Cannonbridge (34 page)
HOW DOES IT FEEL, NOT BEING REAL?
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. But 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 to figure it out...
‘A disturbing, self-reflective type of brilliance.’
Pornokitsch
on
Death Got No Mercy
‘There’s a lot to love here.’
Total Sci-Fi
on
Gods of Manhattan
