The Fictional Man — Al Ewing

The most exciting new voice in sceince fiction has written a novel with enormous cross-over appeal. In an L.A. where Fictional characters are cloned into living beings, the author Niles Golan is on the verge of hitting the big-time - if he can just stay on top of reality long enough to make it.

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 Death By Degrees: 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...