used to question Mike’s endless reading of fiction, wondering what notions he was getting. But turned out he got a better feeling for human life from stories that he had been able to garner from facts; fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it. Besides this ‘humanizing’ effect, Mike’s substitute for experience, he got ideas from ‘not-true data’ as he called fiction. How to hide a catapult he got from Edgar Allan Poe.
