was that they weren’t for me. The protagonists were in the process of dismantling themselves. The virtues I cared about, the story of a man overcoming himself and the world to become a better version of himself, appeared in the narrative only to be complicated, subverted, or shown to be illusions. The message, consistent across a hundred different titles, was that wanting to be a man of character was itself the problem.
Stories are not just entertainment. They are instruction.
This isn’t a controversial claim. In fact, it was the foundational understanding of storytelling for most of human history. Homer’s epics didn’t exist so the ancient Greeks could relax with a mug of tea and cozy into a forgettable story. They existed to transmit values across generations: what it meant to be brave, to be loyal, to endure. The Mahabharata. Beowulf. The Icelandic sagas. Story after story after story built around men tested by adversity and defined by how they met it.
At some point, literary culture decided this was naive. That the proper function of serious fiction was to deconstruct, interrogate, and complicate. Models weren’t things to be upheld, they were outdated modalities meant to be criticized and torn down. And perhaps that is a legitimate artistic choice. But it is not the only legitimate choice, and it left an enormous gap in the market for stories that do something different: stories that show a man what he could become.
Men didn’t stop needing those stories. They stopped being able to find them. I believe men today still read, still want to read, but are left at a loss in how to do that. Mainstream publishing has abandoned them on all fronts, so they’ve sought refuge in anime and manga. Indie publishing has potential jewels, but finding them amid the pile of slop and garbage is next to impossible.
This is why Outlaw Star Press exists. Not to produce propaganda, not to publish wish-fulfillment fantasies, and not to pretend the world is simpler than it is. The best fiction in our tradition is the fiction we aspire to. The stories that are honest about hardship, failure, and the cost of trying to live well. But it takes seriously the idea that trying to live well is worth it. That courage is real. That honor matters. That the man who endures is different, in ways that count, from the man who doesn’t. That every man’s life is a heroes journey and all that it takes to embark on the adventure is one good story that tells him how.
That is a story worth telling. We’re going to keep telling it.