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Author’s Note on

Publisher’s Note

Here we have your boilerplate disclaimer. For the record, I heartily endorse the first sentence. Over the course of several years, I made this story up. It makes no claims on history, except maybe in some of the oblique, figurative, poetic ways that non-documentary art can. Mere facts are beside the point.

I’m also on board with the first clause of the second sentence. Art abhors a vacuum, so like my more energetic cousin DJ Throdown I dig through heaps of American detritus and reuse and recycle. For me, the detritus comes from both culture and personal experience, but can I just make one thing clear please? I don’t do roman-à-clefs. There is never a one-to-one correspondence between any of my characters and a flesh-and-blood human being, myself emphatically included. If you recognize yourself in one of my grotesques, forgive me and keep on reading; you won’t know yourself for long.

I’m much less sure what to make of the disclaimer’s final clause. It’s that word “coincidence” that hangs me up. I mean, no, when I write about, say, the film director James Cameron in this novel, it is certainly not a coincidence if the character bears some resemblance to his real-world counterpart, who really did direct a film called Titanic and who really is reputed to have one hell of a temper. Still, it should be clear to any reasonable reader that I have repurposed that bundle of attributes, as I have every other celebrity who gets mention in these pages. To be sure, I don’t know these people except as semiotic bundles, the gods and archetypes the culture throws up daily, and it is those public personae, as much a part of the furniture of American life as Coke or Viagra, that you’ll find transmigrated into the universe in your hands—which universe, I might mention, is explicitly an alternate one.

Of course, if the multiverse is real and infinite, then, with the possible exception of certain fantasy writers, novelists have been writing non-fiction all along…and all our twitchy disclaimers are void.