Bigger On The Outside: The Book Of The War
(For those who haven’t been reading my blog before, or who’ve forgotten, I’ve been doing a series of posts (to be turned into a book, with luck) on Doctor Who spinoffery. Click the ‘bigger on the outside’ tag to read the rest of these posts.)
For those who are interested in ideas, The Book Of The War is quite probably the single best thing ever to have come out of Doctor Who.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the BBC had taken control of the ongoing series of Doctor Who books, and put out a series featuring the Eighth Doctor. Much of this series was regarded at the time as being a bit rubbish, not least because a lot of it was – The Eight Doctors and War Of The Daleks, in particular, are just bad fanfic, written to explain away or rewrite things their authors didn’t like (and the fact that one of those books is by Terrance Dicks, the single biggest contributor to Doctor Who ever, doesn’t stop it being bad fanfic. Picasso was once asked to separate a pile of paintings into real Picassos and forgeries. After putting one into the forgery pile, someone said to him “But Pablo, I was with you when you painted that one”, to which he replied “No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as anyone.”)
But some of them were extremely good. Those by Lance Parkin and Paul Magrs we’ll come back to later in this series of articles, but there was also a set of books, starting with Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles, which set up a fascinating plot thread – a war, at some time in the Doctor’s future, between the Time Lords and an unnamed Enemy. There was also a third party in this war, a renegade faction of the Time Lords known as Faction Paradox, and several smaller parties.
Unfortunately, the editor of BBC Books at the time decided to wrap this storyline up in a rather spectacularly dull way, and to write almost all of the elements that had been introduced in this story out of ‘continuity’.
But if you’ve read this far, you’ll know what I think about ‘continuity’, and Miles and several of the other authors involved evidently had the same view. Seeing no reason to waste a good idea, a series of Faction Paradox books and audio adventures was started which continues to this day, and The Book Of The War was the first, and one of the best, result.
The Book Of The War is the work of ten different authors – some, like Miles himself, or Simon Bucher-Jones, or Daniel O’Mahony, having written excellent books in the Doctor Who ranges before, while others, like Philip Purser-Hallard, were doing great work on the fringes of Who fiction without ever writing a ‘proper’ Doctor Who story. The book is structured as some combination of encyclopaedia, role-playing sourcebook and hypertext, and purports to provide background information on a war in time between the ‘Great Houses’, an ancient semi-godlike race of time travellers who kept the structure of history together, and their unnamed Enemy.
I say ‘purports’ because what this book actually is is an assault on the dull, literalist way of reading that most Doctor Who fans had.
While Doctor Who itself has at its best always attacked the idea of simple binary choices, that way of perceiving things pervades everything in our culture. Conservative or Labour, Mac or Windows, gay or straight, male or female, if you don’t pick a side, you will be assigned one anyway. Everyone knew that the Lib Dems were ‘really’ just Labour-lite, until they entered coalition and they’re now ‘really’ Tories. Bisexuals are ‘really’ gay people in denial or straight people trying to look interesting. And so on.
And so for a lot of the readers of the Eighth Doctor War stories, the single most interesting question had been ‘who is the Enemy?’ [FOOTNOTE A question which may contain its own answer...or may not.] They saw a war, and read it as having two sides, despite it originally being described as having at least four – the Time Lords/Great Houses, the Enemy, the Celestis and Faction Paradox – with many other factions such as The Remote later being described. So obviously the only thing of interest was who the Enemy ‘really’ were.
We get a lot of hints as to who the Enemy are in The Book of The War, and they do seem to point to an answer (the answer here seems to be that the Enemy are actually the Great Houses themselves, or a group within them, grown so bored and decadent that they have to invent a war with themselves in order to have a reason for existence). But it’s made clear that who the Enemy really are simply isn’t important – and indeed, the various books seem to suggest that Lawrence Miles, who edited this book and is more or less in charge of the Faction Paradox book range, has had different ideas as to who the Enemy are at different times. Indeed, it is entirely possible that each author of this book had his or her own idea who the Enemy were.
But further, the whole book goes out of its way to throw doubt upon the stories it’s telling. Attentive readers will be able to tell, for example, that the whole War itself is merely a feint for some larger plan, involving House Lolita, a single individual who is (we know from one of Miles’ short stories) the Master’s TARDIS (and the Master of course may or may not be the same person as the War King who is now in charge of the Great Houses, and his Presidency during the War may or may not be tied into Lolita’s scheme). There are at least three characters in the book who may or may not be the Doctor, all of whom are on different sides in the War.
The very text of the book itself presents itself both as fallible and as existing within the War universe – the text itself is corrupt, both in the sense of having (deliberate) mistakes in it, and in the sense that it reads as propaganda for one of the sides in the War – which one is open to question.
This corruption of the text exists from even the indicia, where we have “First printing September 2002. Almost certainly printed in Illinois” and “No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or biological”. It’s not often the copyright warnings in a book forbid you to even remember it – and of course this ties in with the material on biodata later on.
Parts of the book have been censored – every entry relating to the Enemy has been deleted, although the links to them remain. Other parts, parts giving crucial bits of information, are interrupted by a ‘conceptual entity’ called The Shift who lives in the relation between the book’s words and the reader’s mind. And then there are entries like this:
“YOU” DIVERSIONS [House Military: Culture] Of increasing interest and concern to the Houses is the concept of interactive propaganda: the interweaving of propaganda messages into the receptors of a target audience’s brain, or even directly into the audience’s local culture. This is a typical tactic of the conceptual entities, but since the enemy gained some understanding of the same technologies the “trick” has become more widespread and more aggressive. YOU, YES YOU – REALLY – YOU. YOU BOUGHT THIS, THEN? THEY’RE TRYING TO TELL YOU THAT THIS CAN BE HISTORY. THIS POLITE FICTION YOU’RE READING INSISTS THAT THE WAR WILL BE SOON BE OVER, THAT IT HAS A SPECIFIC “FIRST FIFTY YEARS”. WELL, IT HASN’T. IT ISN’T OVER. IT’S NEVER OVER. ONE IN EVERY THOUSAND PIECES OF INFORMATION IN THIS TEXT HAS BEEN RE-ENGINEERED. THE MATERIAL BEYOND THIS POINT IS PROGRAMMING HYPERLANGUAGE ONLY YOUR LOCAL IDENTITY IS ENDING. PAY NO ATTENTION. YOU WANTED TO KNOW WHO’D FIGHT FOR THE REBEL HOUSES? WHO’D BEAR ARMS AGAINST THE ENGINEERS OF HISTORY? YOU WOULD, would be a typical opening gambit in such cases.
After its appearance, the recipients of such messages would be told to await activation instructions. Often the level of paranoia induced by this would be sufficient to disrupt normal activities, the same exploitation of House anxiety also reflected in the principles of xenoprediction and mentioned in the “Probability” Doctrine. In some cases the propaganda thrust would be augmented by a secondary double-bluff, suggesting that the text did in fact originate from legitimate sources, which would then be undercut. THE PREVIOUS SENTENCES WERE A LIE, AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS would be a typically smug signing-off for such a message. It would then be followed by some vague, largely meaningless command such as WAIT, ACTIVATION LOCK ACCOMPLISHED.
The fact that almost any action could be construed as having obeyed the allegedly treasonous command is almost always sufficient to ensure that the messages aren’t even reported to the higher ranks.
Much of the book works on multiple levels, sometimes obviously like this, sometimes more subtly. There’s a description of a plot of a bad late-90s blockbuster film, for example, which reads like (and is) a parody of both Mulan and The Phantom Menace. It’s also a good description of the plot of some of Miles’ later Faction Paradox audio dramas, and itself gives another conflicting clue as to what is ‘really’ going on.
This is a book that’s full of ideas. Almost all of its several hundred entries would make the basis of fine short stories in themselves (and several of them made the background for Philip Purser-Hallard’s marvellous novel Of The City Of The Saved). There are digs at Richard Dawkins’ lack of imagination, expansions on the ideas of Teillhard de Chardin, parodies of Ally McBeal and reality TV, conspiracy theories, a subplot inspired by Godel, Escher, Bach and much more.
Possibly the closest comparison to this book is Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, but where that comic series takes ITC adventure serials, with their relatively limited scope, as its point of departure, The Book Of The War builds an entire mythology – or multiple mythologies – out of asides from Robert Holmes scripts.[FOOTNOTE - The Book Of The War is a much, much more mature work, too, far less concerned with a rather sixth-form idea of cool.] And this is definitely the Robert Holmes vision of Doctor Who, rather than any other, but fleshed out, and with the world foregrounded, rather than the character of the Doctor.
But most importantly, it’s a book that you have to approach as a critical reader. It forces its own unreliability to the foreground, and resists all attempts to fit its narrative into a simple binary, goodies vs baddies, format.
Or, at least, that’s what I think…
New Faction Paradox!
It’s really starting to look like this Christmas is some kind of great dream for me. Not only have the Beach Boys reformed, and I’ve seen a great Paul McCartney gig, but the disability benefits we’ve been fighting for for my wife for two years have finally come through (and been backdated). And now this announcement from Obverse Books on the JadePagoda Doctor Who Books mailing list:
Following not terribly protracted negotiations with Lawrence Miles, Obverse will be taking over the Faction Paradox prose license in its entirety from 2012, as a result of which we’ll be publishing this lot next year…
*Novels*
Against Nature – Lawrence Burton
“*Goralschai, a first wave veteran of the House Military, returns from the front bearing a death wish the size of creation. The spiral politic, he decides, cannot continue, and on Earth, in the Mexico of 1506, he finds a means to his twisted end; and so, egged on by the Celestis (who find this sort of thing amusing), he lays plans to turn one small corner of history into a weapon*.”The Brakespeare Voyage – Simon Bucher-Jones and Jon Dennis
“*The Maw, a wound in the fabric of the universe, forms. House Lineacrux claims to have constructed it, but this may be a lie. To exploit it House Lineacrux creates two ships with the intention of harvesting Leviathan biodata from outside the totality of the Spiral politic. The first the San Grael is a scout the second, the Brakespeare…*”*Novellas*
The Moontree Women – Kelly Hale
“*Some people have timelines in their palms instead of lifelines..*.”Opus Majus – Jim Mortimore
*”In 1267 the Fransiscan monk Roger Bacon made such a fuss about the
innacuracies of the calendar that Pope Clement IV ordered he be sent on a quest to find the missing time. This ridiculous but hardly refusable mission is something of a problem for Bacon – but an even greater problem for Faction Paradox.*”*Short Stories*
Faction Paradox 2: The As Yet Untitled Collection – editor, Jay Eales…
Available either as hardbacks individually or a subscription or something
else entirely…
And that’s on top of the previously-announced City Of The Saved short-story collection. I will, of course, be buying every one of these. Simon Bucher-Jones and Lawrence Burton are both friends of mine, but they’re also both extremely good writers, and the rest are all good too. This is very, very exciting. Obverse are an excellent publishing house anyway, putting out good-quality hardbacks and DRM-free epubs of their books.
(Proper update later – spent the last couple of days travelling, and am now staying with my in-laws).
Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts
The Faction Paradox series of books has been one of the most consistently good and interesting series I’ve ever read – certainly the best multi-author series, but it’s had a relatively troubled history. Starting out with a series of novels published by Mad Norwegian (a small press in Iowa, devoted mostly to ‘cult TV’, but with a surprisingly high hit-rate of decent books), when Mad Norwegian stopped publishing new entries in the series, a small SF publisher in New Zealand, Random Static, took over.
However, Random Static have only published one novel in the series, the excellent Newtons Sleep. and their FAQ says “When’s the next book coming out? We can’t say yet, but expect an announcement early in 2009.”, so we’ve been waiting a while for anything new.
Luckily, another small press, Obverse Books, which specialises in short stories rather than novels, has stepped up, and the result is this, my favourite book so far this year.
For those who are unfamiliar with Faction Paradox, the series is originally the creation of Lawrence Miles (who, with Stuart Douglas, co-edits this volume) , although it’s had much input from other writers. The books don’t share a setting, characters or background, but all take place in the same shared universe, which provides a certain consistency of tone.
This universe is dominated by the Great Houses, a race of near-gods who can travel through space and time in their Timeships, but who prefer to simply exist on their Homeworld. In a very real sense, they *are* the universe – they embody its physical laws and history, and the universe mostly exists just because they have chosen to observe it in this form.
However recently the Great Houses have gone to war… to War, in fact, against an Enemy as powerful as them. Nothing is known about the Enemy, except what can be found by reading between the lines, except that they are the Enemy, and that for them to win might well mean not only the Great Houses ceasing to exist, but it might completely rewrite the whole universe – not even just its history, but its fundamental logic. The War covers all of space, all of time, and quite possibly those regions beyond either.
The War is in a kind of stalemate, but it has led to the involvement of several minor powers, including the Celestis (a race of malevolent conceptual entities), the various posthuman races, and Faction Paradox, a time-travelling voodoo cult who delight in playing both sides off against each other.
Faction Paradox: A Romance In Twelve Parts is a collection of twelve stories set in this universe. While the twelve stories are very different, they share a few themes. Primarily, they’re about story and its power – fans of Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman might well enjoy this book (despite its co-editor’s well-known antipathy towards Gaiman’s work) – but here story is seen as a far darker, more malevolent force than their comparatively safe work.
Many of the stories also seem Lovecraftian – not by using words like Cthulhu or shoggoth and hoping people get the reference and feel geeky, but by evoking the same feeling he did at his best, of existing in a world fought over by blind, impassive forces that can crush you without even noticing. In fact, some of the stories remind me even more of Lord Dunsany, the great 19th century fantasist who inspired Lovecraft, than of Lovecraft himself. Certainly most of the writers here have a prose style far removed from Lovecraft’s ponderous overwriting.
The stories here are a mixed bag, of course, as in any multi-author collection, and many of the best stories have only a tangential relationship to the Faction Paradox back story – several of them could have been published with only minor changes in a non-FP collection – but they actually feel, to me, more evocative of the Faction Paradox spirit than the ones that concentrate more directly on the Faction and its doings.
Storyteller by Matt Kimpton is one of those. A pseudo-Viking saga about what happens when a storyteller goes looking for stories to be part of, this is one of those “I wish I’d thought of that” stories that feels like an old folk tale. Gramps by Jonathan Dennis can similarly be read with no previous Faction knowledge, though this creepy little short-short about a cat called Gramps with a missing leg is *definitely* a Faction Paradox story.
I won’t deal with every story in the book, but what I will say is that those I enjoyed less are just those I enjoyed less, rather than bad stories – the quality level is remarkably consistent. In fact, the stories I enjoyed least tend to be the ones that were the kind of thing I was expecting when I bought the book – the good ones were just *better* than that.
That said, I don’t have as much to say about every story, so I’ll just look at a handful to give a flavour of the book. Mightier Than The Sword by Jay Eales, about the prison where they put the writers and a very familiar-seeming comic artist, Now Or Thereabouts by Blair Bidmead, which starts as a satire of The Apprentice before turning somewhat stranger, and Print The Legend by Daniel O’Mahony, which manages to have Charles Dickens and John Ga(u)lt team up with a shoggoth without, astonishingly, turning into AWESOME!, are all standouts.
But best by far is the closer, A Hundred Words From A Civil War, the long-awaited sequel to Of The City Of The Saved by Philip Purser-Hallard.
A Hundred Words… is a ‘drabbleplex’ – a hundred separate one-hundred-word stories that work together to tell a much bigger story. In Of The City… Purser-Hallard established an incredible setting, a city between this universe and the next where all the dead humans live forever. Here death has come to that city, and so has civil war – though not The War; this only involves the death of four trillion people, and is nothing like as all-pervasive, though it’s clearly a small part of the overall War.
A couple of examples (I hope PPH doesn’t mind me sharing these bits – if he does I will of course take them down):
Remakes make lousy soldiers.
I tell you, you build a person based round a character from some media fiction, they’re gonna have some pretty odd ideas about reality.
They’re terrible strategists. They make big, symbolic gestures, then act surprised when that doesn’t win the war outright. They abandon vital operations just to rescue one person. Usually a kid.
Yeah, sometimes it’s a dog.
They sacrifice themselves heroically over and over, knowing someone’s gonna Remake them every goddam time.
Did you know the rebels run an entire POW camp just for John Rambos? There’s something like 500 of him there now.
When the most sophisticated of the posthuman civilisations are co-opted into the Civil War, it becomes a rarefied affair. Five Districts are carrying out hostilities entirely through the medium of music, exchanging shifting tonalities and rhythms which delightfully reprogram the senses with revised systems of aesthetics.
Representatives of two more rival cultures are vying in Flautencil’s Plaza, their societies’ respective destinies invested in a single combat which appears to the ordinary human spectator (of whom there are thousands assembled) to consist of sniffing orchids and exchanging significant glances.
The apparent flirtation is in its seventh month, and approaching no resolution.
Purser-Hallard’s story also contains short stories featuring many characters from other stories in the book, giving many of the stories a final extra twist. But even without that, this pushes so many of my buttons it might as well be called “ten thousand words to excite Andrew Hickey” – a piece of eschatological science fiction which references the ideas of Nick Bostrom and has Philip K Dick talking about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, along with the final deaths of all the dying-and-resurrected gods? That’s my kind of thing, as regular readers will no doubt realise.
And the ending of Purser-Hallard’s story, and of the book, is absolutely chilling and puts the whole book in another light. I won’t spoil it for you, but… just read it, OK?
Faction Paradox, A Romance In Twelve Parts, is available in hardback for £11.99 from Obverse Books.
Gallifrey Series IV
I come to Big Finish’s new Gallifrey series from a slightly different angle from most of its listeners. I listened to the first three series several years ago, and was unimpressed – I remember the first series as being moderately entertaining fluff, while the second and third series got so far up their own arsehole they actually succeeded at navel-gazing from the inside, (This may be an unfair judgement. I remember them as being the very definition of fanwank, but it may well be that the attempt to do a fifteen-part epic story was just too ambitious for my own attention span).
But series three of Gallifrey had ended on a cliffhanger – the start of The Time War, with ‘some metal gentlemen’ having infected all of Gallifrey with a virus. And if there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s the Time War. Especially since reading Richard & Alex’s wonderful Fractal History Of The Time War, I’ve been treating the Time War in my head like a gigantic multidimensional puzzle.
The interesting thing about the Time War is that the further one gets from ‘canon’, the more interesting the stories become. The Faction Paradox books are among the best books I’ve ever read, as is Dead Romance (which is slightly more ‘canon’ than the books). The Faction Paradox audios (with officially licensed Doctor Who baddies) and the Eighth Doctor books are good – sometimes very good – but rarely great. And the actual 2005-2009 TV series that established a version of the war as ‘canon’ is, to my mind, pretty much uniformly awful. The Time War/The War/The War In Heaven is as much as anything a war between alternative versions of history, and a history written by the winners and imposed from above is usually far less interesting than the multiple perspectives of the oppressed – would you rather read Homage To Catalonia or a piece of Falangist propaganda?
That’s not to compare Russel Davies to Generalissimo Franco – though I can imagine certain of the more rabid message board denizens emulating the example of the Tilbury dockers – Davies has actually been remarkably good on the issue of ‘canon’, loudly and publicly refusing to use his position of authority (in the minds of the kind of fans who like authorities) to adjudicate on what does and doesn’t ‘count’. For all the faults I find with him, Davies’ view is an inclusive one.
Rather, it’s to argue that those who are looking for certainty and ‘canon’ are limiting themselves unnecessarily (an argument I have made before, of course, in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!). The Daleks as one possible Enemy in the Time War is a decent, though rather obvious, seed for other stories. The Daleks as *the* Enemy, on the other hand, closes off the other possibilities (an incursion of Time Lords from another ‘bottle universe’, the Time Lords themselves in the future/past, a new idea that radically disrupts ossified ways of thinking, the writers of the books themselves, a non-existent threat created purely to give the illusion of conflict, humanity, the vampires/Mal’akh wanting their universe back, the new TV series itself… ).
It might be fun, in fact, to do a few posts here looking at different options as to who or what The Enemy is. I particularly like the war between the Time Lords and The Enemy as the war between the ‘classic’ (small-c conservative, big-L Liberal) and Welsh (New Labour – modern, glossy, “we can brook no criticism, because however bad it is, it’s better than the horrible wilderness years we had before, do you want Thatcher back/the show off the air again?”) series…
But anyway, if we pop out of this digression from a digression from a digression, the Gallifrey audios – like the Big Finish audios generally – are in an odd place when it comes to ‘canon’ for those who care about such things. They’re officially licensed, but have to be approved by the makers of the current show. But at the same time, they can’t make reference to anything in that show. So even though Gary Russell, who is in charge of the Gallifrey series, is also a script editor on the Welsh series, and he has clearly stated (including on the special features for these stories) that he intends the War that happened off-stage between series three and four to be the Time War featured in the TV show, this can’t be stated directly in the stories themselves. This leads to an interesting kind of forced ambiguity being imposed *against* authorial intent.
And whether intentionally or not, this has produced a story where the in-universe and out-of-universe epistemic statuses are mirrored. We have a multiple-universe story (always a very good thing), but one where all the alternate universes travelled to are just that – alternate universes. They exist not as the parallel worlds in, say, Lance Parkin’s Faction Paradox novel Warlords Of Utopia, do – as worlds whose divergences produce results both good (in Parkin’s case, a peace that has lasted millennia, and a flowering of culture and technology) and bad (dictatorship, paedophilia as social norm, slavery). Rather, they exist as wrong turns that could have been taken, lessons that this (or in this case, the main Doctor Who universe) is the best of all possible worlds, with each of these universes being defined as wrong, inferior timelines, and each one diverging in precisely one way, which leads to disaster.
So along with the ‘real’ Romana, Leela and K9, plus the characters Narvin and Braxiatel from earlier stories, we get alternative versions of Romana (both her first and second regenerations), Leela (an articulate, educated fascist torturer, whose distinctly different tones show once and for all that Leela’s rather stilted way of talking is a deliberate acting decision by Louise Jameson, rather than a poor performance), two Sixth Doctors, and more, all in some ways ‘worse’ than the ones we know.
(Sadly there is no alternate K9. John Leeson was the star of the earlier Gallifrey series, with his bitching between the two K9s. Here, there is only one, and he doesn’t get to shine the same way except during his brief promotion to Castellan).
Of the four stories here – which can only be bought as a bundle, though for a very reasonable £30 (£35 if you want the CDs rather than just downloads), by far the best is CD3 – Gallifrey: Annihilation. Oddly, given that Russell was a co-writer, and he’s known for being more obsessed with continuity and fan-wank than most, there are no alternative Doctors or Romanas or whoever (though Lord Prydon *may* be intended to be an alternate Master, given that he’s played by Geoffrey Beevers), and surprisingly/thankfully Katy Manning isn’t playing Jo Grant or Iris Wildthyme, but a female Borussa.
For those of us who like playing games with that sort of thing, in fact, this story could fit quite neatly in with Faction Paradox, as it’s set on a Gallifrey where Rassilon was turned into a vampire by the Great Vampire, and there’s a civil war between the Vampire Gallifreyans and the ‘True Lords’, who never developed time travel but *could* regenerate. This could easily be the timeline from which the Faction’s masks come, and it will be in my ‘personal canon’ from now on. (Also in my ‘personal canon’, these are four of the Nine Homeworlds. No-one said the Nine Homeworlds had to be in *this* timeline – or if they did I don’t remember, which is the same thing).
It’s quite a nice piece of space-opera-Gothic, Beevers makes an appropriately sepulchral vampire, and it’s an entertaining way to spend an hour, though hardly ground-breaking stuff.
The worst, unfortunately, is Justin Richards’ Gallifrey: Disassembled. I say unfortunately, partly because this has the best performances of the bunch (from Louise Jameson as two Leelas, and a great turn by Colin Baker as Lord Burner), and the first half-hour or so is genuinely good, but it soon degenerates into a load of nonsense, with illogical, made-up-on-the-fly rules about what does and doesn’t count as a paradox, hints at Braxiatel being the Doctor’s brother, explanations as to why the Doctor originally left Gallifrey…
When I say that the big turning point in this universe is that Zagreus took the place of The Other in its history, I think that will tell everyone all they need to know (if you don’t know what those words mean, be thankful…)
The other two stories, Gallifrey: Reborn and Gallifrey: Forever, bookend the series quite nicely, providing us with, respectively, the set-up for this four-story series, and a new status quo at the end with Romana and Leela trapped on a Gallifrey which hadn’t yet invented time travel but where Romana’s now president.
Overall, quality-wise this sits somewhere in the middle of Big Finish’s range. Nowhere near a genuine masterpiece like Peri And The Piscon Paradox or some of their other recent triumphs, this still feels like it was created because of someone’s desire to tell the story, and so it’s still above some of the landfill “let’s have the Doctor team up with two companions from different eras, and have them fight the Celestial Toymaker, who’s teamed up with the Zarbi” stuff they do when inspiration fails completely.
You already know if this is the kind of thing you like or not (in fact you probably either ordered it in advance or are never going to hear it), but for the kind of thing it is, it’s well done. And thankfully, either through diktat from above or through taste on the part of Gary Russell, it leaves as many questions about the Time War unanswered at the end as at the beginning.
Eschatology & Escapology 4: Faction Paradox
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
“But there was war, even there. There was a war in Heaven. And the wrong side won. The Dark Side won.”
Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle 1, by Grant Morrison and Pasqual Ferry
In the mid-90s Doctor Who was in the worst state imaginable. The TV Movie starring Paul McGann had been a flop, and not only was there no prospect of a series, there was not even the prospect of anyone else having a go because of the complicated rights issues it created. On top of that, the New Adventures series of books, which had been an ‘official’ continuation of the show’s story (at least in the eyes of the writers) and projected an ‘adult’ image (though in retrospect many of them were more adolescent) lost their license to use Doctor Who characters, and instead there was a series from BBC Books, which started with the frankly awful The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks (which was the dullest thing ever to have the ‘Doctor Who’ name on it until the new series came along) and didn’t look like it was going to get much better from there.
And then Lawrence Miles wrote Alien Bodies, which for the small number of people who were reading or writing the Who books at the time (I wasn’t one, and I’ve had a lot of catching up to do – they were doing a book a fortnight for the decade-and-a-half the show was off the air) was revelatory.
The basic premise was a good one, which is always a good start – various interested parties (the Time Lords, the Celestial Intervention Agency, the Krotons and others) were bidding for a weapon, which turns out to be the body of the Doctor, from his subjective future – he’s had so many adventures by that point that the information encoded in his body is valuable.
But the book also reveals quite a bit about the future of the Time Lords. In the future, the Time Lords are fighting a war, and losing. We don’t know who the enemy are, and the Doctor doesn’t want to know, for fear of upsetting the Web Of Time. But the Time Lords are, to put it bluntly, shit-scared. So scared that the Celestial Intervention Agency (who are pretty much what their initials would suggest – one of Robert Holmes’ black jokes turned into a major part of fan-lore) have removed themselves from history altogether, turning themselves into purely conceptual entities. Most of the major powers in the universe were lining up on one side or the other, but there was also a third force involved.
Faction Paradox were a breakaway group, started by a rebel Time Lord called Grandfather Paradox, who was so called because (or so the myth goes) he actually did kill his own grandfather, wiping himself out of existence and becoming pure concept. They are a ‘time travelling voodoo cult’ who worship paradox, and who treat timelines and other such concepts as being loas or egregores in Chaos Magick type workings. They wear bone masks made from the skulls of Time Lord/vampire half-breeds from an impossible time-line, and aspire to be a random factor in the war between the Time Lords and The Enemy. (If you’re now thinking of The Invisibles, you’re not far off – Richard Flowers, after reading the first volume of The Invisibles on my recommendation, said “it’s Faction Paradox, if it had used ITC adventure serials rather than BBC Doctor Who as a jumping-off point”).
The identity of The Enemy is never revealed, though Miles’ novel Dead Romance (one of the last entries in the now-Doctorless New Adventures series, which continued with a focus on supporting characters, this was later reprinted as a Faction Paradox ‘prequel’ by Mad Norwegian Press ) gives a very good idea of who he thought it was at the time. But the War caught the imagination of the writers of the series, and quickly became a major throughline for the books.
This was both a good and a bad thing – good in that it inspired some of the better books from the series, but bad in that the one thing a relatively unpopular series really didn’t need was a complicated, ambiguous ‘story arc’ running through many books. The major stories in this ‘arc’ are Miles’ two-volume Interference (where the Doctor’s own past is rewritten, to the extent that his third regeneration now happens in the ‘wrong’ place and time – probably the most controversial Who book, I like it myself, but know people who despise it), The Taking Of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham (a rather nice story which combines Lovecraft pastiche, hard SF and the return of an old villain) and The Shadows Of Avalon by Paul Cornell (a sorta-kinda Midsummer Night’s Dream-cum-Arthurian-legend riff with Silurians), before it was suddenly curtailed by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole’s The Ancestor Cell.
The Ancestor Cell has a … mixed reputation. Among other things it revealed that Grandfather Paradox was the Doctor in the future and that the Enemy are (as Miles put it) ‘three pages of technobabble’, before also destroying Gallifrey. This was intended to clear up the continuity of the series and create a fresh start, but in fact the books became more impenetrable than ever (though some post-Ancestor Cell books build on it very successfully, most notably Lance Parkin’s The Gallifrey Chronicles).
As pretty much all Miles’ original contributions to the book series were excised by The Ancestor Cell, Miles took his ball away with him, and started a new series of books, audio plays and (two issues of) comics based on Faction Paradox, licensing a few other characters who’d appeared in the New Adventures and Eighth Doctor Adventures, and completely ignoring the revelations of The Ancestor Cell. In this new series, the ‘Great Houses’ (the Time Lords) were still fighting a nameless Enemy (which in this context seems to be more a mode of perception than a physical enemy).
(FOOTNOTE: The whole question of who fought who in the War was made even more complex with the return of the Doctor Who TV series, which portrayed a Time War with some strong similarities to the one in the books (The End Of Time, the last Russel T Davies episode of Doctor Who, has been described by those who’ve seen it as being like an adaptation of Dead Romance by someone who hadn’t understood it properly), but where the Enemy were specifically named as the Daleks. There was ALSO the start of a War in Big Finish’s Gallifrey series (which looks like it will be told in full in their forthcoming Season Four). Richard Flowers and Alex Wilcock have made an extraordinary attempt to disentangle all of this and interpret it as rival Hypertime threads in an essay in my ‘zine PEP – free PDF and expensive paper copy. That essay is essential reading for anyone who is reading this.)
I’m only going to look at the first four books of the series (which is still ongoing, between different publishers, at the moment – a new short story anthology is due to be published by Obverse Books in February 2011), partly for reasons of space and partly because I’m more familiar with those books, but so far the Faction Paradox series has been the only multi-author book series I’ve ever read where every single book can be recommended without qualification. Given its origins as a spin-off of a spin-off, this is nothing short of a miracle.
In part this is because the authors clearly have something of a shared aesthetic. They all belong to what Lance Parkin (whose own Faction Paradox novel is one of the best) refers to as The Gray Tradition:
Here’s a by no means exhaustive list of the sort of authors I’m thinking of: Douglas Adams, Ballard, Iain Banks, Roberto Bolano, Borges, Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, Phillip K Dick, Umberto Eco, Alisdair Gray, David Lindsay, CS Lewis, HP Lovecraft, David Mitchell, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Philip Pullman, David Foster Wallace.
They also have more general shared cultural roots – not only in Doctor Who, the mythos of which permeates everything, but at a couple of steps’ remove, like a pinch of garlic added to enhance the flavour rather than anything overt, but in things like I, Claudius (both the TV series – which Miles regards, rightly, as the best TV programme ever made – and Graves’ original novels, which provide an important source for at least two of the books), Monty Python and more. This gives the books a feeling of unity that makes them feel like the work of a single author trying on different styles more than several different authors.
(In this respect I’m talking only about the books, which are a very different beast from the audio adventures. The audios tell a single, complex story with a large cast of characters and regular cameos from Doctor Who villains who are either in the public domain or whose rights can be bought cheaply. They are aimed four-square at what, for want of a better term, we can call the ‘geek’ market, and while interesting aren’t really on the same level as the books).
The Book Of The War, the first book in the independent Faction Paradox series, is one of the two or three most astonishing novels I’ve ever read, if it even counts as a novel. A collaborative work by ten authors, edited by Miles (with the largest contributions apparently being by Miles and Bucher-Jones, but also featuring work by Clapham, Philip Purser-Hallard, Daniel O’Mahony, Ian McIntire, Mags L. Halliday, Helen Fayle, Kelly Hale and Jonathan Dennis), it’s somewhere in-between a non-linear hypertext-like novel, an encyclopedia of a non-existent world, a collection of short stories and a role-playing game sourcebook.
The non-linear structure (though it can be read as a linear story by following the links between the stories in a particular way) is, of course, appropriate for a story of a war that takes place throughout time and rewrites history, but it’s far from the only – or even the most – notable thing about this extraordinary book. Every one of the several hundred entries contains at least one new or interesting idea, ranging from the City Of The Saved (the Omega Point by way of Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld) to the conceptual entity The Shift who enters and rewrites the text as you’re reading it, to the connection between Bach’s Musical Offering and the early computer experiments of Charles Babbage, to the hilarious Mulan/Phantom Menace mash-up, to the history of James Whale’s last, forever-unfinished film, to the Ally McBeal parody, to Lego bricks you can use to build your own black holes, to the Piltdown Mob to… well, to entries with titles like “Women (Dressing Up As)” or “Killerbots (Autonomic)”.
The story it tells is a simple one – there is one major force in the universe, the Great Houses, who literally created history. With the event known as ‘The Anchoring Of The Thread’ they created the whole history of the universe from beginning to end, and made it the kind of universe where creatures like themselves could exist, to the extent that they are closer to gods or living concepts than to biological entities. They literally embody history, and it’s not just physically but conceptually impossible for them to be threatened… until they are. By an enemy which they can’t even comprehend, which seems to be attempting to rewrite history into something other. Rather than telling the story of the War (though a chunk of it does), the book concentrates on the effects the War has on other species, most notably a Lesser Species known as Humanity.
Some of the ideas in here come from earlier BBC Books and New Adventures by Miles or his friends, while others would later be expanded into novels or audios in the series, but this is just like getting an injection of pure Concept straight into your brain. An extraordinary, extraordinary achievement.
This Town Will Never Let Us Go, by Lawrence Miles, the first Faction Paradox novel proper, is equally extraordinary and thought-provoking, but in different ways. Described as ‘a study in ritual, politics, pop culture, time-travel and urban horror’, this is equal parts Vonnegut, Orwell, Philip K Dick and Pynchon, a story of what happens to four people in a literally anonymous town. Told over one night from midnight to 6AM, it splits its three stories up into ‘minutes’ rather than chapters, offering a minute-by-minute breakdown of the night in titles like “5.21 Bastard Racoon Has Arrived”, “1.58 On Red Uranium” and “0.20 Traces Of Nuts”.
It tells of a town that is being devastated by a war the inhabitants can’t understand. All they know is that missiles drop from somewhere and cause explosions, and that somehow nobody is ever hurt by the explosions (some people have a theory that the explosions rewrite time so that anyone who was there is removed from history, but this is obviously absurd). They don’t know who’s fighting the war, or why, just that the war exists.
Our protagonists are Inangela and Horror, two Goths performing an improvised ritual with the intent of making the world a little more interesting, Valentine, an ambulance attendant who has a girl in a bone mask dying in his ambulance but has something even more important to do, and Tiffany Korta, a manufactured pop star who’s worried that her image is becoming sentient. Over these six hours, the story follows how all their lives change through such events as George Orwell’s appearance on the Muppet Show and the discovery of a buried Timeship.
A book that takes several readings to absorb properly, This Town… is aiming for something very, very different from the usual SF tie-in stuff you might expect. Closer to Joyce or Pynchon than to Terrance Dicks, had this been published as a standalone work rather than as part of a series it would be the kind of thing that would be in with a chance of winning prestigious literary awards, were literary awards open enough to truly interesting writing. An unalloyed masterpiece.
Of The City Of The Saved… by Philip Purser-Hallard can probably best be described as Post-Singularity Noir. The City Of The Saved exists on the boundary between this universe and the ‘next’ one, at the very end of time, and contains every single human being, from the first proto-hominid right through to posthuman alien hybrids and cyborgs, within its very expansive boundaries (it’s the size of a galaxy or so), all resurrected at the end of time. Based loosely around Frank Tipler’s Omega Point idea, here everyone is free to live out an immortal life in whatever culture they want, from reconstructed Imperial Rome to crime-ridden slums, with no fear of physical harm ever coming to them.
But there are questions. Why are only humans and part-humans there? What about aliens and robots? Who created the City and what for? Are the agents of the Wartime Powers infiltrating the City, and if so how?
And then suddenly, somehow, someone is murdered in the City, something that should never have been possible. And Laura Tobin (a character Miles created for the Eighth Doctor books) is asked by a member of Faction Paradox to investigate. Along the way she uncovers the truth behind the City, the horrible reality of the next universe and the secret identity of the Emperor Claudius, and briefly meets Philip K Dick, while Julian Mammoth-Tooth, a Neanderthal, searches for his lost love.
Finding the perfect balance between the rush of ideas in The Book Of The War and new-reader accessibility, Of The City Of The Saved… manages to be a genuinely thought-provoking book (Purser-Hallard’s doctoral thesis was on the relationship between creator and creature in SF, while he’s written extensively on SF and Christianity) while also being entertaining fun. The only criticism I can make is that it’s not actually possible to solve the mystery given only what we’re told in the story, but that’s a pretty minor criticism for a great book.
And finally (as far as this article goes, though there have been three more novels since) we come to Lance Parkin’s Warlords Of Utopia. The least interesting of these books, this is ‘merely’ an extremely good high-concept SF novel, about a war between all the universes in the multiverse where Rome never fell and all those where the Nazis won World War II. That it manages to live up to, and even surpass, the high concept makes it worth reading.
Written as an extremely good pastiche of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius The God (explained in-story – “I commissioned a prose piece ostensibly the autobiography of the first Emperor Claudius from one of my fellow soldiers, Sepulcrius, but ended up having to amend a great deal of it myself. If you are minded that my writing style resembles his famous book, then that is the reason”), Parkin occasionally goes, Douglas Adams-like, for the cheap joke (and, rather more annoyingly, throws in a few Monty Python references. Much as I love Python, the idea that the mere mention of a line from Python is enough to make something interesting and/or funny is one of the most damaging to have ever happened), but he is so good at his world-building and so consistent in his Gravesian style that I can more than forgive this.
Most impressively, he paints a realistic portrait of a Roman Empire that includes all its worst features – slavery, dictatorship, paedophilia – but still manages to be clearly preferable to the Nazi worlds, and has his narrator defend all these while still being a relatable protagonist. (Of course, a truly brave book would have reversed things, and had the Nazis be the ‘goodies’ in comparison to the Roman Empire, but that would be in horribly bad taste for the forseeable future). Few writers at the moment can avoid the temptation to assume that late-20th/early-21st century small-l-liberal Western values have ‘really’ been universal in all times and cultures, and that all decent people ‘really’ agreed with them. Parkin manages it.
Warlords Of Utopia is the least interesting of these four books, but not due to any faults in itself – it’s a very, very good SF adventure novel, well-written and imaginative. It’s just that the other three can stand up to pretty much any book I’ve ever read, whereas Warlords can ‘only’ stand up against 99.9% of SF novels.
Linkblogging For 09/06/10
And after that heaviness, a few links:
I’m through to the FINAL!!! in the Pop World Cup, but unfortunately from the comments it looks like I’m getting thrashed by Nigeria. Please go there and vote for Germany.
Obverse Books, who publish the Iris Wildthyme Doctor Who spinoff books, have announced they will be working with Lawrence Miles on a new series of Faction Paradox short story collections, the first coming out next year. News will presumably be up soon on their news page.
Jennie wants people’s views on the Fantastic Film Weekend in Bradford, which I’ll probably blog about tomorrow.
Andrew Rilstone wonders whether, as a Doctor Who fan, he’s allowed to like Doctor Who.
And if you want the world’s single greatest timesink of all time, go and play The Wikipedia Game…
Andrew’s Book Club 4: Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles
The more I read of Miles the more convinced I become that he is to science fiction novels what Grant Morrison is to comics.
Miles is clearly influenced by Morrison, in much the same way the Morrison himself is influenced by Alan Moore – I recently read a message board thread in which a fan had written to Miles asking if he’d ever read Doom Patrol, to which the reply was just ‘how do you think I learned to write like that?’ – but he has his own style, one far more suited to novels. (Miles is also as abrasive and – quite often – irritating in his public persona as Morrison was twenty years ago, when for a long time I wouldn’t read his comics because his interviews put me off. I was eleven at the time, so can probably be forgiven)
The problem is, much as Morrison does most of his work using the mythology he grew up with – superheroes – as the basis for his stories, Miles uses Doctor Who, which limits his readership enormously.
The TV spin-off novel is not somewhere where one naturally looks for literary merit, and if TV spin-off novels are often poor, then spin-offs of those spin-offs could be expected to be truly horrible, full of terrible writing and fannish in-jokes, aimed at only the most insanely obsessive completist.
So when people hear that Dead Romance is a book originally written for the New Adventures, a series that started off as Doctor Who spin-off novels before continuing on based on a supporting character when they lost the Doctor Who license; that it doesn’t even feature that supporting character but a new character who is possibly connected to her in an initially-unspecified way; and that this edition of the novel is a reprint as a semi-apocryphal part of the Faction Paradox series, a series of novels that span off from *another*, unconnected, line of Doctor Who books, one might forgive them for assuming it was illiterate dribble fit only for consumption by Ian Levine.
In fact this is one of the most interesting and intelligent SF novels I’ve read in a long time. If, as Millennium’s Daddy Richard once said to me, The Book Of The War is the BBC/Doctor Who version of The Invisibles’ ITC serials, Dead Romance is volume 4 of Zenith, seen through a filter of Doctor Who rather than old British adventure comics, and written by Kurt Vonnegut.
In fact, the Vonnegut comparison is very valid. There’s a similar fascination here with the actual physical page, the actual text itself, the same slightly distanced tone, the same ‘big picture’ view of human beings as being only (or possibly less than) their component parts, the same slightly non-linear, rambling structure. It came as no surprise to me to find an interview with Miles (and quite a fascinating one) speaking of Vonnegut as one of the few writers he admired – one of the few who was trying to actually *write*, rather than put films onto the page.
And you could read this without having ever heard of Doctor Who and come away without ever knowing it was connected to something else. It’s just a science fiction (or really science fantasy) novel. The few elements from the Who ‘mythos’ included are so radically reworked that someone who didn’t know where they came from would think the influence was Lovecraft or Philip K. Dick rather than Doctor Who.
Apparently Dead Romance is regarded as in some way an ‘experimental’ novel by fans of the Doctor Who novels. This says *far* more about the Doctor Who novels (which can roughly be split into four groups – those by hacks who’d worked on the TV show and needed a quick pay cheque, those by fans who wanted to answer all the continuity questions they’d been bothered by, those by fans who wanted to show that Doctor Who was really grown up adult entertainment by mentioning bare ladies and the spliffs and the young persons’ rock and roll music, and those by people who could actually write and wanted to do something interesting. Sometimes these categories overlapped.)
The ‘experimental’ nature of Dead Romance only extends as far as Miles doing things like having a slightly unreliable narrator, having the story be told in a discursive manner rather than a strictly linear one – in short, the things I would think of as being basic for anyone who wants to do actual *good writing* rather than just being interested in the plot and ideas. Certainly, the writing is no more ‘experimental’ than, say, anything in PEP!, and a lot less ‘experimental’ than Sean’s piece… it’s on the level of a rock band who know how to play a diminished seventh or minor sixth chord, rather than being Stockhausen. It’s sad that fans of Doctor Who – a programme that at its best was all about pushing boundaries and experimenting – could be so illiterate (there’s really no other word for it) that they’d see this as experimental (which is not to say that all, or even most, Doctor Who fans are that illiterate – this often topped polls of the best books in the New Adventures series – but enough are that it’s saddening).
And while this book is full of SF Big Ideas, it’s not really *about* them. Rather, it’s about the changing of the sixties to the seventies, the death of the spirit of optimism in popular culture, the Manson murders, growing older, the way Britain fictionalises and romanticises its past, both the Victorian and Swinging London eras. It’s about serial killers, and fantasy lives, and about the aching sense some of us have that the world we’re living in simply isn’t as interesting as the one we were promised. It’s about how fundamentally shallow much of the Sixties’ counterculture was. It’s about Bobby Fuller and Jack The Ripper and people who create their own pick-n-mix spirituality. It’s about identity.
In his introduction, Miles refers to this book as The Spy Who Loved Me of the New Adventures line (the book, not the film), and this is a very apt comparison. It’s an intriguing example of how you can turn pop-culture mythology into genuine art. It’s not the greatest novel of all time or anything, but it’s a *very good* novel, and that’s *FAR* more than anyone would have the right to expect of it, and it’s very sad that its existence is only known to a subgroup within a subgroup within Doctor Who fandom, rather than Miles’ work being as mainstream as, say, Iain Banks (with whose work this shares a number of characteristics. Miles is better).
As the original novel was rather short, the reprint is rounded out with a few other pieces. There’s Miles’ introduction (“The original Dead Romance had commas in places where commas should never be, and anyone who knows me will know that I’d rather have an editor give a story a happy ending than let him fiddle with the punctuation.”), a rather lovely short story called “Toy Story” which *is* set firmly enough in Doctor Who continuity that it won’t make much sense to non-fans, an essay on the way the universe of the Faction Paradox works (containing a number of ridiculously good ideas) and a beautiful short story called Grass, unconnected in any obvious way to any of the other material, but *well* worth reading.
At this point, having read three books in the range, I am now convinced that the Faction Paradox range of books is the best multi-author fictional universe I’ve ever read. I would suggest that anyone who enjoys my blog – or who enjoyed PEP! 1 – would almost certainly enjoy these books, and I plan to purchase the rest – and the audios – as fast as my credit card will allow. You don’t need to be a Doctor Who fan to enjoy them, any more than you need to have been a Charlton comics fan to enjoy Watchmen, and I think it’s a real shame that, partly because of their origin and partly because of the abrasive persona of the main writer, they’re not reaching a mass audience.
The Faction Paradox books can all be purchased from Mad Norwegian (who publish all but one of them). I recommend just buying the lot…
ABC (Andrew’s Book Club) 1 : Of The City Of The Saved…
Laura Tobin is a Private Investigator in the City, where the human race lives. All of it, from the first Australopithecus to the posthumans of ten million AD and beyond. A hundred undecillion people, resurrected at the end of time in new, immortal bodies incapable of being physically harmed. So she’s more than a little surprised to get her first murder case…
One thing I’ve decided to do this year is to write a blog entry reviewing every book I read (specifically every book in paper format that I read for pleasure and that I haven’t read before). Unfortunately, this is going to mean a certain amount of Doctor Who-heaviness at the beginning – Big Finish recently had an online clearance sale on books they’ve lost their license to publish, and so I bought four, which should be in the post now – but that’s not especially representative of my reading habits, which actually stretch at the moment mostly to pop-science, political comedy and 20th century history.
Of The City Of The Saved… by Philip Purser-Hallard is sort of a Doctor Who book, but not really. During the 1990s, after Doctor Who was taken off the TV, there were many novels written about the character. While the BBC owned things like the Doctor, the TARDIS, the Time Lords and so on, all the writers of the novels owned any characters or concepts they came up with.
So when the editor of the books decided he didn’t like some of Lawrence Miles’ ideas any more, Miles took his ball away with him and started his own fictional universe, notionally separate from the main Doctor Who line, with a thinly disguised Gallifrey, Time Lords, Master and so on, plus not-at-all disguised characters from his Doctor Who books (or those of others who allowed him to use their characters) like companion Chris Cwej and half-human half-TARDIS Compassion (although Miles wasn’t allowed to use the word TARDIS of course, so she was just half-’timeship’…)
But what he mostly took from the Doctor Who books was the concept he’d created of a War between the Time Lords and an unknown Enemy – a Time War where the whole of reality would regularly get rewritten. Yes, it does sound a little bit like some of the things in the Welsh Series, doesn’t it? (And if you think it does, you might want to read Richard Flowers’ article in PEP! when it finally, belatedly comes out…)
And he, and a group of other writers, fleshed out this universe in Faction Paradox: The Book Of The War, one of the best SF/Fantasy books I’ve read in years – somewhere between encyclopedia, short story collection and RPG sourcebook, it is denser with ideas than almost any SF book you’ll read – and good ones.
And one of the best was the City Of The Saved – a city in a point straight after the destruction of this universe, as big as a galaxy, or bigger, in which every human being (or cyborg, or human-alien hybrid – but *not* any fully non-human lifeforms) was resurrected on the same day, to live forever, without being told who had resurrected them, or how it had happened.
Of The City Of The Saved… is the second novel in the Faction Paradox series that came after The Book Of The War, and generally regarded as the best. And it is an extraordinarily good novel, teeming with ideas, from the Reproduction Tanks in which ‘clones’ of people who never lived to be grown, to the Manfolk with their lethal means of reproduction.
Those who like their SF to be full of ideas will definitely enjoy the book – fans of Warren Ellis’ better work, or Philip K Dick, will find much to their taste here. I was unsurprised to see in the notes at the end that the concept of the City owed much to the Omega Point idea of Frank Tipler, as put on a more rational footing by David Deutsch in his book The Fabric Of Reality (which I’ve spoken about here), as this is the kind of ultra-speculative SF/Fantasy that feeds off the most imaginative scientific ideas.
But unlike much of that kind of material, Purser-Hallard appears to have a good grounding in the humanities as well. A crucial plot-point is telegraphed for those who know their Roman history (and in fact the whole book exhibits a reasonable knowledge of Ancient Rome), and the book is actually well-written rather than just functionally written (a surprising amount of SF is written by people whose prose style is merely adequate even when their ideas sing). Purser-Hallard has obviously read (or at least flicked through) Ulysses and picked up some of Joyce’s ideas, and can also write convincingly in the voices of very different people from different societies.
The story itself is a little unsatisfying – set up as a murder mystery (if one were to try to assign a genre to this, the best one could do is to call it post-Singularity noir), it’s not a ‘fair play’ mystery – there’s no way one could guess in advance the true reasons behind the murder – but the fun is in the twists and turns it takes to get there. (Also, for those interested in the overall War plotline, some of the themes of the story make for an interesting suggestion as to who Purser-Hallard, at least, believes the Enemy to be).
The one really significant flaw, though, actually comes from the book’s strengths – the City is such a wonderful environment, and such a beguiling mystery, that the climax of the novel, in which all its secrets are revealed, can only be a let-down. (I’m personally going to take the view that we’ve only seen a possible origin of the City).
While it’s not quite up to Book Of The War standards, I’d still say that this was one of the best SF novels I’ve read from the last thirty years. And for those who, reading this, are uninterested because they aren’t Doctor Who fans, don’t be – the links between Doctor Who and this novel are so tenuous that the traces of Who in there are practically homeopathic. Everything you need to know is set out in the book itself, though it almost certainly would lose something without reading The Book Of The War first.
The Faction Paradox novels are published by Mad Norwegian, and after having read this and the Book Of The War, I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending them to anyone who reads my blog. I’ll certainly be picking up all the remaining novels as quickly as I can.
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