‘If you read Sinclair only for the story, you would hang yourself,’ writes Roz Kaveney, acknowledging rather starkly the inadvisability, and the impossibility, of attempting to summarize the plots of Sinclair's fictional narratives, including the three novels I will examine here. It is not so much that the reader does not know what is happening; it is that too much happens. The fiction aspires to the novelistic condition Michael Moorcock calls the ‘multiverse’, in which, as Sinclair glosses it, ‘alternate selves live different lives, simultaneously’ (LT 105). One reviewer, Nicholas Lezard, conjectured of the first novel I will be examining, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), that ‘the mise-en-scene may be [Peter] Ackroyd's’, an intertextual relation I have touched on in the introduction, but, by the time of the second novel Downriver (1991), Angela Carter, for one, saw the true allegiance: ‘The decisive influence on this grisly dystopia is surely the grand master of all dystopias, William Burroughs.’ Burroughs's late trilogy – Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983) and The Western Lands (1987) – domesticates the excessive and disruptive processes of the cutup technique, while retaining his legion of near-mythological characters. Influenced by postmodern masters, such as Borges and Calvino, Burroughs feeds his sensibility, which remains committed to all methods of resisting control, through baroque overlapping and, often unresolved, narratives. His characters are granted the agency to ‘experiment with identity’; they pass through time and space to create a dystopian multiverse, in which their mission is to overcome death (LT 105).

By the time Sinclair was writing the third novel I will examine, Landor's Tower (2001), a character with a name lifted from Burroughs's work, Norton, haunts the narrative, in which, as Burroughs was fond of saying, and Sinclair is fonder of paraphrasing, the paranoid is the central figure because he (and the figure is always male for both writers) is the only one who possesses a full account of the conspiratorial world he inhabits; that is, all the possible stories. Since these are fictional worlds, it follows that ‘mere fiction’ may be defined as that which ‘hasn't happened yet’, as Sinclair does in his ‘Acknowledgements and Confessions’ to Downriver (DR 407).