The Fictional Man

The Fictional Man

"What's it like, not being real?"<br />In Hollywood, where last year’s stars are this year’s busboys, Fictionals are everywhere. Niles Golan’s therapist is a Fictional. So is his best friend. So (maybe) is the woman in the bar he can’t stop staring at. Fictionals – characters ‘translated’ into living beings for movies and TV using cloning technology – are a part of daily life in LA now. Sometimes the problem is knowing who’s real and who’s not.<br />Divorced, alcoholic and hanging on by a thread, Niles – author of The Saladin Imperative: A Kurt Power Novel and many others – has been hired to write a big-budget reboot of a classic movie. If he does this right, the studio might bring one of Niles’ own characters to life. Somewhere beneath the movie – beneath the TV show it was inspired by, the children’s book behind that and the story behind that – is the kernel of something important. If he can just hold it together long enough...<br /><br />“Intriguing and entertaining, at times not far short of a modern classic.”<br />The SF Site<br /> <br />“From Episodes to The Player, Tinseltown has made a habit over the years of satirising its own superficial, self-obsessed ways. But none have exposed the cynical inner workings of the Hollywood movie-making machine quite as brilliantly as Al Ewing’s The Fictional Man.”<br />SFX<br /> <br />“This is a solid piece of sci-fi that deals with the nature of self, and is worthy of comparison with Philip K. Dick's We Can Remember It for You Wholesale and Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. It’s an effortless and rapid read, and works perfectly. Highly recommended.”<br />Starburst<br /> <br />“Once in a while I pick up a gem of a book that blows my friggin’ mind and takes me places I did not even know existed... I assure you, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that The Fictional Man is just such a book. Ewing is a goddamn genius.”<br />Den of Geek