The Book of the War (novel)

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

Edited by Lawrence Miles and written collaboratively by more than ten authors, The Book of the War was formatted like an encyclopedia, with a number of stories spread across multiple alphabetically-sorted entries. In each entry, some words were emphasised in bold to point to other entries with that name, enabling the reader to jump around the book and read related entries.

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…

Alt text

The War so far (in highlights); the location of the exact centre of history; the lo-tech way to break into the Eleven-Day Empire; the truth about gravity spiders; the dangers of investigating Violent Unknown Events; the art of breeding your own timeship; a short history of the various ends of humanity; the fate of the Grandfather's Arm; the secrets of removing yourself from history while still leaving yourself free to interfere; a brief interruption from the future; where to meet every human being who ever lived; how to bring your world to the attention of the Spiral Politic using 23,000 corpses; why the War-time powers never recruit celebrities; the problems of running a time-active brothel; on telling the difference between the afterlife and the trailer; banality as a weapon of War; the Faction Paradox guide to Hollywood; and how the Sixth Wave revealed the truth about the enemy without even trying.

Entries

This page lists the entries in the order specified in the "Design Specs for Advanced Users", which were published on a hidden page of the Faction Paradox website,[2] rather than alphabetically as they appear in the book. Two errors were deliberately included in the "Design Specs": the nonexistent entry "Scarratt's Group" in "The A-Z of the War"; and the exclusion of an "Easter egg" entry which was not linked to in other entries and therefore unfindable except by reading in alphabetical order.

The Core Entries

The History of Faction Paradox

The History of Earth

The A-Z of the War

With the inclusion of the prior and subsequent entries, "Robert Scarratt" and "Jungle Children", this section includes one entry for every letter of the alphabet.[3]

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

Worldbuilding

Notes

  • While editing The Book of the War, 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."[4]
  • Miles carefully structured the book so it could also be understood if the entries were read in alphabetical order: at one point, he specifically requested that Jonathan Dennis rename a character to move the respective entry in the book.[5] The entries in several sections of the Design Specs reading order were notably given in alphabetical order.[2]
  • Miles was selective regarding which concepts were borrowed from the Doctor Who universe, particularly with regards to alien species. For instance, he had permission from the Robert Holmes estate to use the Sontarans, who had previously appeared in his The Faction Paradox Protocols audio stories, but he decided they weren't necessary.[6] In contrast, he obtained permission from Neil Penswick to use the Yssgaroth from The Pit, because, even though the concept was generic, Miles described "Yssgaroth" as "the best name I've ever heard".[7]
  • Besides its continuity connections to the Doctor Who universe, The Book of the War also included references to many stories from other genres and fictional universes:
  • Lawrence Miles briefly considered releasing an expanded version of The Book of the War on CD-ROM.[8] Though Mad Norwegian Press' other Faction Paradox 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.[6]
  • 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.[9]
  • The Book of the War won three awards from the Jade Pagoda mailing list in 2002: Best Anthology; Best Short Story, for the Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom-related entries; and, for its use of Faction Paradox, Best Returning Character or Concept.[10]

Who wrote what?

Simon Bucher-Jones, Daniel O'Mahony, Ian McIntire, Mags L. Halliday, Helen Fayle, Philip Purser-Hallard, Kelly Hale, Jonathan Dennis, Mark Clapham, and Lars Pearson[1] all contributed material to the book. Each contributors mostly worked on their stories independently, only discovering Lawrence Miles's added intersections with other stories once the book was released. It was deliberately kept unclear as to which authors contributed which entries, but later releases provided some clues.

Unincluded entries

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

Additionally, Simon Bucher-Jones wrote two extra entries, "Protective Neotony" and "Instant Animals", for the proposed CD-ROM expansion of the book; after the cancellation of that project, he published the entries on his blog.[8] Bucher-Jones returned to the concepts from "Protective Neotony" in his 2018 Faction Paradox short story The Short Briefing Sergeant's Tale as the "Hausanthropic equations".

Continuity

External links

Footnotes

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Lars Pearson (22 May 2003). Re: BotW Constructing Themes Question. The Faction Paradox Community.
  2. 2.0 2.1 Design Specs for Advanced Users. Archived from the original on 17 August 2003.
  3. In the original "Design Spec" document, the nonexistent entry "Scarratt's Group" was included in this section as an intentional error.
  4. Outpost Gallifrey Interview
  5. Re: JP The Book of War
  6. 6.0 6.1 Re: Faction Paradox (Non-BBC) - Your Favourites
  7. Bernice Summerfield: The Inside Story
  8. 8.0 8.1 Book Of The War unused material
  9. 9.0 9.1 Iris Wildthyme in the City of the Saved
  10. Jade Pagoda awards (2008). Archived from the original on 22 September 2008.
  11. The Faction Paradox Family
  12. Ask the Author SBJ
  13. Shard Apocrypha - Brakespeare Initialisation
  14. Pantechnicon Issue Eight
  15. Author! Author! DOM
  16. O'Mahony Gallifrey One Interview
  17. Brookhaven: A Filmography
  18. A Facebook post by Ian McIntire
  19. BBC Online Interview
  20. Helen Fayle on the Mal'akh
  21. Helen Fayle on Shelley and Lamia
  22. Helen Fayle on Keats and Shelley
  23. Helen Fayle on the Star Chamber
  24. Helen Fayle at FanFiction.Net via the Wayback Machine
  25. The Book of Taliesin: Stories
  26. 26.0 26.1 "So, Who Wrote What?"
  27. purserhallard on Twitter
  28. Lawrence Miles on Language, Literature and Lying to the Audience
  29. Re:"Through The Eye of Eternity" modest cough
  30. Lawrence Miles on Twitter
  31. Myth Makers Past Issues
  32. Rejected Book of the War entries
  33. Eddie Robson's previously unpublished entries