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Gore Vidal, to take one example, didn't make his fictional Abraham Lincoln the composer of Beethoven's works who marries Julia Roberts.

But what would be wrong with doing that? Actually the idea is kind of interesting. That's one of the uses of fiction it seems to me - to play around with ideas, sort of ask "what if?". So what if it's not true? That's why they call it fiction.

Would you have a problem with it if Vidal said, "This book is a work of fiction, but the theory about Abraham Lincoln being the composer of Beethoven's works and about him being married to Julia Roberts is based on solid historical evidence."

That's what Brown is saying with DiVinci Code. No one is saying that he's denying it's a fictional book. What a lot of people are choking on is the fact that he's saying it's a fictional book that based on solid historical theory. The ideas in his book about Christ have been examined for years and have been found wanting.

What if? Sure. And Vidal's Lincoln does plenty of that, but within established framework. Jim Crace's Quarantine plays with what if describing Jesus' 40 days in the desert. Dystopias, such as 1984 do it as well. And then there is THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA by Philip Roth in which "What if, he asks, the flying ace Charles A. Lindbergh had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election, and what if Lindbergh (who in real life articulated anti-Semitic sentiments and isolationist politics) had instituted a pro-Nazi agenda?" (source NYT.)

Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus and its film adaptation by Milos Forman were similar exercises which played with ideas based on limited historical knowledge. If you had been there, in Mozart's time, you'd know they got it all wrong, but none of us had.

Fiction, even fiction that "plays with ideas" starts out by observing history and then filling in the author's ideas. But twisting historical events and the nature of organizations that are still with us? Opus Dei a buncha murderous thugs? No thanks, Danny boy.

Those are interesting questions outside of this discussion and they're covered in a thin book by Umberto Eco Six Walks in Fictional Woods, which is a collection of his university lectures, I think. Highly recommended.