★★★☆☆ – “Hey, I had a good time tonight.”

A theme park ride of ideas.

Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is, in a sense, the Platonic idea of a Faction Paradox novel(la). When I say that, I don’t mean the Platonic ideal, mind – that being perfect, absolute, and eternal – but the Platonic idea: The most essential form; an embodiment that zeroes in on what “a Faction Paradox novel” is, free of extraneous features. And when I say “in a sense”, I do mean a specific sense: It manifests what I had heard Faction Paradox was like before I got into it. Quote Elizabeth Sandifer, in her essay on A Romance in Twelve Parts, Obverse Books’s first Faction Paradox publication:

[Faction Paradox] is a series and a mythology defined by setup and by the generation of ideas, as opposed to by their deep exploration and resolution.

Never has this been truer than in this book. Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is a guided tour of ideas; a safari of titillating notions; a theme park ride with concepts in place of animatronic characters. It never stops to explore these concepts in any depth, but they certainly get to strike their cool poses and put on their pyrotechnic displays as you ride past. Notably, the premise to which “rose-coloured crosshairs” refers –  a device placed on a planet in life’s infancy, which (over the course of the planet’s whole remaining multi-billion-year history!) brainwashes people into remembering a false past and “progress [thus] becomes impossible, as [nostalgia denies] any possibility of change” – smacks loudly of a message; of a point the author wants to make… but that point is never made, as the effects of the device never enter the story.

It’s difficult to be too disappointed by the lack of depth, however, because Rose-Coloured Crosshairs makes a good bid at compensating with quantity. I found myself lost and quite honestly bored for the first third of the book, which consists largely of meticulous, dry worldbuilding descriptions (as if out of a sourcebook for a tabletop role-playing game) and slightly too inscrutable exchanges between unfamiliar characters. Barring some hitches in the pacing, however – Bidmead likes frontloaded descriptions (though at least I always had a vivid image of the scene) – the rest of the book flew by: The Macy’s parade of ideas gets into the swing of it, and I’m sure I audibly let out an “ooh” and/or “ahh” on at least a few occasions.

Some of the concepts are a bit too fuzzily defined for my tastes (“vibes-based”, as they say, or sometimes “things just kind of happen”), but again, it’s not a great loss if a given idea doesn’t speak to you, since you’ll be on to the next but a few pages down the line. Unfortunately, the central plot of the book is characterized by this fuzziness as well; a general feeling of “what just happened and why?” In the end, I’m left feeling more as if I’ve read a single-author anthology than a novel(…la), but the inescapable fact of the matter is, I like an anthology. Do you?

Positives: Again proving to be one of the best Faction Paradox authors out there, Bidmead creates a masterpiece of intertwined storylines, with some really complex stuff that ties itself together pefectly within just 150 pages. The initial concept of the 'nostalgia bomb' was really cool, especially at the end when the Cousins are describing how unaware those affected cultures were of Faction Paradox's greater scheme. I loved seeing the fallout of the Cousins being essentially blasted through time, my absolute favourite section being the sort of parallel version of London. The characters were all well established and developed for the short time they got. Despite this book following an almost short story format with each of the side characters being introduced and left in roughly 40 pages they were all memorable, and each feeling relevant, which is really impressive for such a short book. It felt so satisfying to see everything link together at the end, with Rake saving Yousef and Prudence gaining a new body, and I liked the point they didn't mention the results of the experiment, as the main point of the story lay with the characters and what they went through.

Negatives: I don't really know if it's just a me problem but it took me far too long to realise what was going on. Up until Rake and Yousef appeared in the parallel London section I just hadn't made the connection that the Faction agents were dealing with the fallout of their experiment, so I spent the first half of the book really confused.

9/10