Is there a better term I can use?

Well, it works for me in that sentence. I think it conveys the idea without being overly wordy.

Yep

It depends. If this is the blurb you have in a published book itmight not be enough. The normal screed goes this is a work of fiction and any similarity with real people is entirely coincidental.

The sentence itself is fine.

The professor noted that while the stories are fictional, they're loosely based on a montage of separate events.

In an apoplexy of absolute denial, the professor stressed that these stories ...

Thanks everyone. I'llprobably keep it as is, except for "these stories are all entirely fictional; none of them occurred" is redundant. I will shorten to delete "none of them occurred".

A little context for you: Professor Sun (lives in Fuzhou) granted me permission to translate and republish his fictional novel about a few famous martial art heros of the late 1800's. It is a compilation of street-stories and folktales about these persons. It is actually intentional that all characters resemble the actual persons, and some of the events are based on actual historical events of that era.

As street tales go, the object was to get the listener to say, "Oh yeah, I remember reading something about that happening around 1890", and buy you another drink to help you continue the story. Cabbies, bartenders, old folks who used to train, old janitors, ec., all seemed to have tales to tell if there was another beer, or a tip, or a chance to see his story in print. Prof. Sun gathered a large number of these tales during the 1980's and compiled them, finding literary tricks to string them all together into a comprehensive fiction novel he named "The Hero's Road", tracing the life of a martial art hero beginning from his childhood to his death in his early 50's. It was quite popular in southern China among teens and young adults (family honor, chivalry, incredible martial deeds, war, armies and brigands, theives and cutthroats, priests, monks, and abbots, and of course the obligatory romantic affair between the hero and his beloved).

Some of these tales were told to visiting foreign martial artists, who took them to be history and wrote them into the histories of their systems. Prof. Sun is quite happy to see the record set straight by telling in English that these are fantasies, and often the events related didn't occur at all, or were too far away from the scene of the tale, or occured at some other time, etc.

The whole novel is really rather exciting to read, the story moves fast, and is full of swords, poisoned dart, sharpened fans, and fist-fight scenes...!

I am finished up to page 222 and chapter 12 of 20 chapters. Maybe publishing by late November.

Errol Flynn would have loved to do a serial based on this one.

"chronologically-displaced" sounds a bit like a time traveler lost their map! How about saying "events that may have happened, but at slightly less convenient or story-worthy moments in history"?