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Welcome to My Way to Canossa. On behalf of all the various individuals who, with and without their permission, have been cast as characters in this project, I'd like to emphasize one important point: This is fiction. Now, by fiction, I'm not simply referring to one of the categories of my former business—which, as I'm sure you are aware, was the book business. That is, I'm not talking about a specific section in a bookstore or a certain range in a catalog system. No, I'm afraid My Way to Canossa forces me to a broader consideration, of fiction as a general mode of story-telling. Let us attempt a first definition of the term: Fiction is a made-up story. Well, that's rather obvious, isn't it? Even my cell-mate would understand. But this definition raises an important problem. There's another kind of made-up story, familiar to all in a place like this: the lie. The dirty, bold-faced, trust-destroying lie. Is, then, fiction the same thing as a lie? As far as I'm concerned, there's not much difference, but O'Meara begs to differ, and he offers a second definition: A lie is a false story told with intent to deceive, but fiction is not-necessarily-true story told with intent to entertain, instruct, or reveal some truth. Please note the phrase, "not-necessarily-true". The facts presented in a work of fiction might be true, or they might not. To O'Meara and his ilk, it doesn't matter. Since the intention is to entertain, instruct, or reveal some truth, what matters is the entertainment, the instruction, or the revelation. If a fictional story has any claim to truth-telling, that claim works only at the level of the whole (yessir, that's the way things are...yep, that's how it is). At the level of detail, the fictional story-teller has a complete freedom to cook up a stew of the true and the false. Which is exactly what My Way to Canossa is: a stew of the factual and the fake, a promiscuous gathering of the implausible, the impossible, the unlikely, and the accurate. There are also more than a few outright lies, but O'Meara and his team of researchers at OT!OM! Labs claim that their efforts, when understood in the proper philosophical light, have been scrupulously honest, and that any deliberate attempt to mislead has been the doing of the characters, not the story-tellers. And who am I to quibble with such noble intentions? But, dear reader, you have been warned: any given fact presented on this site may, or may not, be true. Continue at your own risk. Roger McAllister |