Violet asked Elizabeth Wein:

Hi! I read and loved both Stateless and Code Name Verity. Thank you for writing both!! I found it really cool how in Stateless, you were able to invent "historical" events that never really happened. How did you even start to go about that?

Elizabeth Wein Hmmm, you mean the Rocketman Affair? (Or perhaps also the Circuit of Nations Olympics of the Air itself?) I think how I go about doing that is just because I am a storyteller and I make stuff up! If you think about it, all historical fiction is the invention of "historical" events that never really happened.

But I guess the secret to making it seem like a "real" historical event is that in the fictional world of Stateless, the event is "reported" in the news media. Think about it - if the Rocketman Affair hadn't been framed as a reported event that all the characters knew about, it would have just seemed like more plot action. Simple!

I say "simple," but giving my made-up story validation in my made-up tabloids (none of the newspapers named in Stateless are real) somehow seems to lend them a virtual or ghostly authenticity, so much so that even the copyeditors working on this book queried the Rocketman Affair - they were trying to verify that I'd got the facts straight and couldn't find any BECAUSE I'D MADE IT UP. Someone along the way during publication even suggested that the book was "based on a real incident." So you're not the only one who felt these events seemed real.

I think that the take-away is that what we call "fake news" passes VERY EASILY as real, especially if it is reported in what seem to be official channels.

Thank you for your very interesting question! :D

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