The Fictional Man

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. 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...