Recently, I read a book with those little quotes at the beginning of a chapter and found one that was misattributed. It was very convenient and I wondered whether it was purposeful.

I was wondering about the nature of such a pieces. What's your take on such things?
Especially fabricated histories and UFO books and the like.

A really classic example is the origins of the Nazi salute. Supposedly Hitler and Mussilini based their new salutes on the ancient Romans' salute. In actual fact, they had it based on a movie producer's idea and he had based it on a couple of pictures that *might* have been a salute. There's no actual evidence of the Roman salute being anything like the Fascist salute. The movie producer probably had no intention of claiming historical facts. But now most of us, when we think of the Roman salute think of something similar to the Nazi salute.

Recently, I read RED STAR ROGUE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF A SOVIET SUBMARINE'S NUCLEAR STRIKE ATTEMPT ON THE US

You've all probably heard the story of the Glomar Explorer, the ship built by Howard Hughes (and paid for by the CIA), which secretly raised a sunken Russian sub? The sub was armed with three one-megaton nuclear missiles, and it mysteriously sank off the coast of Hawaii in 1968. In 1974, at least part of the sub was raised by the Glomar Explorer.

According to RED STAR ROGUE, the sub was attempting to launch one of its nukes at Pearl Harbor. However, the crew entered the wrong codes into the fail safe device, which engaged an emergency destruct system that destroyed the nuke and sank the sub.

It's a pretty fantastic story, but is it true? Who knows.

What does worry me is when people take 'facts' from such books into arguments. A recent and cliche example is DaVinci Code. It doesn't put me in a religious furvor or anything, but it is scary how many people simply assume it's factual. People seem especially quick to believe relatively silly things if they are controvertial. Even better if they happen to support an emotionally charged point of view.

Fiction, presented as non-fiction can be a great thing, if it is marketed as fiction. I don't want to be browsing my history rack and find a History of an Huckelberry Finn that portrays him as a real person.

But there is a great outlet for creativity in producing reference material for fictional subjects. I remember reading a great fictional book on the history of time travel. It was sold as fiction, but looked like a bonafide non-fiction book.

There is fiction which is clearly labelled as fiction, and fiction which labels itself as "truth". Trying to pass a fiction off as true is, of course, wrong. It will also get you black-balled pretty quickly, both by individual readers and by publishers.

Publishers feel that you're covered as long as you submit the entire thing to their "fiction" imprint. You can claim it's the truth, both in the text and in interviews, but since you sold it to them as fiction, they're covered.

I didn't offer to read her STAR TREK novel.

With things like metafiction and "creative nonfiction" as possibilities, it can be pretty hard to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction sometimes, but as writers, we should try to be clear in our own minds about which it is we are writing.