this actually made me mad that i can't rate something negative stars it just kept going and going

i wish i could rate it 0 stars. the premise is so interesting, if only the writing was. i could see this being good under another writer and director, but as-is the only thing that made it anything marginally close to worth it was the fact that the gun sfx made me cackle

the worst thing i have ever watched 9/10 i want some of what russell t davies is smoking

love the idea of aquatic themed aliens and a lot of the stuff with 8 on the jellyfish planet is really cute. unfortunately the episode is tanked when the main villain is introduced – she is fat and transfem and these two things are disrespected and made fun of constantly, including by the eighth doctor himself. really disgusting – not sure i can ever completely forgive briggs for this one.

matt fitton continually excels at giving us intriguing ideas and unique story structures that ultimately feel hollow asf. the framework is great but it's not in service of anything with substance. i'm. i'm really tired of his writing y'all.

also after 4 great episodes followed by 11 episodes of getting to do jack s**t, molly gets unceremoniously recasted and killed off... the squandered potential here is emblematic of dark eyes as a whole. it's not even that it leads to nothing, it's just that it doesn't lead to anything i can bring myself to care about. i know BF can do better than this – there's so many seeds of interesting things here!

here's hoping doom coalition etc delivers on the promise dark eyes as a whole gave then squandered: that of interesting storytelling.

story was pretty cute, was gonna give it 7, then i realized it was maybe a bit too close to a simplified version of the long game, but still enjoyable and the prose had some fun lines so i thought maybe i'll score it 6, then the ending came around and i settled on 5. what is it with 13 and killing people, going "oof that sucks", and moving on?

Even being the massive Faction Paradox fan that I am, I'd be remiss not to admit that it can be a bit much at times. The dense worldbuilding, the symbolism, the intricately-designed plotlines, the deep-cut references – it can be hard to keep up as a reader, much as I try my best for the sake of understanding and enjoying these books to their full potential. Especially when you get into books like Against Nature, mired in dense cultural and historical context and spread across multiple storylines that blur the lines between the real and the mythological... it can be quite the headache. A very worthwhile headache, mind you, but a headache nevertheless.

As it turns out, the author of Against Nature felt much the same way. Hence, Golden Age.

As the development of Against Nature dragged on through publication limbo and production hell of various flavors, author Lawrence Burton started to feel bogged down by the writing process. Looking to find something to offset the tedium, Burton decided to pen a book with a completely different modus operandi to that of the meticulously planned Against Nature, yet written parallel to it. Where Against Nature's plot was rigorous and overdesigned, Golden Age's was largely improvised, new elements being thrown in wherever Burton felt they were needed. Where Against Nature tied itself up in the lore of both Faction Paradox and Aztec mythology, needing a decent amount of context to fully appreciate, Golden Age served as a largely independent work. And where Against Nature took itself deeply seriously, Golden Age's main priority was just to have fun.

The resulting novel is – what else? – a book that wears its writing philosophy on its sleeve. Individuals from 15th-century Mexico, Texas of the near future, an alien planet known as Ganda Mnemma, and so on collide on a journey to explore a mysterious cave system where time doesn't work right and realms from all over the universe are connected – and over time it's revealed just how little of a right to exist in this universe the caves really have. It's a chaotic, unpredictable journey through a variety of alien worlds, featuring fish people, gnomes, and whatever a "Space Plum" is. (Spoiler: it's the spindly guy on the cover.) To call Golden Age a "romp" almost feels like underselling it, mostly because any given monosyllabic word doesn't seem eloquent enough to describe the joyful, wide-eyed exploratory energy contained within these pages.

And it somehow all fits together, thematically and plot-wise. The book's universe and its storyline are both sprawling yet cohesive – Burton manages the impressive feat of constantly introducing new elements while ensuring that none of them feel like they've come out of nowhere. It's just about as madcap as a novel can get while retaining this level of coherency, which is commendable in and of itself. When any given element started tiring me out, the book moved on to something new and interesting, without ever really blindsiding me with all its twists and turns. It's a rollercoaster from start to finish, which is a sentiment meant in the best way possible.

The book's biggest weakness in focusing on introducing new elements and keeping the plot moving forward is that its characters are rather bland, serving mostly as vessels through which the story and worldbuilding can be expressed. The cast is pretty big, and yet very few of them do much to stand out – for most I could only name one character trait, and for some I could barely name any. The cast is relatively likeable, but mostly because there's not much there to dislike. The characters that worked for me most were probably the Aztecs, Icnopilli and Teuhmatl, but even that was more for how their world was reflected through them; it was a good time seeing the duo work out what was going on around them through their own cultural and scientific understanding of the universe.

On the other hand, the fact that the worldbuilding carries the characters speaks to the strength of that worldbuilding. This is a quality notably shared by Against Nature, where cultures real and fictional feel equally fleshed-out, and like there's a real attempt to make each world feel just as alive as every other regardless of how fantastical any one of them is. The worlds of the various Earthbound cast members feel just as lived-in as the alien realms they visit, realms which feel more alien and more engaging than those of other scifi series I might be able to name. That's simply thanks to Burton's lack of interest in making these realms' denizens at all human-like, and the amount of consideration given to how civilizations would vary based on the resident species' physiology and culture. Very few settings feel lacking here.

The one major exception to the pattern of uninteresting characters and fleshed-out settings is the supporting character of the Raumclown and the reality he inhabits – oh, yes, this guy warrants his own paragraph. The Raumclown is a traveler in space and time who's been reduced to a parody of himself, enshittifying all of his surroundings. Nonsense follows him, and he follows in nonsense's stead, turning everything into pointless, substanceless adventures. And through it all, he's reasonably aware of the existential nature of his situation. It's a character idea with potential, but doesn't really go anywhere other than serving as an obvious satire of Doctor Who and, more broadly, franchises bogged down in their own continuity. It's interesting as a reaction to Against Nature and to Faction Paradox as a whole, but the depth of the commentary does not warrant the sheer amount of pages and snarky comments spent on it. Golden Age at large is making its best effort not to be as aimless as its writing philosophy would suggest, and the Raumclown's sections are those where it does succumb to pointlessness. He doesn't even get an interesting ending. I guess Burton succeeded in making me feel as tired as the characters do when in the Raumclown's presence, but that's not necessarily a good thing.

Still, in the release announcement for Golden Age, Burton made it very clear that the intention was never to make the thing a crowdpleaser. He wrote whatever came into his head, made sure it was interesting to him in particular, and gave as little of a s**t as possible about the opinions of potential readers. By and large this attitude serves the book very well, giving it an airy and adventurous atmosphere; and at the points where it doesn't, it's hard to blame a publication whose entire purpose is self-indulgence for being self-indulgent. In that respect, I'm largely just surprised and impressed that I enjoyed it as much as I did. By the time I was making my way through the final chapter, I felt a combination of fascination and joy at the way the main characters' stories ended – and given the smile on my face as I finished the last couple pages, I think it's safe to call this one a success.

very stylized comic of the first couple minutes of Colony in Space. i'd die to see more of this, the artistic license taken here is wonderful. super dynamic and gorgeous art. if it was even a couple pages longer it might very well get a 10/10 from me

My favorite part of Lawrence Miles's Dead Romance is Chris Cwej. A well-meaning figure driven to diabolical acts by his sheer puppy-like trust in his Superiors, he's deeply tragic and compelling – yet every other Doctor Who book featuring him takes place before he was brainwashed by said Superiors, thus lacking the aspect of him that drew my interest in the first place. Evidently I wasn't alone in feeling this way, judging by the fact that small publisher Arcbeatle Press has taken it upon themselves to give the man a series all his own! Starting in 2019 with the anthology Down the Middle, the Cwej book series follows a post-brainwashing Cwej. It continued in 2024 with the release of a novella named Requiem, intended to serve as a "zeroth entry" to the series: a brand new jumping-on point.

...unfortunately, despite efforts to the contrary, this jumping-on point isn't really a story about Chris Cwej at all.

Let me clarify. Requiem (by James Hornby) is adapted from a fanmade Doctor Who audio drama written in the 80s by Andy Lane, the man who would go on to create the character of Chris Cwej. Said audio drama featured the Doctor and fanmade companion Truman, whereas this novella's protagonists are Cwej and his Superior patron, Tyron. Despite this, the author has made an effort to preserve as much of the original dialogue as possible, simply reassigning lines to various characters.

It's a deeply strange experience; the drastic difference in medium would theoretically suggest that the script would need to be drastically altered as well, but instead, the decision was made to keep it as close to the original as possible. The script is very evidently that of an audio drama, and much of the prose feels extraneous and incongruous as a result – to say nothing of the fact that Cwej himself is given lines that were never written with him in mind, and ends up sounding a lot firmer and more self-righteous than he ever was back in Dead Romance. Distractingly Doctor-like, in fact. It's... a messy cut-and-paste.

Naturally, the most successful segments are the original scenes, which serve to add Cwej: The Series–specific context to the novella's events and the characters' choices. These match much better with the series context: Hornby crafts some brilliant prose from Tyron's perspective, going in-depth on what the universe looks like from the viewpoint of a cosmic power. Those scenes are probably the book's strongest sequences, although credit where credit's due to the occasional internal monologue by Chris Cwej himself, helping to flesh out his character-specific perspective on the book's events. All of these are meant to help integrate the story into its new context, but they can only do so much when they're so visibly shoehorned in. Beyond those occasional moments, the characters of Tyron and especially Cwej himself feel egregiously underbaked, especially for a book intended to introduce us to the latter character.

As for the actual story of the book: it's okay. There's a lot of buildup – and quite effective buildup at that – for what turns out to be not much payoff. The ultimate explanation for what's going on is a bit sudden and hard-to-believe, and the plot's problems basically get resolved off-screen. In addition, a key player in the book – Gregori Glasst – is only introduced right before the novella's climax, which gives us very little time to get attached before his noble and tragic self-sacrifice at the end. I have a feeling it'd play better in audio drama form, where things are a lot more snappy, but I read it across a couple weeks, and after all the running around the characters did, I felt let down by the solutions presented to the plot's various conflicts.

For what it's worth, there's a few solid emotional beats in there, particularly in the form of tragedy. There's some effective body horror – made wonderfully painful to read by the prose descriptions – and some heart-wrenching backstory behind it... all of which becomes relevant for a little while, before being abandoned right before Glasst gets involved, when it would be most interesting to explore. Similarly, Glasst's self-sacrifice at the end would have landed so much better if he'd taken up more of the story, or if he'd seen firsthand more of the chaos he'd caused. And the story comes close to making a point about human–machine collaboration, but never really does anything with the threads it sets up, almost feeling actively self-contradicting at points. All the pieces are there for a substantial story, but it's evident that with some restructuring they could have hit that much harder than they do.

And that's the thing about Requiem. It was a confusing project to start with – adapting an audio drama about the Doctor and co. into a novella about Chris Cwej – but could have worked given the confidence to restructure and rewrite it into a more original piece. Instead, the author's decision to keep it as true to the source as possible means that the main emotion it elicits is that of feeling thrown. On many levels, the novella feels incongruous, like it's trying to tell a perfectly fine story that was simply never meant to be told this way.

Adaptation is never about surface-level fidelity; it's about knowing what needs to be changed to make something work in a new context. If only Requiem subscribed to that same ethos, we could have had a truly solid work on our hands. As it is, it's one of the more disarming pieces of prose I've encountered on my journey through the Faction Paradox–adjacent corner of the Whoniverse – but I know the people at Arcbeatle Press are passionate writers with nothing but love for the stories they weave. No matter how I felt about this introductory addendum to Cwej: The Series, I'm very much looking forward to getting started with the series proper.

...So, uh. What a book to coincidentally finish reading right on US Election Day, huh? It took me a while to get around to actually reviewing this one, and I'm sure you can work out why.

If you can't, though, that's all the more reason to start with a recap. Andrew Hickey's first contribution to the Faction Paradox novel series takes readers on a journey through a tumultuous US election cycle, Richard Burton's travels through the Arabian desert in the 19th century, a tale of dubious provenance labeled the "Thousand and Second Night", and more. Each element is presented to us through in-universe documents, from journal entries to book translations to a Shift hijacking the memetic connections in the reader's mind to overwrite the text of the book and speak to them directly – oh, and it all ends with the malevolent sentient timeship Lolita becoming President of the United States!

To get the elephant in the room out of the way: yes, this book hit different as an American reading it in 2024 than the Brit writing it in 2015 probably intended. Hickey has US elections down pat in some ways, with the party dynamics feeling particularly acutely represented – and yet Lolita's plan to become President feels unnecessarily subtle and complex now that we have the modern perspective of, well, everything about Trumpism. In general, though, despite some outdated details I was surprised at how accurate the politics felt.

The civilians we spend time with, meanwhile, are more exaggerated; Dave Larsen is a redneck orbiting conspiracy theory circles, who ultimately becomes the rope in a game of tug-of-war between two alien powers, while Rachel Edwards is a left-wing British journalist sent to follow the a candidate on the campaign trail. Neither of them are particularly likeable, with Rachel being a bit too snarky and self-assured, and Dave being a bit too dull and stubborn, but both of them feel vibrant and present their own stories interestingly enough despite occasional (intentionally) groan-worthy moments. When it comes to groan-worthy, Richard Burton's segments in 19th-century Arabia stole the show, feeling pretty meaningless and dragged-out. For what it's worth, though, they did pick up near the end – and besides, getting to know Burton granted some nice perspective to the Thousand and Second Night segments. In short, none of the characters were all that likeable, but Burton aside, they were enjoyable, and that kept the book flowing smoothly.

The readability is helped by the format, which flips between passages of different in-universe texts every couple of pages, ensuring dynamicity even as the plot itself is quite a slow burn. Feel free to make a quip about Gen Z attention spans, and you won't be wrong, but even beyond that I'm a sucker for the epistolary format. Having every bit of the book be composed of news articles, journal entries, transcripts of video recordings, and so on helped my immersion immensely. As the reader familiarizes themself with so many different documents across so many times and places, it's wonderfully easy to feel invested in the book's world.

Honestly, this book is pretty darn digestible in general. It's a surprising thing to say about a Faction book, let alone one with as many moving parts as Head of State has – Lolita's plan jumps across eras and locations, and the plot is presented in a very fractured and nonlinear way. Still, the core plot is simple, and the pace slow, so readers are given ample time to consider all the gears and work out how they interlock before it all properly comes together (or do I mean falls apart?) in the crushing climax. Sure, I was doubtful of the slow pace at first, but it won me over as I gradually realized the story structure the book was aiming for. The whole book is rising action, then your stomach drops right at the end.

My biggest concern with the book is that it might not land as well if the reader hadn't listened to some of the Faction Paradox audios and acquainted themself with Lolita. They'll probably get the general picture, but not quite why she's so dangerous, or what she plans to do; when every Faction book is presented as relatively standalone, it feels like a bit of a weak point not to demonstrate why the reader should be so scared of your main villain. Hell, I've listened to the audios, and I still would've appreciated more elaboration on her goals here to really drive the stakes home. Still, by the end you at least get a vague idea, and whew that final speech hits like a brick. Especially, yes, in November of 2024.

Head of State is a solid book. I don't think it's up there with some of the series greats, but it's memorable for its format and its clean simplicity if nothing else. It's genuinely impressive how Hickey can implement a plotline just as complex as some of the other Faction books while making it feel like such light reading – deftly navigating and explaining complex lore elements, jumping from time period to time period, and never throwing readers off in the process. Its levity might stop it from rising to the heights of, say, Warring States or The Brakespeare Voyage, but it'll stick in my mind as an engaging and clever read all the same. Certainly that ending won't leave me anytime soon...

Faction Paradox initially attracted me as a franchise because of its lore, its big-idea scifi worldbuilding, and the rich cultures it told stories of; as I progressed in my readthrough and discovered the diversity of stories and themes the series had to offer, I found a lot more to enjoy, but the worldbuilding remained the big draw. It also happens that I'm a sucker for the nautical æsthetic. Seeing as Jonathan Dennis and Simon Bucher-Jones's The Brakespeare Voyage has both of these things in droves, it follows that my loving it was pretty much an inevitability – and it doesn't hurt that it's also a really good book.

This is the first Faction Paradox novel to be co-authored by two different writers, and the structure is very much dependent on this fact. Half of the book (the side mostly helmed by Bucher-Jones) follows Robert Scarratt, a member of the Great Houses who's sent on a wild goose chase through the void between universes, piloting the Brakespeare – a timeship containing the timeline of a whole artificial galaxy. His chapters are mostly composed of vignettes from his journey as he reflects on his life and realizes how much he's being used as a pawn in someone else's grand scheme. Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, you have Dennis's chapters, following Nebaioth: a man born to one of the Brakespeare's many worlds devoted to supplying the Voyage, he has memories of a timeline where Scarratt was never the Captain, and resolves himself to deposing Scarratt and restoring the original Captain of the Brakespeare. None of this goes according to plan.

If that comes off as a dense premise, well... the fun part is that it's barely the tip of the iceberg. Every time I attempted to summarize the book's plot to someone new, my explanations got longer and longer, as I progressed through the book and slowly uncovered more of the underlying causes and events at play. But through its complexity, one of The Brakespeare Voyage's most admirable qualities is that the density never becomes a roadblock to comprehension. Wading through rewritten timelines, a myriad of fictional cultures, and inscrutable alien technologies, it remains shockingly easy to follow throughout. It has the same penchant for dense storytelling and worldbuilding shared by its siblings Newtons Sleep and Against Nature (only natural given they all had development time at Random Static Ltd), but the difference lies in that The Brakespeare Voyage drip-feeds the reader the complexities as it goes along, taking things slow and letting the details sink in. Naturally, there are vaguenesses and mysteries to speculate on, but they're of an approachable scale when set against everything else that is explained clearly.

More than just being an aid to comprehension, this slow pace helps the book as a whole. I mentioned earlier on that The Brakespeare Voyage goes all-out with the worldbuilding, and plenty of that is expanding on concepts from The Book of the War, but a lot more of it takes the form of the Brakespeare itself. Nebaioth journeys across many corners of the Ship, starting from the small seaside town he grew up in and ending up in the far-future Bridge, a vast metropolis that the people of the Brakespeare spent millennia galvanizing their planets to build, and from which Scarratt guides the Ship. The Bridge is perhaps the best example of the stunning scale of the Brakespeare: entire cultures and religions based around furthering the Voyage, working for æons and culminating in a beautiful galaxy-wide display of architecture and culture, if one that's also a little existentially nerve-wracking. Its depiction is frankly incredible, an awe-inspiring structure on the face of it that's made all the more impressive due to the reader's time spent soaking in the culture it sprang from. Throughout the book, and especially in Nebaioth's chapters, the Brakespeare takes enough of the spotlight that said ship itself might as well be the main character.

And that's the thing about Nebaioth's chapters – he himself isn't that complex a character. He has one big goal in mind, and it leads him through about three-quarters of a hero's journey: the call to adventure, a supernatural mentor, a big turning point and trial partway through, and his ultimate rise in power as he nears his goal. The most compelling aspect of him is this singlemindedness, as his goals shift and warp over time and he falls prey to his own ingrained biases. His story's myth-style emphasis on plot over character is reminiscent of Warlords of Utopia, and it's even got the same kind of sudden timeskips – but none of that is much of a bother here. The setting is the star of the show, and it has more than enough personality to make up for Nebaioth's one-and-a-half-dimensionality and leave that side of the story feeling fleshed-out.

Still, Nebaioth's sections on their own can get a little dry. And that's where the co-authoring comes in clutch: Robert Scarratt's sections are completely different from Nebaioth's. For one, Scarratt himself comes from a wildly different cultural background, and has a much different perspective on the Brakespeare's voyage, which does enough to differentiate him; and the narration style is dramatically different due to his personality. He's a seedy, misogynist, generally abrasive man, which means that you love to hate him – his chapters can be hard to read, but at the same time it's fascinating just to look inside his mind. Scarratt's sections are very structurally different from Nebaioth's, too; they're presented as a military briefing file collected from his memories, and scattered throughout are vignettes from other characters, occasional official comments, and various moments from earlier in his life. It all coalesces into an inevitably incomplete yet continuously captivating patchwork tapestry of the life of Robert Scarratt.

The contrast between these two protagonists is the big strength of The Brakespeare Voyage. There are two different sides to it, and neither feels totally complete – the characters aren't the most likeable, and one story is a pinch too straightforward while the other one can feel disarmingly disparate in its vignettish style. I could certainly enjoy a whole book of just one side or the other, but they're very much designed to complement each other. Each half draws you into a character and their world and then switches it up when you're at maximum interest levels, right before it starts to get to be too much. It's a beautiful balancing act, taking full advantage of the collaborative nature of the book. These are two different stories in different styles, yet they intertwine beautifully.

And that brings me to the climax, as the disparate plot threads gradually pool together to make one big whole. That sort of thing is nothing new, especially not for Faction Paradox, a series that's always absolutely adored this story structure – but it's particularly expertly done here. Each perspective retains a distinct identity, making the way they complement each other that much more standout, until the two eventually merge together in, ah, more ways than one. The ending in general is a big interpretive mindf**k that synthesizes everything up til then in a colorful explosion of prose, and it's both baffling and tremendously entertaining. I'll be thinking about that moment, what it means for the characters, what it means for the setting, and what it means for the themes, for a while yet.

(And as an aside – after the women in the storyline had been set aside for a lot of the book, I felt vindicated to see they were the ones that escaped and had the best chance at making a life for themselves. It didn't negate the book's somewhat gender-exclusionary nature, but it certainly did soften the blow.)

That ending is the cherry on top to what is, without a doubt, the best Faction Paradox book overall that I've had the pleasure of reading and subsequently reviewing. It's got the complex worldbuilding that still manages to flow, it's got engaging characters and settings, and it's got a unique and deftly-assembled structure to boot. Just a fantastically solid read all around. Oh, and I like the nautical motif. Did I mention I like the nautical motif?

The first Faction Paradox novel I reviewed, This Town Will Never Let Us Go, was perhaps the most introspective and philosophical in Mad Norwegian Press's line of seven Faction books. As someone just getting started with the franchise, and to be honest just getting back into the habit of reading in general, it was a lot for me to unpack. Large portions of the book were taken up by commentary on society, and as the plot developed it turned out to be much more symbolic than it was interested in telling a neatly-ordered, easy-to-understand story. Certainly I ended up with takeaways from the book, and boy oh boy did I write about them, but it was one that really had to sit with me; over time, my perception of the book, its plot, and its messaging changed dramatically. I'll be a Tiffany Korta stan til the end of my days, but generally speaking I've disavowed the majority of what I wrote in that review. It's simply a book that's impossible to judge on first glance, and one so interpretive that it might as well be impossible to paint a full, coherent, definite picture in a single review.

Anyway, Lawrence Burton's Against Nature was overtly inspired by This Town. So that gives you an idea of what I'm in for here, in my attempt to review this thing.

This was the first Faction Paradox novel published by Obverse Books, but in my mind it very much belongs in the same era as the book directly before it, Newtons Sleep from Random Static Ltd. The two were both developed there, and it very much shows: they're both incredibly dense with lore, time travel shenanigans, and opaque prose styles. Against Nature in fact takes it a step further from Newtons Sleep, having full sequences set in pseudo-imaginary realms, alter-time states, and so on. And it commits to culture-specific narration styles even more than its antecessor, jumping between characters from all sorts of cultures (modern Texas, modern Mexico, pre-colonial Mexico, the Great Houses) and taking culture-specific terminology as givens, whether it's "radio", "Huixachtepetl", or "Kithriarch". This makes some sections a lot more readable than others on first glance, but as the reader settles into the book it eventually just helps the immersion; after all, why would characters overexplain deeply-ingrained cultural concepts in their own internal monologues? And the narration style helps a lot, being surprisingly relaxed a lot of the time. The content isn't leisurely, but Burton's prose style often is, somehow not feeling tryhard or overindulgent in spite of its density.

What is the book actually about, though? That one's up for interpretation. One plotline sees a character grappling with the realization his entire life isn't real anymore, and struggling to find a sense of belonging and purpose regardless; I'm not really sure what its climax was aiming for, but there's definitely something on the bone there. Another involves a group of hybrid Homeworlders, as they come to terms with their world becoming both increasingly mythological and biological; there's three other plotlines, but I don't think I could describe their storylines with any level of assuredness. And surprisingly, that attitude worked for me while reading – after a while, I stopped trying to follow along perfectly, instead focusing on the grand strokes of what was going on, the atmosphere and the theming, and understanding that I was simply along for the ride.

And the impressive thing is that I still got a lot from it! Relatable characters, touching moments, stressful climactic scenes, jaw-dropping plot twists, moments that make you sit back for a sec and think about life – this book has it all. Some characters were more developed than others (between the two brothers Primo and Todd it's not hard to say who was more memorable) but each plotline is vividly written and has moments and characters peppered in that stand out. It speaks to Lawrence Burton's talent that he's able to craft such a fascinating and gripping narrative even though the specifics can be somewhat muddied; there's salient themes of what it means to be human, our relationship with mythology, our relationship with reality, the difference between the two, the meaning of life and death and so on and so on. I couldn't tell you what my exact takeaways were, but as with This Town it's stuck with me, and will be stewing around in my mind for a while yet. If that was my experience on a baseline first readthrough, I can only imagine what it's like after a reread or two, where the reader knows what they're in for and can really dig into it. Or maybe just what it's like to someone who's an Aztec scholar like Burton is.

Whatever else I can say about it, Lawrence Burton is an incredibly talented man for this book alone. He mashed This Town Will Never Let Us Go (an introspective book that maybe needed more structure) and Newtons Sleep (an overly structured book that maybe needed more introspection) into an Aztec culture–flavored broth, and it worked out very well. I can't call it perfect – it focused a lot on the philosophy and mythicality of its storyline, occasionally to the detriment of the characters and structure. Some of the perspective characters stick with you, while others rolled through my mind and back out, mostly serving as vessels for the plot; and near the climax, some characters suddenly start understanding the plot for reasons entirely unclear to me, which struck me as a little underbaked way of doing it. Still, Against Nature goes for the grandiose and the mythical over anything else, and I can't fault it for deprioritizing characterization a little bit, especially when it's still got a serviceable batting average in that regard.

The moment I finished this book, I decided to put off reviewing it for a few days; it seemed like the sort of thing that needed a lot of time to stew in my brain. But truth be told, I don't think I'm ready to write a proper review still, because I don't think it'll ever stop stewing on it. Perhaps even more than This Town Will Never Let Us Go, Against Nature is a book with a lot to say, one that doesn't give you answers at first glance, and in fact I doubt it ever will no matter how many times I come back to it. The best any reader of this book can do is to keep stirring that stew in their heads, watch the chunks of veggie rearrange into different places and configurations, and admire whatever comes out, knowing it's only one way of seeing it and that it'll keep changing and growing and getting just that little bit more delicious over time.

Epic. Inscrutable. Oddly beautiful. Would read again.

After Mad Norwegian Press's wild, diverse, beautiful, and bizarre run of Faction Paradox books came to an end, it was subsequently picked up by New Zealand–based publisher Random Static for a healthy, extensive line of one (1) whole book: Newtons Sleep by Daniel O'Mahony. And despite the comical level of diversity in Mad Norwegian's output, Random Static still managed to form a new and distinct identity for the series. Of all the Faction books so far, Newtons Sleep comes closest to the core tone of the franchise: it's convoluted, mired in real historical events, impenetrably dense, very timey-wimey, and generally bizarre, with a hint of gratuitous edge. It commits to being esoteric in a way that no Faction Paradox book before it did, which is a feat given what the rest of the franchise up til now looks like. This level of commitment is both to its benefit and its detriment.

For once, I will not attempt to provide a plot summary for this book. It's simply too messy and convoluted, and I would inevitably get details wrong and omit important plot points in my vain attempt to puzzle together everything this book was about. There's this guy named Nate Silver who got resurrected, plus historical writer Aphra Behn, and an evil bioengineered thing, and lots of sex, and Faction Paradox is hanging around too – that's as far as I'll go in attempting to explain. And don't even get me started on themes – this book zig-zags through so much real-life history, time-travel insanity, supernatural/scifi phenomena (depending on how you look at it), and political intrigue, that I spent too much energy just trying to understand what was happening before I could intake the underlying ideas that powered the plot.

Put in this position, some reviewers would criticize the book for being so hard to understand that the thematic points were buried in the complex plotline and fantastical writing style. Me? I'd rather just acknowledge this book was made for someone with a lot more patience and ability to put threads together than I, and with a lot more interest in understanding 17th-century British politics to boot. Newtons Sleep is a book that absolutely knows what it's doing, but when it intentionally obfuscates the plot for the sake of ~the vibes~, it alienates part of its audience in the process. It feels like it knows that too, and does it all anyway. I'm halfway to denouncing it for being pretentious, but I'd rather play devil's advocate and treat it as simply not being designed for me.

But enough about how dense this thing is: let's talk about what I did gather. Because while Newtons Sleep was a tangle of oddities, plenty of those oddities did stick out to me along the way. Most of the political and historical context was lost on me (which undoubtedly damaged my understanding of the plot and themes), but there's lots to enjoy within the plot's connections to the Faction Paradox mythos. You've got the Faction itself, the babels, the Order of the Weal, posthumans, loa, the whole shebang, and they're all filtered through the perspective of people from the 17th century. O'Mahony runs with the "dark fantasy masquerading as sci-fi" tone and uses this lens to take it up to eleven. It makes these lore details feel extra otherworldly and astounding, with especial shout-outs to the portrayal of Larissa, the renegade Homeworlder who flits in and out of Aphra's life. The fanciful, old-timey writing style is laid on a little thick ("The Faction of Paradoxes"? Really?) but it very much lands the vibes it's going for, and the scifi stuff hits great as a result. Fucked-up incomprehensible gothic fantasy scifi is the stuff I came to this franchise for, and Newtons Sleep absolutely delivers on that front.

The characters are also worth mentioning. Everyone's got good points and big flaws, but all of the main cast stands out and gives you something to be invested in by the book's end. My personal favorite was naturally Greenaway, a member of Faction Paradox who's trying a bit too hard to prove herself to her superiors, and who harbors a secret throughout the second half of the book that completely changes the way she experiences the world. I definitely wanted to see more of her character, but what was there felt rock-solid; I could've spent a whole book with just Greenaway. The other perspective characters, Nate Silver and Aphra Behn, are also portrayed vividly, and the side cast feels lively too. (I hated Nick Plainsong, but that seems intentional, and you can't deny he's memorable.)

Everything so far: the book has solid characters and knows what it's doing, and I liked it when it dug its claws into Faction Paradox mythos, but otherwise felt alienated by its density and references to historical events. That's mostly everything out of the way, but there is one elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. Namely: Daniel O'Mahony is obsessed with mentioning sex in this book. Practically everyone in this book has sex or thinks about having sex with everyone else, prostitutes are all over the place, at one point a character gets pissed on for some reason, and the relationship between a certain two characters pretty much amounts to grooming. It becomes especially bothersome when real-life historical figures get involved, who are too busy being dead to sign off on this use of their persona. It's thankfully less prevalent during the book's climax, so I didn't finish the book with a bad taste in my mouth, but the sheer gratuity of it all still wore me down. I'm not the most Puritan of beings, but I vastly prefer when sex scenes in mostly-SFW media are tasteful and really contribute to the plot and characters (cf. Lawrence Miles' Dead Romance). Newtons Sleep flies past that line and never looks back. I legitimately think I would have given this book at least one more point out of ten if it hadn't been smattered in sex scenes and idle mentions of characters wanting to f**k each other. Some of it seems character-relevant, most of it is just gratuitous.

clears throat

Beyond that. Newtons Sleep is a fine book. It commits to the Faction Paradox ethos of being obtuse and complex, and it does it to an extreme extent; this naturally has the result that some will love it and some will feel entirely alienated by it. I fall somewhere in the middle, depending on which aspect of the book we're talking about. Sure, Faction Paradox–brand density is a classic and it's what I'm here for, but this book takes it a step too far and loses me somewhere in the esoteric morass of the plot and writing style. I'd love to give this book a higher rating based on the parts I did like, but it's trying a little too hard to be impenetrable for my liking. There were some scenes I cringed at, some I really loved, and in the end I had a fine time but don't think I'll be jumping to re-read this one.

dr. who uses bullshit time travel logic to kill a random stegosaurus

this is why the 60s daleks are best they will engage in 5d chess with random victorian dudes in order to enact their evil grand-scale eugenics plans and then turn around and forget to do product testing on their Earthling Detectors™

the doctor and co aiding the daleks in their quest to destroy biodiversity except they didnt even do anything. i think these writers are on another plane entirely, one that i could only ever dream of approaching

meh resolution but when the doctor said "they have a 5 million years journey" i felt that

Erasing Sherlock by Kelly Hale is a weird book. A romance drama about a time traveler falling in love with Sherlock Holmes, which starts to pick up more high-stakes and adventure elements in the second half... it's a lot of things at once. And all those things are okay, but it left me with one question: why was this published as a Faction Paradox book? Looking at its history, it was originally written as a standalone with no connection to Doctor Who in any capacity, and the Faction Paradox version is a later rewrite. It was then published again as a standalone with the Factiony elements removed, and the fact that it's been published three times with the Faction Paradox version sandwiched awkwardly in the middle is perhaps a testament to how well it fits into this franchise in general.

That's where my disconnect with this book lies. Not to do with it being good or bad – though it's certainly not without its flaws – but in the fact that it makes no attempt to have a thematic, worldbuilding, or genre connection with the rest of the book series it's been published in. Warlords of Utopia was a mess, but it felt like a Faction book purely in how it went for the grand-scale scifi. This Town Will Never Let Us Go was small-scale and contained, but it felt like a Faction book because its themes, of ritual and the power of ideas and cultural stagnation, matched up perfectly with the themes of Faction Paradox lore. This? Well, the villain is backed by the Celestis, something that's mentioned on a single page, and he's generally kind of occult-ish and wants to f**k up the timeline for whatever reason, but that's about where the interesting time travel aspects end. You could easily give the villain another motivation and say the main character was just a visitor from a faraway country who had somehow heard of Holmes, and the actual plot wouldn't have to be changed that much. And sure, the plot did at least become more grand-stakes and tense in the last third or so, and included scraps of horror, occult, and scifi here and there, but frankly I'd been so worn down by the sex scenes and romance drama that I kind of neglected to care. So when I give this book a low-to-middling score, it's less to do with its quality and more how I simply couldn't connect with it personally. It's not what I came to this series for. More than annoyed, it just left me confused – never before has the Mad Norwegian Press line of Faction Paradox books felt as much like a hodgepodge of random vaguely scifi-ish books as it does with this installment.

As much as I claim it's simply not to my taste, there's a few bits worth mentioning that did genuinely bother me. The prose is fine but occasionally makes bizarre comparisons or word choices that totally take you out of it, and the dialogue has its strange moments as well. The main character needs a lot more personality definition than she has, and the on-again-off-again pattern of her relationship with Sherlock feels quite repetitive and lacking in depth. Sherlock Holmes himself never really has a proper character arc to make him more likeable, so much as the book just stops giving him as many classist, racist, and generally rude comments to make as the plot moves along. (And on the note of racism, let's not get too much into the topic of "China Crow", a character who's portrayed as a scummy, leery, very Asian-looking guy. He has epicanthic folds, guys, he must be evil!!) Oh, and, Kelly Hale has a weird fascination with sexual assault and also homosexuality, and neither topic is quite handled with the finesse it demands.

But like, aside from the genuinely problematic elements, and the fact that I personally found some aspects of it underbaked, it's largely a perfectly competent novel. I'm sure this is a great book if you're generally a fan of Sherlock Holmes and/or women's romance drama novels. Or just if you're Kelly Hale. And after all, lots of people on Goodreads seem to like it, and a screenplay version almost won an international awards contest, so who am I to judge? It's just not to my taste, and that's fine. I'm sure for some people, this is a deeply engrossing and exciting tale. Just don't talk to me about China Crow. Or that one brief scene near the start where Sherlock gets way too into visualizing a p-do/necrophile's actions. Or any time I had to read about Sherlock Holmes's thickening member and musky armpits and how "manfully" he does things and so on.

Is this just what happens when you let Americans write for Doctor Who???

So. Dead Romance. Okay, so this is a book that was originally published for an entirely different Doctor Who book series, which didn't feature the main character of that series in any capacity, and which was later republished as part of the Faction Paradox line. Cool. Let's see what we've got here.

Obligatory plot summary: it's a book set in the '70s, about a drug addict named Christine Summerfield who crosses paths with a brainwashed agent of the Great Houses and former 7th Doctor companion, Chris Cwej. As the book goes on, we learn all sorts of wild revelations. Christine actually lives in a bottle universe, which Cwej has come to to set up a "survival team" since the Great Houses are fighting some Gods, there's also eldritch horrors / computers called Sphinxes, then there's evil people from the time vortex, and Christine defeats them by playing rock-paper-scissors, and then it turns out she was supposed to be a sacrifice victim but Cwej got attached, and actually the Great Houses invade the bottle-Earth and everyone dies. Also Gallifrey is in ruins and that's seemingly irrelevant to any other Doctor Who or Faction Paradox lore???

Well, it's kind of a lot. That much is obvious.

Is it good, though? Well, I mean, it's Lawrence Miles – it's good in worldbuilding and in prose style if nothing else. It's chock-full of creative ideas, with some wonderful worldbuilding that's written to make the scope feel absolutely vast. The descriptions of the alien planets, the Great Houses' warships, all the monsters and creatures, really send you into this world so different from our own. Oh, and Cwej! Chris Cwej is an all-time great character, and perhaps the most compelling part of the whole thing for me. This is my first real exposure to him, and seeing him as a tragic figure who's been brainwashed but is still trying to do the right thing... there's so many little quirks and comments Christine makes a note out of in the narration that just crush you. He's not a good person, his flaws are wildly evident, and that's why the sympathetic aspects of his personality land. Or at least make him fascinating to look at from a distance.

And as for the main character, the one narrating this whole thing? The framing mechanism of the book being Christine's journal is solid in a vacuum, and the narration style really sucks you in. Christine's snarky but thoughtful, and she has a lot to say. There's barely a dull moment, because even when the plot's in downtime, Christine finds unique things to talk about, aspects of her life and ways of describing things. It does keep you hooked, and I felt like her personal style of narration sucked me into the world that much more, with the little details and comparisons she picks out about everything around her. The thing is just... I felt like I'd seen all this before, with This Town Will Never Let Us Go. It gives the impression a little bit that once you've read one Lawrence Miles book, you've read them all. Like, it was solid, and sure, it had some different themes to This Town, but I didn't feel like I was getting that much new from it. A lot of the jumpy, rambly, splintered prose style is much the same.

This is also very much an issue of it being republished as a Faction Paradox book, I'm aware. In the context of Virgin's Bernice Summerfield series, I'm sure this was groundbreaking stuff in how its style, premise, and worldbuilding stood out from the rest – and I'm sure there's interest in it ties into Bernice Summerfield lore. But being exposed to it after reading a bunch of other Faction Paradox content, it just feels a bit unrefined compared to a lot of the stuff I've read that postdates it, especially Miles's own later work.

The ideas come fast and hard, and they're painted with one hell of an evocative brush (loved the initial description of the Sphinx), but the scattered stream-of-consciousness style means that the story, the one that's meant to frame those ideas, doesn't land as well as it should. The journal-y writing style makes the reader connect to Christine more, at the cost of the story's coherency. It feels more like a series of vignettes than a proper adventure, like... well, like pretty much any other Faction book. Lawrence Miles's scattered, vignettish writing style works a lot better in a book that's more theme-focused, where the worldbuilding is more subtle, spread out, and contained, like This Town Will Never Let Us Go manages. To really get these wild ideas across and make the story they're in compelling, you either need a full story to frame them (see most Faction books), or go whole hog with the idea dump and not give the impression of a plot in the first place (see The Book of the War).

Dead Romance works. It's a good book, with compelling narration, and some great plot twists at the end. There's some themes in there as well, about oppression and mass media and storytelling, that land really well and give the reader something to chew on. Oh, and Chris Cwej is an all-time great character, for this book alone. But is it really Miles's best, as so often claimed? No, not when you compare it to something like A Labyrinth of Histories or This Town. I would probably enjoy this more if I was reading the Bernice Summerfield Virgin books, but framing it as a Faction book lets it down a bit, solid as it is. In the end, there's plenty of bits that are memorable enough, but if I had to pick a Miles book for my brain to chew on, I would pick This Town Will Never Let Us Go in a heartbeat.

One of the things I love about Doctor Who as a franchise is its diversity. Every episode brings something different to the table, and you have no idea what you're in for each week. As its esoteric offspring, Faction Paradox very much inherits this quality, and turns it up to eleven... which leads us to the fact that the fifth published Faction Paradox novel, Warring States, is the first one to actually focus on a member of the titular Faction. Going into this, there's an inherent excitement in seeing what a more "traditional" Faction Paradox story might look like, and yeah, Warring States delivers. It's in no way without its flaws, but it follows up to the same standard that Of the City of the Saved set, with wild ideas abound and a rich tapestry of setting and culture to back it up. It's a more-than-worthwhile read.

Now, let's get to the customary plot overview. Warring States, written by Mags L. Halliday, is about a Faction Paradox member, Cousin Octavia, visiting Boxer Rebellion–era China to recover a casket stolen by some British archæologists, as she believes it holds the secret to true immortality. As the book progresses, we meet Liu Hui Ying, a Chinese translator with a background in martial arts who's also oddly driven to find this casket. The book is split into three chunks: the first from Octavia's perspective, the second from Liu's perspective over the same span of time, and the third depicting the events afterwards, rapidly switching between perspectives. The two characters cross paths and form an uneasy alliance; they discover they're alike in that they both have witchblood, which grants the rare ability to look into timelines. Eventually we learn that they've been put in a time loop, used as human batteries for the human–timeship hybrid known as Compassion. This is the first loop where the two have truly formed a personal connection, though, and as neither is willing to sacrifice the other, they embrace and break the loop before abruptly disappearing.

It's solid stuff, with a good level of mystery throughout as to what's truly going on. The quest for the casket, and the mysteries surrounding it, help things keep moving forward. If there's one big flaw, it's that the structural choice to abruptly switch gears halfway through does take a fair bit of steam out of the plot, seeing as it requires some mental adjustment to see things through a radically different character's eyes. It is worth it, though: by the end of the second half, you've got a good feel for both characters and their situations. The convergence in the final third would not work nearly as well if not for the time we'd spent from both sides, with how it ties things together and lets our characters bond after readers have already gotten to know them both.

The climax in general really gets going and captures interest with every new development, from Liu's developing witchblood to the time train crash to the two women's uneasy alliance to their bonding through building a clay soldier to their confrontation with Compassion and if you'll allow me to just gush for a second aaagh this book gets so good near the end. I didn't even care about the pacing up til that point, because I was just so enraptured and enthralled by the everything of the climax. It comes together really fast, and introduces a lot of things very quickly, with the first two parts feeling quite slow in contrast. So, yes, it does come dangerously close to feeling overwhelming and out of left field, but with all the hints scattered beforehand, it ultimately succeeds in feeling like it's tying the characters, setting, and plot together into a wonderful little bow. I do wish certain parts were explained more (namely how Octavia and Liu traveled to the pyramid's construction, and what happened to the two women when they escaped the loop), but the climax has enough meat on the bone to make it work. The ambiguity seems fairly intentional, besides.

But where the ending is solid-yet-slightly-lacking, the characters are probably the book's weakest point. There's plenty of positives: you get attached to Liu and Octavia purely by spending so much time with them, and frankly after the sexist mess of Warlords of Utopia it's wonderful to read a Faction book with so many bold female characters – and written by a woman, no less! The probable strongest element is the way they bond in the final third, with some really beautiful scenes (and, like, it's incredibly sapphic, so of course I was a fan). Still, the characters are a little thin; one review I read described them as overly stoic, and that's not wrong exactly. They're a bit too self-serious and distant, which makes their eventual bonding especially compelling, but does leave them somewhat lacking in strong personality. The most we learn about them as people is through their backstories, and the relationships they have as a result of that. Liu's is given in breadcrumbs throughout her section, which works reasonably well, but Octavia's falls behind... Personally, I appreciate Octavia's backstory a lot, probably more than Liu's, but that's because I went out of my way and did extracurricular reading. Her backstory and motivations are explored more deeply in this book's prologue and the Thirteen-Day Republic content in The Book of the War, two pieces that make her that much more compelling. It's a real shame, then, that that context is buried in other Faction content, given how much it helps Octavia stand out.

But let's be honest with ourselves here: at its core, plot and characters aren't the star of the show in Faction Paradox. It's all well and good that those components are relatively well-oiled here, but this is a franchise where setting and scope and ideas and atmosphere come first. And indeed, where the plot and especially characters are lacking, the setting fills in the gaps very well. The prose is all very clear and easy-to-digest, while simultaneously giving a litany of details to make the setting of historical Beijing feel rich. It's a tough balance to strike, and one which Warring States hits beautifully. Even the fight scenes work great, which are tricky to depict no matter the medium. And with the focus on a Cousin of Faction Paradox, the sci-fi concepts come fast and hard while never feeling overbearing: the emphasis on ritual is great stuff, and the scenes involving ghost stations and time trains were dazzlingly creative. Particular props go to the scenes where Liu or Octavia use their witchblood to look into the timelines of people and objects, which evoked the vision of a twisting, turning path throughout history fantastically. Perhaps my favorite moment hands-down was the scene when Liu and Octavia look into each other's timelines, and their pasts blend into a mishmash of both characters' upbringings. It's convoluted, beautifully intimate, and trippy in just the right way.

As for Beijing itself? It feels plenty detailed and vibrant. Mags L. Halliday's passion for Chinese culture and history is more than evident, and there's lots of little details sprinkled throughout that make the setting feel alive. It's thoroughly researched, to good effect. The frequent references to historical events and Chinese cultural objects and titles do result in the book feeling somewhat dense, particularly Liu's section – but honestly, I can't complain too much about that. It shouldn't really be the author's job to handhold someone through another culture, and my own background research definitely helped. I do think certain aspects were laid on thick enough to feel almost stereotypical, mostly to do with family honor and all the superstition and metaphors... does make me wish there were more Chinese hands in the writing of this book. But in spite of that, there's a good attempt to be respectful and treat the Beijing of 1900 as more than just an exotic set piece. Definitely helps that half the book is from the perspective of a Chinese woman.

All in all, this book has ended up being my favorite Faction Paradox novel so far. I'd call it generally on par with Of the City of the Saved, but the sapphic elements bump it up a notch or so, which I'll freely admit is entirely my own bias... but putting that aside, there's a lot else to love. The plot's solid, the characters are compelling, the setting is vibrant and exciting, and the wuxia fight scenes are great. Most especially, the mysteries, their solutions, and the worldbuilding are top-tier, as always for this franchise. And all of this is backed by quality prose that makes sure it all pops. There's some faults here and there, mostly in the pacing and character writing, but they've got enough to stand on their own two legs and let the other elements do the heavy lifting.

God. I already loved this series well enough, but Warring States sealed the deal.

To recap: Warlords of Utopia by Lance Parkin is a book about a war between every alternate dimension where Rome never fell, and every alternate dimension where the Nazis won WWII. It's framed as a translated memoir of one Marcus Americanius Scriptor, the man who discovered the existence of alternate dimensions and helped lead the war to take over Nazi-occupied  worlds.

Warlords of Utopia is the first Faction Paradox book I've read that I've really struggled to enjoy. Like Of the City of the Saved before it, Warlords goes big with its scope, with a premise spanning countless civilizations. The difference comes down to how they frame the premise: City focuses on a single period of one or two days, while Warlords lets years at a time pass by. This means that City allows the setting and the way it's seen by its characters to really sink in with a bunch of little scenes, whereas Warlords prefers to be very matter-of-fact about the sequence of events without allowing the characters or scenery to speak for themselves. It's a shame, because Warlords proves it can make those little moments work, with a particular highlight being the scene set in a world where the dinosaurs only went extinct after Rome thrived. The ideas on display here are great! But the execution doesn't let them thrive.

And this absolutely extends to the characters. To aid in conveying the scope, City stretches its plot between around fifteen richly-written perspective characters, whereas Warlords just has the one, and doesn't seem interested in making any of the cast feel alive. Characters are introduced with relationships to the main protagonist, and things happen to them that the protagonist feels one way or another about, but they read as sets of actions in a history book as opposed to personalities. The summary blurb characterizes it as a particularly intimate memoir, a trait which would've been lovely for the book to actually have.

The character who comes closest to having a personality is of course the main character, Marcus Americanius Scriptor, but hoo boy there's a lot to unpack here. Marcus grew up in a world where Rome flourished and took over all of Earth, and as a member of one of the richest families to boot. He's ridiculously patriotic, and as the book is framed as his memoirs, it reads as very pro-Roman Empire. Some discussion is given to the unsavory aspects of Roman society, which Marcus does engage in (most notably slavery), but the discussion amounts to Marcus going out of his way to justify it with Bible quotes and comparisons to Nazi slavery, before moving on.

Let's go back to Of the City of the Saved for a moment, for one more comparison. That novel contains a Roman character named Urbanus (I know, I know). He isn't the deepest of characters, but he's fleshed out more than enough to feel like a real person, in complete contrast to Marcus. Urbanus was hardly the main focus of City, and yet he still feels ten times as believable as Marcus. And though he's loyal to Rome throughout most of the book, his experiences of other cultures and worlds change his outlook and he begins to question some of the ideas he's been socialized into. We do not get that with Marcus Americanius Scriptor. For a while I wanted to give the book the benefit of the doubt and say that he was simply being written as an unreliable narrator, and that he'd develop as the story went on and he adventured more. Instead, as the book went on and got increasingly pro-Roman Empire I started to question the author's own beliefs. Rome triumphs at the end and converts scores of worlds to their "utopian" way of life - I could simply not believe that they would wipe the floor with the Nazis the way they did (especially when the Nazis have, of all things, House Mirraflex on their side). Forget Marcus's opinions: even the plot itself views Ancient Roman culture and warfare as near-perfect, and it tired me out to see the narration and plot condemning Nazis while portraying Ancient Roman society as the zenith of civilization. These two groups both have serious ethical faults, and it's possible to have Marcus be a biased narrator while still having the events of the book themselves portray Ancient Roman culture as fallible: something Warlords of Utopia just doesn't bother with.

Back to Marcus as a protagonist, though. Let's say we continue with the argument that the book is the way it is because Marcus is a biased narrator, and it doesn't mean that the book on a meta level is arguing that dictatorships or institutionalized pedophilia or imperialism (etcetc) are good. This comes into question when we look at the rest of the few traits he's given. By which I mean: this man is a total self-insert. He's from a rich family yet still grabs at power; he's very focused on reading and making deductions in a way that feels very "I'm superior because I'm intellectual"; he attacks soldiers and guards willy-nilly and hardly ever takes hits; and he's generally written without any major character flaws. This all rubbed me the wrong way, but you could make the argument I'm interpreting it all in bad faith. One thing that can't be pushed aside, though, is the way Marcus's wife Angela is written.

At eighteen, this guy marries a twelve-year-old (an age gap which is barely brought up), basically abandons her to go gallivanting in alternate dimensions for a large chunk of the book, meets an alternate-dimension version of her who has intimate sex with him on the first date (she's at least an adult by then), and both versions of her seem to be okay with him having cheated on Angela prime with the other Angela. The alternate version is mildly perturbed to hear of the main Angela's age upon marriage, which is barely touched on again, and then they have a threesome, at which point I was seriously considering dropping the book entirely. Marcus's relationship with Angela is a blatant self-insert fantasy which allows her little true agency or nuance, which is tiring enough, but the real sticking point here is that you cannot have a problematic biased narrator with such opinions as "pedophilia and slavery are okay" while also channeling all these self-insert fantasies through them. At least not without seriously raising some eyebrows. I'm not saying the book on a metatextual level condones these things, but it doesn't not condone them either. Certainly I never want to meet Lance Parkin after reading this.

I reserve 3/10 ratings generally for things that have promise, but are very lacking. And yes, this book has promise, and some of it is realized. There's a few lines in the prose that make the sense of scale this book has really hit, and hearing about the interactions between dimensions was seriously entertaining at points. It has some genuinely great moments. I was also intrigued by the bits of lore we got about how this ties into the greater Faction Paradox mythos, though some of the hints went over my head. There's an interesting plotline buried in here, but that's all it is: a big plotline, with nothing to fill in the gaps and make it meaningful. No characters with personality, no self-reflection on the morals involved, nothing but plot and the occasional moment that makes you want to push the main character off a cliff.

Can you believe this thing goes for a hundred bucks second-hand?

Memorable and admirable for its ideas alone, Of the City of the Saved by Philip Purser-Hallard explores the titular City: a galaxy-sized metropolis at the end of the universe which houses every human who ever lived. The City is an absolutely sprawling setting that holds infinite potential, with Districts for every culture imaginable, past, present, and future (and otherwise). There's so many things to explore and aspects of this setting to ask questions about, and while a lot remains unanswered, the book spans so many topics and settings to really make the most out of the page count. The plot only matters halfway, and the joy of exploring the City is the other half. Still, it's no wonder there's a whole short story series spinning off of this book. There's endless possibilities for exploration, and this book can only lay the groundwork; that's less a slight on the book itself, and more a testament to the brilliance of the setting and its scope. This is a long-ish book which thrives on making the setting feel rich and lived-in, yet there's still endless possibilities to explore.

Oh, yeah, the book also has a plot. It's pretty good. Introducing a rebel offshoot species of humans makes sense, as it's only natural that the City of the Saved wouldn't be for everyone – and when their origins are eventually revealed it all snaps into place satisfyingly. Their rebellion, and the ripple effects the introduction of potent weapons has, is explored from the perspectives of a litany of characters who we get to know throughout the course of the book.

These characters are all developed surprisingly well for how much the book jumps around in setting and perspective, although all the same, that broad scope did leave me wanting a bit more nuance to each character. Still, the cast really comes to life, and the author found ways to make even more minor characters (shoutout to Little Brother Edward in particular) interesting and engaging. Seeing things from their eyes really helps, as do the shifts in narration style that come with each perspective shift. Things like futuristic slang for Julian (a City-born Neanderthal who hangs around with posthumans), a complete lack of punctuation for Dedalus (an illiterate slave), and even the more minor style differences between characters liven up the reading experience immensely. It really feels like you're getting to see the City and the book's events through their eyes, moreso than it would if the narration style was the same throughout.

Still, the book suffers from a disinterest in focusing on a specific character, which is fine for most of the pagecount, but really ends up hurting the climax. Faction Paradox is a series of big, wild ideas more than anything, and the revelations the final third provides really had me impressed and excited, but the climax thrives entirely on those ideas as opposed to actually bringing the plot to a satisfying, character-based conclusion. Instead a compelling villain gets introduced, dumps a lot of exposition, and abruptly gets killed by a side character with little in the way of personality. The big rebellion isn't stopped, and the City is facing a new era of conflict which is only just beginning. The climax rides on its ideas, but the resolution (and lack thereof) is nonetheless sorely lacking.

And yet... I'm still giving it eight out of ten? Yes!! When you have a setting such as this, and ideas as big and awesome as this book has, you almost don't need plot. The scope of the City, its origins, its structure: these things are absolutely awe-inspiring, and it's an endlessly lively setting that the book explores to the fullest. Just let yourself get swept away in the excitement of learning about the City of the Saved and its past, and you won't be disappointed.

THIS STORY IS SO MUCH. THERE'S SO MUCH RANDOM s**t HERE AND IT'S SO GOOFY AND SILLY AND FUN. I recognize this is an extremely unorthodox take but "quality" be damned, this is literally the single most entertaining serial out of the entire UNIT era. Drags a little with the sudden shift in focus in the last two episodes but there's one genuinely good scene and a lot of memorably silly stuff near the end that keeps it going.

I watched the second half of this with my cousin who had never seen any Classic Who before and I think it really heightened the experience. The politics surrounding colonialism and capitalism are kinda up and down in this one but also oh my god look at that weird space baby guy why does he just live in a box

Favorite season 8 story and it's not even close. Finally some decent pacing, a cool alien concept with some weird science to boot, a bit of time travel f**kery – it's just what I like from Doctor Who. And oh my god can we talk about those costumes and set designs?? Genuinely some of my favorite work in all of the classic show up til this point.

I'm kinda surprised this one seems to be considered middling-to-bad among other reviewers, but I suppose I'm more here for the concepts than other people are – and if you're not as excited about the set design as I am this story will probably land less. My personal main criticism is that the Master didn't need to be here but that's just Season 8 in a nutshell.