Faction Paradox: Of the City of the Saved..., by Philip Purser-Hallard

The City of the Saved is a vast city the size of a spiral galaxy. It exists in a pocket universe situated after the destruction of this universe. Its vast population is made up of the resurrected bodies of every human being that has ever lived. Obviously, this is massive high concept science fiction.

A lot of fans who read Faction Paradox: The Book of the War hated the idea of the City of the Saved, as it smacked of a religious notion of an afterlife. This is actually deceptive. As somebody points out in an introductory chapter to Of the City of the Saved..., the word 'saved' can have the meaning of data being restored onto a computer. It is a delicious play on words. Their is an ambiguity as to whether the resurrected humans are the genuine persons they pertain to be or manufactured facsimiles.

I am an evangelical Christian who believes in the resurrection of believers to eternal life and the unbelieving to eternal destruction, so naturally a novel about life after a sort of secular resurrection was of great interest to me. I have heard preachers say that if God were to let sinners into heaven, they would spoil the place. Reading Of the City of the Saved... certainly confirmed this idea in my mind. The City of the Saved might be inhabited by immortal resurrected humans, but it is certainly not the heavenly New Jerusalem. On the contrary, it is a hive of scum and villainy. The resurrected humans have brought with them every shade of depravity and nastiness of this life with them. The City of the Saved is a dystopia, with poverty, organised crime, prostitution, drug addiction and every thing else that makes life miserable, with the only difference being the inability of the city's inhabitants to harm or kill each other.

Having enjoyed This Town will Never Let Us Go enormously, I found myself wishing that Of the City of the Saved... was a Lawrence Miles book. Purser-Hallard does not quite have Miles' talent for entertaining high concept madness. I found it a little dense and a bit too violent for my taste in places. Compassion did not come across as that interesting a character, being another one of those moody, 'don't mess with me on a bad day' detective types. As with the 8th Doctor books, Compassion never quite lives up to her potential. At least in the 8th Doctor books, her abrasiveness was contrasted with the mild-mannered Doctor and the easy going Fitz. Without them she seems just a little uninteresting.

Nevertheless, this novel is not without some nice touches. Purser-Hallard's complex prose does a wonderful job of juxtaposing a surreal, dream-like atmosphere with the harshness and gritty realism of an urban environment. Of the City of the Saved... is an incredible experiment in world-building and the writer definitely manages to pull it off. The author wisely avoids the cliche of populating his afterlife with famous historical figures. Instead we get a cast that is far more varied. We are given the impression that the majority of the inhabitants of the city are quite different people to you and I. This is a humanity that has diverged in countless different evolutionary directions. If humanity is to last for millions of years into the future, as is clear in the Doctor Who universe, we can expect those from distant eons into the future to outnumber those from the past.

I was a little disappointed by the explanation for the city's origins when it was revealed towards the end. Without giving it away, it is not that different to some things we have seen in the Virgin New Adventure books. It came across as just a little unoriginal. The talking statue was cool, however.

A Time Lord, sorry Houseworlder, appears in this novel. One of the great ideas of Lawrence Miles was to inject mystery into the Time Lords by keeping them at a distance. That worked so well that when we get a Time Lord in this book, there is a real sense of a nature that is alien and remote from humanity. We are far away from Invasion of Time/ Arc of Infinity territory. There are other references to Doctor Who in this book, the half-Androgum character is an especially nice touch.

Of the City of the Saved... is not the easiest of books to read and is a little grim in parts, but is not without some great ideas.

This Town Will Never Let Us Go, by Lawrence Miles (Faction Paradox)

Five minutes ago, or maybe fifteen, she was squinting at the screen and trying to work out who the celebrity guest is on this particular show. The token sacrificial human, an old, sad, beaten-looking man, evidently trying to enjoy his time with these colourful puppet-breeds but realising they represent a world he no longer understands. Kermit the Frog described it as a 'great honour' to have him in the studio. Inangela finally identified him- shakily, it's got to be said- as George Orwell. She vaguely recalls that when she first walked into the stopover, the Muppets were in the middle of a comedy re-enactment of the 101 scene from 1984, starring Rizzo the Rat. Or at least she thinks she remembers that, but she could be retro-imagining it.

On the very first page of this novel we get the most surreal idea imaginable; George Orwell apparently appearing as a celebrity guest on The Muppet Show. Only a mind like that of Lawrence Miles could have come up with something like this. It's such a gloriously colourful and bizarre notion that it just sucks you in and draws you into the rest of the novel.

Like every other Lawrence Miles novel, This Town will Never Let us Go is not blessed with a strong plot and things start to get a bit frantic towards the end as the author tries to bring the book to some sort of resolution. I suspect most people who have heard of this novel know who Lawrence Miles is and will not be reading it in the hope of reading a tightly-written , gripping adventure. That's just not the sort of book that he writes. If you don't care for Lawrence Miles' blend of surrealistic madness and intellectual analysis of everything, you may as well not bother reading this.

The most distinctive literary feature of This Town Will Never Let Us Go is the highly involved narration. The book is narrated almost conversationally, as though Lawrence Miles were sitting with you, telling you the story, along with his opinions on modern life. Miles is almost become the central character in his own novel. It is a feature which risks alienating the reader, as it is fair to say that Miles uses the novel as a platform to preach his particular take on society. Being a pro-free market conservative who supported the War on Terror, I inevitably find myself disagreeing with Miles most of the time, but I still find his views very interesting.

While This Town Will Never Let Us Go is the first novel in the Faction Paradox series, it is not really about Faction Paradox. The Faction are more of a background presence. This novel differs from other Miles books in the scale on which it operates. While his other novels deal with grand, sweeping cosmic events, this book is all about ordinary characters and how they are affected by the unseen cosmic War.

Bizarrely, Lawrence Miles continues the original educational agenda of early Doctor Who. The first companions of the Doctor were a science teacher to teach young viewers about science and a history teacher to teach them about history. Lawrence Miles' books are rather thin on school teachers, but in his inimitable way, he educates fans about postmodernity, poststructuralist literary theory and cultural anthropology. This Town Will Never Let Us Go has the influence of the French postmodern philosopher Baudrillard written all over it. Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality is explored in depth and with it the notion that events like wars have a more substantial media existence than they do an actual spatio-temporal reality. Lawrence Miles also brings up some interesting anthropological ideas about the place of rituals and symbols and how magic has an important place even in modern society.

The novel is set in a world that looks very much like ours, but is not quite the same. The town in which the story unfolds is never named. At first I wondered if the setting was meant to be Italy, but then it became apparent that this place was meant to resemble 21st century Britain. The most obvious difference from our world is that it is being affected by the mysterious War. This seems to be the same war explored and detailed in The Book of the War. This War is very obviously analogous to the War on Terror. In a postmodern spirit, it is not at all clear whether the events of the book are meant to be taken literally on their own narrative terms or whether they are intended to be treated purely on a metaphorical level. Given the highly didactic nature of the book, the latter seems rather more likely. The appearance of a literal 'Dog of War' is a nice play on metaphors.

The characters are an odd bunch. We have the ritual-obsessed Goth, Inangela. It's hard to really get a feel on her character. She comes across as very confident and having mysterious depths. Her friend Horror is very shallow best-friend type, who turns about to be rather more important to the plot than might be expected. Many reviewers have suggested that these characters have a very Buffy flavour. I found myself taking a massive dislike to Valentine, an ambulance driver who is also a fanatical revolutionary type. He shows a callous disregard to human life. As somebody who works in an accident and emergency department, I was unconvinced by the realism of his activity. There is absolutely no way an ambulance could go off on excursions with a dying girl in the back. Ambulance crews are just too closely monitored for that to happen.

The most engaging character was Tiffany Korta, one of those manufactured pop stars. It's remarkably disconcerting to see her discovery of the way her media image is being manipulating. One of the most terrifying scenes is when she is put on 'trial' by her record company executives who seem to almost wield absolute power over her very existence.

As in Alien Bodies, we get a character called the 'Black Man.' He appears remarkably similar to the one we met in that novel. He gets a very powerful and quite scary scene with Valentine. The comparison between the Black Man and the strange media witch, Miss Ruth is interesting.

I found This Town Will Never Let Us Go an immensely interesting and enjoyable read, but then I am a massive Lawrence Miles fan. It is certainly not his best novel and I suspect those who dislike his work will not be impressed.

Dead Romance, by Lawrence Miles

The founder of time-traveller society was a great thinker, a great scientist, a great philosopher, and a great politician. That's what the stories say, although whenever Cwej told me the stories he always got distracted and started talking about rocket-ship fights with giant vampire-beasts. But the statue in the fortress? Just a great warrior. Because warriors were what Cwej's employers needed, I suppose. Warriors were what they wanted their agents to be.... When I think about Cwej, I sometimes end up thinking about two different people. Nice Cwej, who used to snuggle up next to me and watch night-time TV in the flat. The Cwej of cuddles. And Warrior Cwej, who did whatever his employers told him to, right up until the end. The Cwej of Holy War. The Cwej of Destruction. I think I know which Cwej is going to end up on top, if his employers ever get round to writing their history of their fight agaist the Gods.

Dead Romance is Lawrence Miles' best novel ever. Alien Bodies was great, but it pales in comparison to the brilliance of Dead Romance. Furthermore, Dead Romance sets a literary standard that outshines and outclasses every single Doctor Who novel ever written. I won't say this is the best Doctor Who novel ever, as it is not altogether certain this is a Doctor Who novel, but if it was, it would be the best Doctor Who novel ever.

Dead Romance was originally published as part of Virgin's Bernice Summerfield range of novels. It was more recently republished with minor changes by Mad Norwegian Press. It is not actually part of the Faction Paradox series (they are never mentioned in it), but does provide some background to how the Faction Paradox ideas and concepts developed. It is difficult to fit Dead Romance into any sort of continuity. The bottle universe idea was Miles' way of illustrating his denial that the Virgin and BBC novels occupy the same universe. The novel is part of a story arc within the Bernice Summerfield novels, but now that it was republished independently, it is not clear that this continuity still stands. Do the revelations about the Gods in Twilight of the Gods apply to the new edition of the book? The ideas in it are similar to those in the Faction Paradox books, but are certainly not identical. It's not at all certain that the Gods in Dead Romance are the same as the Enemy in The Book of the War.

This novel is closer to being Doctor Who than the Faction Paradox books. Cwej, first introduced in the New Adventures, is one of the main characters. Bernice Summerfield does not appear, but is referred to throughout the book. The Doctor is mentioned, described as 'the Evil Renegade,' according to Cwej a sinister character who kidnaps people and makes them think they are having wonderful adventures. We also get the Time Lords, Rassilon and even the Daleks without any copyrighted names being mentioned. The clever nameless references work really well and show just how shallow a lot of the continuity referencing in some Doctor Who novels can be.

Nevertheless, this is very much a Doctorless novel. Even the darkest of Doctor Who novels still have the reassuring presence of the Doctor. Dead Romance does not. There is no Doctor to rescue everybody here. We are told right from the start that the world is going to come to an end and it does. This is a dark, bleak novel pervaded with an overall mood of pessimism. Dead Romance presents an hopeless, chaotic and futile cosmos. This is a quite different mood to what we generally get in Doctor Who.

The story is told through a first-person narrative. Cleverly, this an unreliable narrator. In a postmodern spirit, we are never quite sure how much of the cosmic picture she has grasped. She is also clearly baffled by all the alien technology she encounters and so describes it in magical terms like 'potions.' This is a refreshing change from the technobabble you get in so much Doctor Who.

The narrator, Christine Summerfield (not an ancestor or in any way a blood relative to Benny) is a typical Lawrence Miles character, a cynical drug addict with very loose morals. I find her very likable. She is a down to Earth person who is easy to identify with. I much prefer her to Bernice Summerfield. Despite my adoration of the Virgin NAs, I absolutely hate Benny. She is far too overconfident and self-righteous. Christine is a much more believable character. Cwej comes across quite differently to how he appears in other novels. Part of the tragedy of the book is seeing just how corrupted he has become. The lack of redemption for him shows just how far this is from the happy humanism of Doctor Who.

Like every other Lawrence Miles book, the plot rambles a bit. There is a bit red herring half way through. There is also a massive twist in Dead Romance towards the end. I won't give it away, but it totally changes your perspective on the story and it makes the whole thing seem even more dark than it was up to that point.

I really appreciated the lack of action in the book. It is very much a work of reflection. It is all about exactly what is going through the mind of the protagonist and narrator. In fact, the only time in the book that she does something heroic, there is an apology!

The Time Lords are brilliantly portrayed. We never meet a flesh and blood Time Lord in the book, and this distance helps to keep them god-like and ethereal. They appear utterly cold and ruthless. They are simply beyond caring about the lives of human beings. Their obsession with altering the bodies of their subjects and employees is a new idea. I suppose the Rani must have learned her tricks on Gallifrey.

Dead Romance shares some common themes with the works of H.P. Lovecraft, as well as the sense of doom and cosmic pessimism. However, it stands above pretty much everything which is consciously written in the vein of Lovecraft. Seeing Miles manage to use the very same ideas as Lovecraft, yet avoiding the cliches of his imitators made me realise just how bad and pointless most Mythos fiction is.

Dead Romance is simply the cleverest and best written book ever to be associated with Doctor Who. It's absolute literary perfection.

The Book of the War, edited by Lawrence Miles (Faction Paradox)

Between the age of 11 and 14 I was massively into Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 game. This is a tabletop war game in a setting far into the future. Warhammer 40k is probably one of the most vivid and fascinating fictional universes ever created. I gave up Warhammer 40k when I was 14, but in my twenties I would actually buy the Games Workshop magazine, White Dwarf, not because I had taken it up again, but just to enjoy reading the background material. I think Warhammer 40k has gone downhill massively in recent years because of the efforts of Games Workshop editors to impose too much uniformity on their universe. They got rid of something that really made it work; the quirky sense of humour that characterised the background material in the early nineties. Reading The Book of the War reminds me of reading Warhammer 40,000 rulebooks and source books back in the early days of Warhammer 40k. It definitely has the feel of a role-playing source book, with all the elaboration on key characters and factions. It portrays a bleak and rather disturbing cosmos, yet embues that cosmos with a tongue in cheek humour. If the idea of buying a gaming book just to enjoy the source material makes any sense to you, then you are probably going to enjoy The Book of the War.

Lawrence Miles has always been much better at building worlds than coming up with effective plots. His books are always full of brilliant ideas, but tend to ramble and plod a little. This book therefore capitalises on his strengths by dispensing with any plot and just gives a A-Z guide to the various elements of the universe he effectively created out of Doctor Who. He is assisted in this by an imaginative group of writers notably including Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham, co-authors of the impressive Taking of Planet 5 within the BBC novels original War in Heaven arc.

The key elements of the War in Heaven, Faction Paradox, Celestis, humanoid TARDISes, Mictalan and the mysterious Enemy were all introduced by Miles in the BBC Doctor Who novels. Unfortunately, this stuff was too radical for the BBC range to handle properly so it was all retro-erased in The Ancestor Cell. The Book of the War undoes the destructive work of The Ancestor Cell and expands upon this new and disturbing version of the Whoniverse that we glimpsed in Alien Bodies.

For legal reasons this can't be proper Doctor Who. There are possible references to the Doctor if you look for them, but this is a book about the universe he might have inhabited rather than about the man himself. The elements created by Miles himself, such as Faction Paradox and Compassion are allowed in, as well as Cwej and the Yssgaroth with the permission of their creators. Other key Doctor Who elements have had a change of name. Hence, we get the Great Houses in place of the Time Lords and timeships for TARDISes. The War King is thought to be the Master and the Imperator is definitely Morbius.

The Time Lords, or Great Houses, as they are called in the book, are very much Lawrence Miles vision of the Time Lords. His genius is to combine the two models of the Time Lords that we get in Doctor Who; the predominant Robert Holmes idea of a corrupt and sinister society and the early War Games image of god-like beings. The Great Houses are as Machiavellian as they get, but they are also shown to be an almost all-powerful elemental presence in the universe. It is the Great Houses who have made history what it is. The War is not exactly a physical assault on Gallifrey, but an attempt to overthrow history as the Time Lords have directed it.

The Book of the War does not reveal the identity of the Enemy (would you really want it to?) but does give some elaboration of how they fit into the concepts of the War. Cleverly, a list of entries is offered relating to the Enemy with some intriguing titles, but these are purposely missing. It's a very clever way to play with the reader.

I was very glad to see the use of the Yssgaroth, courtesy of Neil Penswick. These help to tie this world to the mythos of Doctor Who. We get some great discussion about their history and relation to the Time Lords. Neil Penswick never made clear in The Pit whether the Yssgaroth are supposed to be the same as the Great Vampires in State of Decay. The Book of the War essentially treats them as the same. It also introduces the Mal'akh, humans who have been tainted by the Yssgaroth. These are identified with the Nephilim of Genesis 6 in the Old Testament.

One has to admire the sheer scope of this book. It does not simply describe characters and settings but outlines an entire cosmology. As well as the satire of popular culture that one can expect in a Miles book, we also get explorations of philosophy and temporal physics. The book often offers conflicting perspectives on the various concepts and characters, some psychological, some scientific, others theological. This leaves a certain doubt about the whole truth of the War.

In the About Time guides to Doctor Who, Miles and Wood distinguished between science fiction and fantasy by arguing that science fiction deals with humanity's relation to tools, while fantasy deals with humanity's relation to symbols. The Book of the War is totally in the latter category. It is a book about symbols and concepts. For instance Faction Paradox's 'Eleven Day Empire.' The historical change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar resulted in the loss of eleven calendar days. Rather than treating them as merely words and numbers on a paper calendar, these days are treated as having an independent existence which can be used as a stronghold for Faction Paradox. The Book of the War outlines a kind of Platonic metaphysics in which concepts have a real existence as entities. Hence a creature called a 'Memovore' can actually eat concepts! The concept of 'Biodata' does not seem radically different to Plato's concept of the 'Forms.'

One of the greatest aspects of the book is the playful use of language. Some of the titles of the entries are delightful- The Broken Remote, Production Hell, The Unkindnesses. Take the City of the Saved. A lot of readers were annoyed by that, thinking the idea of a city containing the resurrected form of every human who ever lived smacked of religion (there seems to be a big atheist contingent in fandom). Reading the word 'Saved' makes one assume that theological salvation is in mind. However, this is deconstructed in the novel Faction Paradox: Of the City of the Saved..., where somebody points out that 'saved' can refer to data being saved on to a disc or computer drive.

If you are fascinated by the Time Lords, if you enjoy exploration of the background of Doctor Who or you just love reading Lawrence Miles' leftfield ideas, you really need to read this book.