The Fictional Man

by Al Ewing

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...

Al Ewing is a talented new writer whose work for British comic 2000 AD has seen him hailed as a major voice in the field. His work for Abaddon Books and Solaris has been equally lauded.