The Book of the War (novel): Difference between revisions

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* The [[Clockwork Ouroboros]]
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* The [[Eleven-Day Empire]]: The [[1834]] Attack
* The [[Eleven-Day Empire]]: [[Clockwork Ouroboros affair|The 1834 Attack]]
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Revision as of 13:37, 12 July 2018

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prose stub

The Book of the War was the first novel in the Faction Paradox series of novels.

Publisher's summary

The Great Houses: Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral Politic.

The Enemy: Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.

Faction Paradox: Renegades, ritualists, saboteurs and subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the wreckage... assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's habitable.

The War: A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect."

Marking the first five decades of the conflict, THE BOOK OF THE WAR is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold on to your own past...

Entries

The Core Entries

History of Faction Paradox

The History of Earth

The A-Z of the War

Houses and Orders

The History of the Homeworld

The History of Posthumanity

The Academician's Story

The Non-History of the Celestis

The Shift's Story

The City of the Saved

The Impaler's Story

The Thirteen-Day Republic

Labyrinths

The Ghost Dance

The History of the Remote

Faction Hollywood

The End

Coda

References

Notes

  • While editing the Book, Lawrence Miles described it as "a continuity in a book, it's an encyclopaedia to the War Era universe. It's got a structure rather than a plot, the way history's got a structure or a Bible's got a structure. Some parts of the universe are cross-referenced with other parts, and it all comes together to make up this great big ... vision."[2]
  • "Design Specs for Advanced Users", purporting to reveal the "secret pathway running through the whole volume", were published on the Faction Paradox website, and they form a basis for the organisation of the entries on this page. The Specs specified that its listing contained "almost certainly at least one mistake", as well as "a single entry which isn't connected to anything else";[3] the mistake was the listing of the nonexistent "Scarratt's Group" entry under "The A-Z of the War", and the single unconnected entry was "Parablox" (here placed under "The End").
  • Lawrence Miles briefly considered releasing an expanded version of The Book of the War on CD-ROM.[4] Though Mad Norwegian Press' other Faction Paradox series books would be later be released as ebooks, CEO Lars Pearson said that the number of permissions that would be needed from the contributors made it untenable.[5]
  • The entry for the City of the Saved quotes a traveller's lyrical description of the City as "an urban sprawl the size of a spiral galaxy… a fabulous shimmering lightscape nonillions of miles across". This traveller was intended to be Iris Wildthyme.[6]
  • Miles considered using the Sontarans with permission from the Robert Holmes estate, but decided it wasn't necessary.[5]

Who wrote what?

Contributors to the book mostly worked on their stories independently, only discovering the added intersections with other stories once the book was released. It was deliberately kept unclear as to which authors contributed which articles, but later releases provided some clues.

Unincluded entries

The book lists Lance Parkin, David A. McIntee, and Eddie Robson as writers who "wanted to play but whose material didn't quite fit anywhere".

  • Parkin's contribution was an entry about Mr Saldaamir that was later published in the fanzine Myth Makers 13.[17]
  • McIntee spoke with Lars Pearson about contributing but never actually submitted any material.[18]
  • Robson's five entries were published online in 2017; they told a story about Faction Paradox's Father Katzmary, his "Minimeridas Project", and his daughter Tanya Glassman.[19] Robson would later reuse some elements of this idea in the Bernice Summerfield audios Beyond the Sea and Resurrecting the Past, both of which involved the planet Maximediras.
  • Simon Bucher-Jones wrote two extra entries, Protective Neotony and Instant Animals, for the planned CD-ROM expansion of the book; when that project was cancelled, he published the entries on his blog.[4]

Continuity

References

External links