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???