The City of the Saved (series)

The City of the Saved series was a collection of short story anthologies set in the eponymous City. Obverse Books began the series after obtaining the licence to the City in 2011; it was a spin-off of the Faction Paradox series.

History[[edit] | [edit source]]

Philip Purser-Hallard created the City of the Saved for the unproduced novel Iris Wildthyme in the City of the Saved. After that pitch was rejected by Big Finish Productions in 2001, Purser-Hallard recycled and further developed the setting for the Faction Paradox series through his contributions to The Book of the War and in his 2004 novel Of the City of the Saved....^[1]

Purser-Hallard viewed the City as a "seed concept" that could generate stories indefinitely, spanning all genres, time periods, and types of character. In 2005, Purser-Hallard and Faction Paradox creator Lawrence Miles co-wrote a pilot script for City of the Saved, a radio sitcom set in the City. Although the episode was recorded, it was never released.^[2]

Purser-Hallard said in 2007 that he would love to do a short story anthology set in the City, citing Lance Parkin's 2004 Prologue to Warlords of Utopia as a successful example of another author using the City.^[2]

In December 2011, six months after the release of their first Faction Paradox anthology A Romance in Twelve Parts, Obverse Books announced Tales of the City as part of their "Obverse Quarterly" anthology range.^[3] The anthology was the first of five edited by Purser-Hallard for Obverse's The City of the Saved line.

Several titles in the range were titled in homage to Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, which began with the novels Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, and Further Tales of the City. The first two of these titles were straightforwardly reused by The City of the Saved anthologies, while the third was referenced in the 2015 anthology Furthest Tales of the City.

In 2018, Obverse's The Black Archive series, whose editorial team was led by Purser-Hallard, began publishing monographs monthly rather than bimonthly. That year, the first City of the Saved anthology not edited by Purser-Hallard was released: Stranger Tales of the City, edited by series regular Elizabeth Evershed.

Anthologies[[edit] | [edit source]]

Title	Editor	Published
Tales of the City	Philip Purser-Hallard	1 June 2012
More Tales of the City		1 June 2013
Tales of the Great Detectives		1 October 2014
Furthest Tales of the City		31 October 2015
Tales of the Civil War		10 February 2017
Stranger Tales of the City	Liz Evershed	12 March 2018
Vanishing Tales of the City	Kara Dennison	9 December 2019