Wringing Off (novel)

Wringing Off was a novella by Ryan Fogarty published in November 2020.

It featured a number of Doctor Who universe elements licensed from their creators, including the Caxtarids from Kate Orman's Virgin New Adventures novels and Blair Bidmead's character Theo Possible. Insofar as it was spun off from the world of Faction Paradox, the cover bore the label "From the Silver Age of Faction Paradox", although it was not itself a part of the Faction Paradox series.

Publisher's summary[[edit] | [edit source]]

Fourteen years old. Crash landed on an alien planet. No way to call for help.

This is the problem facing the young delinquent Pyke when his prisoner transport wrecks on an impossible world. Everything hurts and nothing works. Can he survive by his wits and ingenuity? Can he even escape?

Either way Pyke must hurry because the monster he has been fleeing from is already here!

Plot[[edit] | [edit source]]

A prisoner transport carrying Pyke-Xi Raul wrecks on the planet Bokuvell, and Pyke frees himself by murdering the surviving Caxtarid guard. With the help of new friends from the native Petaloudepta, Pyke scavenges alien technology from sites where the Atlanteans and Court of Osirus had visited the planet. Using this technology he conducts an increasingly dangerous series of improvised rituals based on his experience in the Society of the Flamingo and at another universe's school of magic; the final and most dangerous of these, .TGA Greyspacing, leaves Pyke torn into two fragmentary selves, which in their selfishness destroy each other.

Characters[[edit] | [edit source]]

• Pyke-Xi Raul
• Caxtarid
• Leopold
• Sweet God
• Flamingo God

Worldbuilding[[edit] | [edit source]]

• The Atlantean base was made of impervium-lanthanide.
• The Society of the Flamingo worships the Flamingo God and her apocryphal Pink Guardian.

Notes[[edit] | [edit source]]

• The acknowledgements thanked Janea Farris, Kate Orman, and Mary Robinette Kowal, who lent their intellectual property to the story, as well as Andy Frankham-Allen, who published the author's short story Marooned at Teatime in The Lethbridge-Stewart Short Story Collection 2.
• The story was purportedly a sequel to Janea Farris's short story Lolly Eater, continuing the characters and setting of Bokuvell from the end of that story,^[1][2][3] allegedly one of those published in the Obverse Books Faction Paradox anthology Wallowing in Pessimism's Mire,^[4]. With this connection, the Candæmon's sugar crystals implicitly resemble lollies, and just as Lolly Eaters was praised for its "clever" references to Vladimir Nabokov,| Wallowing in Pessimism's Mire the Petaloudepta reference Nabokov's passion for lepidoptery.
• Pyke-Xi Raul's memories of his time studying at a school of magic in a parallel version of Earth match the continuity of the Harry Potter films. He mentions breaking one student's arm so he "could take his place for a bit"; this matches the third film, during which the actor for Gregory Goyle broke his arm, so in action scenes his character was replaced with a new character named in the script as "Pike". Similarly, he claims he was caught by a "meathead" from his Homeworld who had taken the place of a Bulgarian wizard named Victor, despite not looking anything like him, as part of a scheme to get with "Young Miss Watson"; this references how the actor for Viktor Krum – a Bulgarian wizard in the fourth film who takes Hermione Granger, played by Emma Watson, to the Yule Ball in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – didn't match the Harry Potter novels' physical description of Krum. In its physical description of Pyke-Xi, Wringing Off describes him as resembling a fourteen-year-old boy, matching the age of Pike in the film. In this way, the story explains these casting discrepancies.
• The story began with a quote from "Doctor John William Polidori, time-traveling vampire hunter". This version of the historical figure was used with permission from Mary Robinette Kowal, who created this version of Polidori for her 2014 "Glamourist Histories" novel Valour and Vanity and, with Paul Cornell's help, wrote him as the Doctor.^[5] Polidori had previously been mentioned in the Faction Paradox novel The Book of the War as part of the Shelley Cabal hunting the vampiric Mal'akh.

Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]

• John Polidori is a vampire hunter (PROSE: The Book of the War) and time travelled to Southwark in 1599. (TV: The Shakespeare Code)
• Atlantis sent out colonists in deep space, including on planets inhabited by humanoid insects. (PROSE: The Lost Ones)

External links[[edit] | [edit source]]

• Wringing Off on Amazon

Footnotes[[edit] | [edit source]]