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Faction Paradox #0
Faction Paradox: The Book of the War
A stand-alone novel in alphabetical order�
Before the Faction Paradox series from Image Comics, there was the War in Heaven—a wide-ranging conflict between the immovable Great Houses, the renegade Faction Paradox and other major powers. All of them possess time-travel technology—and all of them are trying to usurp various points in history, thus erasing their opponents from the timestream.
Marking the first five decades of the cosmic-spanning conflict, The Book of the War is an A to Z self-contained complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recorded time to the fall of humanity. This book chronicles the rise of the Faction as a renegade House, the creation of a living timeship named Compassion, some brutal battles across all of time and space and more.
All in all, The Book of the War serves as the No. 1 entry point into the Faction Paradox novel and comic lines.
Before the Faction Paradox series from Image Comics, there was the War in Heaven—a wide-ranging conflict between the immovable Great Houses, the renegade Faction Paradox and other major powers. All of them possess time-travel technology—and all of them are trying to usurp various points in history, thus erasing their opponents from the timestream.
Marking the first five decades of the cosmic-spanning conflict, The Book of the War is an A to Z self-contained complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recorded time to the fall of humanity. This book chronicles the rise of the Faction as a renegade House, the creation of a living timeship named Compassion, some brutal battles across all of time and space and more.
All in all, The Book of the War serves as the No. 1 entry point into the Faction Paradox novel and comic lines.
256 pages, Paperback
First published September 17, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
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July 2, 2012A novel - or perhaps a story-cycle - told in the form of an encyclopaedia. Which has itself been infected by a conceptual entity who at times merely interrupts, but elsewhere contradicts the text, or tells you why the encyclopaedia is out of date. More formal experimentation, in other words, than most modern litfic losers would ever manage, all snuck out in a Doctor Who spin-off. In a book which deliberately has missing entries, though (because when time itself can be rewritten, continuing ever to have existed is never guaranteed), it would have helped if the proofreading had been a bit more thorough so we could be sure all omissions and inconsistencies were deliberate.
March 25, 2021
“The Book of the War� is a marvelous piece of work. Something with its remit could easily have turned into pretentious, garbled nonsense illegible to outsiders � or into fanwank of the worst sort, essentially a fanon-riddled Wiki in printed form. And yet, it is neither.
For one thing, what it is, surprisingly enough, is very much a narrative novel, as opposed to a 'mere' encyclopedia (not that those can't be fun). It is a sort of roman fleuve, with an enormously clever structure, whereby the reader must piece the nonlinear plot back together by darting from one entry to the next. To give a fictitious example of the very real device, one long entry might end on the seemingly-inexplicable disappearance of the character being documented; and later, a short and seemingly-dry entry about a point of technobabble will retroactively allow the reader to understand how this disappearance came about, likely in an ironic, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents�-twist-ending kind of register.
Another neat structural trick is the way it can be read both as an independent work of fantasy (or possibly science-fiction; “Faction Paradox� as a whole skewers that line with reckless abandon; and if you want to chide me for the paradoxical nature of the "skewering a line" allegory, please consider that this is exactly the point), and as a new entry in the wide and tentacular shared universe commonly known as the DWU. I use the curious periphrasis because, of course, the Virgin New Adventure books, in the lineage of which the ‘Book� is directly posited, absorbed the worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and of H.P. Lovecraft into this Whoniverse. There is more artful pilfering here, as elements of “Dune� with their serial numbers filed off, and a distinct note of parody to top things off, are inserted into the mix. “The Book of the War� is not quite a spin-off of “Doctor Who� � rather, it seeks to define a universe of which “Doctor Who� is one of a thousand shattered fragments. It is “Doctor Who� which is revealed to share a universe with “Faction Paradox�, and not the reverse.
The physical book is a neat piece of design, also. That it has one of the all-time great fantasy covers of English literature is obvious enough; but to me, the starkly black-and-white ink illustrations peppering the inner pages are quite delightful in themselves, walking the line between a touch of comic-bookish fancy, and the gnarly, angular reality of the fictional universe posited by the book.
I would not say it is flawless, of course. Some entries are better-written than others; some of the treatment of Native American mythology reeks of clumsy appropriation with modern sensitivities (although this is a minor part of the novel's plot); some of the ideas are somewhat misjudged, like the overly materialistic depiction of the Great Houses, who seem surprisingly materialistic and hard-science-fictionny, coming from Lawrence Miles who said on many occasions that he sought to redefine them as magic-realist “time elementals�, embodiments of History rather than merely powerful aliens with time machine.
In addition, from the point of view of 2021, the “Book�'s pretenses of being a complete history of the War are harmed by the lack of treatment of various elements of War-lore which had yet to be devised at the time, or could not be involved due to copyright issues; the lack of any mention of the Osirian Court is striking to those who are familiar with the “Faction Paradox� audio dramas, picturesque figures like Godfather Auteur (for all that he postdates the book by a decade) or Iris Wildthyme are conspicuous in their absence, and of course, even if they are not the Enemy, it is hard not to wonder, in the back of your mind, quite how the Daleks are taking all of this.
Still, if you manage to track this down in some shape or form, it is a very rewarding, and surprisingly easy, read, especially if you have like-minded friends (online or otherwise) with whom to discuss it.
For one thing, what it is, surprisingly enough, is very much a narrative novel, as opposed to a 'mere' encyclopedia (not that those can't be fun). It is a sort of roman fleuve, with an enormously clever structure, whereby the reader must piece the nonlinear plot back together by darting from one entry to the next. To give a fictitious example of the very real device, one long entry might end on the seemingly-inexplicable disappearance of the character being documented; and later, a short and seemingly-dry entry about a point of technobabble will retroactively allow the reader to understand how this disappearance came about, likely in an ironic, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents�-twist-ending kind of register.
Another neat structural trick is the way it can be read both as an independent work of fantasy (or possibly science-fiction; “Faction Paradox� as a whole skewers that line with reckless abandon; and if you want to chide me for the paradoxical nature of the "skewering a line" allegory, please consider that this is exactly the point), and as a new entry in the wide and tentacular shared universe commonly known as the DWU. I use the curious periphrasis because, of course, the Virgin New Adventure books, in the lineage of which the ‘Book� is directly posited, absorbed the worlds of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and of H.P. Lovecraft into this Whoniverse. There is more artful pilfering here, as elements of “Dune� with their serial numbers filed off, and a distinct note of parody to top things off, are inserted into the mix. “The Book of the War� is not quite a spin-off of “Doctor Who� � rather, it seeks to define a universe of which “Doctor Who� is one of a thousand shattered fragments. It is “Doctor Who� which is revealed to share a universe with “Faction Paradox�, and not the reverse.
The physical book is a neat piece of design, also. That it has one of the all-time great fantasy covers of English literature is obvious enough; but to me, the starkly black-and-white ink illustrations peppering the inner pages are quite delightful in themselves, walking the line between a touch of comic-bookish fancy, and the gnarly, angular reality of the fictional universe posited by the book.
I would not say it is flawless, of course. Some entries are better-written than others; some of the treatment of Native American mythology reeks of clumsy appropriation with modern sensitivities (although this is a minor part of the novel's plot); some of the ideas are somewhat misjudged, like the overly materialistic depiction of the Great Houses, who seem surprisingly materialistic and hard-science-fictionny, coming from Lawrence Miles who said on many occasions that he sought to redefine them as magic-realist “time elementals�, embodiments of History rather than merely powerful aliens with time machine.
In addition, from the point of view of 2021, the “Book�'s pretenses of being a complete history of the War are harmed by the lack of treatment of various elements of War-lore which had yet to be devised at the time, or could not be involved due to copyright issues; the lack of any mention of the Osirian Court is striking to those who are familiar with the “Faction Paradox� audio dramas, picturesque figures like Godfather Auteur (for all that he postdates the book by a decade) or Iris Wildthyme are conspicuous in their absence, and of course, even if they are not the Enemy, it is hard not to wonder, in the back of your mind, quite how the Daleks are taking all of this.
Still, if you manage to track this down in some shape or form, it is a very rewarding, and surprisingly easy, read, especially if you have like-minded friends (online or otherwise) with whom to discuss it.
February 19, 2024
Absolutely fascinating and rare book. I actually got this one almost by chance; available copies in any forum are few and the prices usually high. I happened to be checking Abe books one night and saw a copy available for only $50. High but far below anything I might have expected.
I actually ended up with a signed copy at a very reasonable price. IN inside cover says its one of only 300 signed. I have no idea how I got this book! (Actually feels like a classic Faction Paradox memetic infiltration situation.)
This was reccomended to me some time ago by some mysterious Germans. I was discudding my love of epistalory paracosm dictionaries and guides; books about imaginary worlds which are set *within* those worlds, as if they were texts from the Paracosm itself. This love grew on Warhammer books like the Liber Chaotica, Liber Xenologis, the Sabbat Worlds Crusade and on Creatures of Near Kingdoms, the Dictionary of the Khazars and Wayne Barlowes 'Expedition'. (And I suppose on 'House of Leaves', though I missed the boat on that one.
I was only a mild Dr Who fan and knew almost nothing about Faction Paradox but the concept enthralled me; derp and edgy Timelords who go around doing whatever they like. Thats me! I thought, I'm derp and edgy!
I also have an interest in metatextuality which interacts with the story form, causal-warfare, reality-horror and a range of somewhat abtruse and weird fiction aspects. I kind of half worked on my own sequence of ideas based around the horrors of prescience and reality decay.
So I'm glad I have this. Its a charming labyrinthine text packed with ideas, like an encyclopedia for a wierd lost season of dark Dr Who that never existed. A lot of the concepts around identity, conceptual entities, ritual, fiction and biodata feel a lot like stories from the peak-modernism years of superhero comics, from the 90s to the mid 2000's, when Grant Morrison and Alan Moore both roamed free across the pages as Big Beasts of Oddity.
In its scale and gigantism the Book of the War (and the war it represents), rivals that other war-obsessed Paracosm of Warhammer 40k, and on the further edge the concepts of 'Book of the War' seem to brush against those of 40k. Its not unreasonable to imagine an Inquisitor of the Ordo Chronus running into some skull-masked ritualistic time-travellers from Faction Paradox, neither of them being sure what to make of the other. The meta-scale manipulations of prophecy and causality, with varied groups attempting to hide their victories inside their defeats, trying to intermix the base strands of inevitable success into a weave of irresistable failure, also remind me of Dune and 40k, especially the final books of the Horus Heresy, which came out as I was reading this.
Of particular interest is the a-temporal nature of the conflict and the varied time-catastropies and enormous, even ridiculous subtleties engaged in to fight such a conflict. The image of a war fought largely in the gaps and ephemera of much larger, more classically violent and massive pan-galactic conflict, but which is in effect larger than the 'main screen' conflict it insinuates, a war of details, manipulation and deception. The image of Homeworlds map of the war being a 'tube map' a diagram with places utterly seperate from each other in both space and time but linked deeply in the minds of the belligerants, a 'war front' made up spatialy of scattered pin-pricks of wide history, reminds me a little of the otherworld imagined in Margaret St Clairs 'The Shadow People' or the schizoidal fantasies of the Shaver Mythos, with elevators in select buildings going down to secret floors.
The writers views on modern culture are ably if unsubtly conveyed.
I am curious how much of the 'New Who' background was influenced by, or just taken from the Faction paradox universe, or are they parralel texts, each tacity influencing the other but evolving seperately.
I hope I don't become a Faction Paradox fan, finding all those books and performances is going to be a nightmare.
I actually ended up with a signed copy at a very reasonable price. IN inside cover says its one of only 300 signed. I have no idea how I got this book! (Actually feels like a classic Faction Paradox memetic infiltration situation.)
This was reccomended to me some time ago by some mysterious Germans. I was discudding my love of epistalory paracosm dictionaries and guides; books about imaginary worlds which are set *within* those worlds, as if they were texts from the Paracosm itself. This love grew on Warhammer books like the Liber Chaotica, Liber Xenologis, the Sabbat Worlds Crusade and on Creatures of Near Kingdoms, the Dictionary of the Khazars and Wayne Barlowes 'Expedition'. (And I suppose on 'House of Leaves', though I missed the boat on that one.
I was only a mild Dr Who fan and knew almost nothing about Faction Paradox but the concept enthralled me; derp and edgy Timelords who go around doing whatever they like. Thats me! I thought, I'm derp and edgy!
I also have an interest in metatextuality which interacts with the story form, causal-warfare, reality-horror and a range of somewhat abtruse and weird fiction aspects. I kind of half worked on my own sequence of ideas based around the horrors of prescience and reality decay.
So I'm glad I have this. Its a charming labyrinthine text packed with ideas, like an encyclopedia for a wierd lost season of dark Dr Who that never existed. A lot of the concepts around identity, conceptual entities, ritual, fiction and biodata feel a lot like stories from the peak-modernism years of superhero comics, from the 90s to the mid 2000's, when Grant Morrison and Alan Moore both roamed free across the pages as Big Beasts of Oddity.
In its scale and gigantism the Book of the War (and the war it represents), rivals that other war-obsessed Paracosm of Warhammer 40k, and on the further edge the concepts of 'Book of the War' seem to brush against those of 40k. Its not unreasonable to imagine an Inquisitor of the Ordo Chronus running into some skull-masked ritualistic time-travellers from Faction Paradox, neither of them being sure what to make of the other. The meta-scale manipulations of prophecy and causality, with varied groups attempting to hide their victories inside their defeats, trying to intermix the base strands of inevitable success into a weave of irresistable failure, also remind me of Dune and 40k, especially the final books of the Horus Heresy, which came out as I was reading this.
Of particular interest is the a-temporal nature of the conflict and the varied time-catastropies and enormous, even ridiculous subtleties engaged in to fight such a conflict. The image of a war fought largely in the gaps and ephemera of much larger, more classically violent and massive pan-galactic conflict, but which is in effect larger than the 'main screen' conflict it insinuates, a war of details, manipulation and deception. The image of Homeworlds map of the war being a 'tube map' a diagram with places utterly seperate from each other in both space and time but linked deeply in the minds of the belligerants, a 'war front' made up spatialy of scattered pin-pricks of wide history, reminds me a little of the otherworld imagined in Margaret St Clairs 'The Shadow People' or the schizoidal fantasies of the Shaver Mythos, with elevators in select buildings going down to secret floors.
The writers views on modern culture are ably if unsubtly conveyed.
I am curious how much of the 'New Who' background was influenced by, or just taken from the Faction paradox universe, or are they parralel texts, each tacity influencing the other but evolving seperately.
I hope I don't become a Faction Paradox fan, finding all those books and performances is going to be a nightmare.
January 10, 2014
A lexicon novel from a spinoff Doctor Who storyline. (It does not directly involve any canonical Who characters, and the terminology is painted over.) The history-spanning, insular, weakly godlike civilization has run into an unnamed Enemy. This is a dictionary of factions, technologies, personages, and adjunct factors from the War's early years (for certain agreed-upon values of "year"). Lexicon entries are threaded together in several ways to form several implied narratives -- of which some are interesting and some are dull. Nonetheless the book is a worthwhile example of a bunch of crazy people writing something impossible.
February 20, 2021
Expansive, egregiously convoluted, and entirely excellent.
May 18, 2022
One of the most impressive things about The Book of the War is that it exists at all.
I don't mean that as an insult or even faint praise. This is a book where the editor Lawrence Miles took everything he liked about and had written for Doctor Who as a setting and a bunch of ideas that he wanted to explore further, and then rounded up several other authors (some of whom had written for the Doctor Who line and some who hadn't) and then all of these writers contributed things that they were interested in, whether ideas they wanted to explore and expand on, other pieces of media, or bits and pieces from the long history of Doctor Who. And then through three tons of elbow grease they put together an encyclopedia that reads like a single piece of work. And on top of all that it's incredible.
The Book of the War is an in-universe encyclopedia of the first fifty years of a time-spanning conflict between the Great Houses, who mapped out the long stretches of history, and the Enemy, a mysterious opposing force whose existence should be theoretically impossible but exists anyway. Between them is a group of Great House renegades named Faction Paradox who are opposed to both sides.
The Book goes into details about events we had seen or were referenced in the Eighth Doctor Adventure novels such as Alien Bodies, Interference, The Taking of Planet 5, Shadows of Avalon, and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, while also going further and expanding the setting in many ways that they couldn't have if they were still part of Doctor Who proper, while setting up and foreshadowing events that would take decades before they paid off.
It would be wrong to call The Book of the War just an encyclopedia, though it is that, as it's more a collection of short stories. , narratives emerge in the various entries, and several of the missing ones, with a few strands weaving in and out of the entire work.
And if all of that wasn't enough, the entire work also has a lot to say about humanity, civilization, culture, stagnation, the effects of war, in-groups and out-groups, media, cultural imperialism, and of course, the entertainment industry in Hollywood.
So again, the fact that this book exists at all is truly amazing, and speaks to the massive amount of talent of the people who brought it into existence.
I don't mean that as an insult or even faint praise. This is a book where the editor Lawrence Miles took everything he liked about and had written for Doctor Who as a setting and a bunch of ideas that he wanted to explore further, and then rounded up several other authors (some of whom had written for the Doctor Who line and some who hadn't) and then all of these writers contributed things that they were interested in, whether ideas they wanted to explore and expand on, other pieces of media, or bits and pieces from the long history of Doctor Who. And then through three tons of elbow grease they put together an encyclopedia that reads like a single piece of work. And on top of all that it's incredible.
The Book of the War is an in-universe encyclopedia of the first fifty years of a time-spanning conflict between the Great Houses, who mapped out the long stretches of history, and the Enemy, a mysterious opposing force whose existence should be theoretically impossible but exists anyway. Between them is a group of Great House renegades named Faction Paradox who are opposed to both sides.
The Book goes into details about events we had seen or were referenced in the Eighth Doctor Adventure novels such as Alien Bodies, Interference, The Taking of Planet 5, Shadows of Avalon, and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, while also going further and expanding the setting in many ways that they couldn't have if they were still part of Doctor Who proper, while setting up and foreshadowing events that would take decades before they paid off.
It would be wrong to call The Book of the War just an encyclopedia, though it is that, as it's more a collection of short stories. , narratives emerge in the various entries, and several of the missing ones, with a few strands weaving in and out of the entire work.
And if all of that wasn't enough, the entire work also has a lot to say about humanity, civilization, culture, stagnation, the effects of war, in-groups and out-groups, media, cultural imperialism, and of course, the entertainment industry in Hollywood.
So again, the fact that this book exists at all is truly amazing, and speaks to the massive amount of talent of the people who brought it into existence.
June 2, 2025
I'd been meaning to get round to reading some Faction Paradox for a while, since I had gathered from various other friends that this was the kind of thing I'd probably like. The Book of the War was recommended by several people as the best place to start. It's a non-linear narrative arranged in the style of an encyclopaedia with entries in alphabetical order, and cross-references that you can follow from entry to entry as you choose. I found I quite enjoyed this as a way of reading - there was something curiously relaxing about not being quite sure how much of the book I had still to go at any given point - although it did also mean that I didn't quite know when I'd finished, which made for a bit of an anti-climax. It's full of really neat ideas and what-ifs, though, which are indeed very much the kind of thing I like. Also, I am now squinting at all sorts of things in New Who and wondering if they are allusions to Faction Paradox, which is fun.
April 23, 2024
An absolutely fascinating way to worldbuild: write an in-universe encyclopedia!
A fantastic, fun read; if you're someone who reads educational articles and books for fun, you will get sucked right into the encyclopedia aspect and stop reading it as a fiction and more like a historical event...... up until a hilarious or outlandish high-tech scifi sentences catches you off guard, and your brain screeches to a halt as it remembers this is Scifi.
Well worth the read, with very nice illustrations throughout, and tons and tons of world-building for the Doctor Who expanded universe.
A fantastic, fun read; if you're someone who reads educational articles and books for fun, you will get sucked right into the encyclopedia aspect and stop reading it as a fiction and more like a historical event...... up until a hilarious or outlandish high-tech scifi sentences catches you off guard, and your brain screeches to a halt as it remembers this is Scifi.
Well worth the read, with very nice illustrations throughout, and tons and tons of world-building for the Doctor Who expanded universe.
December 11, 2021
The first in the series of Faction Paradox Doctor Who spinoff books, this is supposedly an encyclopedia of things in the Faction Paradox world which sort of comes together to make a story or several stories (an approach also used by Christopher Priest in The Islanders). I admit I did find it all pretty confusing, but it was engaging enough that I've got hold of the next few volumes in the series and will start getting through them at the rate of one a month for the next while.
May 31, 2025
“The Book of the War� is an extremely dense and occasionally confusing book for the entry to the Faction Paradox series. There are some interesting bits, like Anastasia and the Broken Remote though, and it intrigues me enough to continue looking through this semi-spin-off.
February 14, 2023
Incomplete read - definitely will return to this later on though. Tons of thrilling ideas and concepts.
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August 6, 2016A bit of a weird on this. Lawrence Miles created Faction Paradox as a time travelling voodoo-esque cult as a villain for the BBC range of Eighth Doctor books. The BBC took the Faction in a different way to what Miles originally intended so he spun them off into their own series. Whilst not being massively popular it is, imho, one of the better Doctor Who spin-offs. They have a series of audios and quite a few well-received original novels. The Book of the War was the first release but instead of being a standard novel it is an encyclopaedia which doesn’t read in a normal way. However Miles has actually published a ‘reading order� for the entries which links the entries into a narrative. This made the book very hard going but by sticking with it I do now know who ‘The Enemy� is and there were some excellent sections in their. The bits on The Great Houses (Timelords) and how they approach warfare with another time active race was brilliant, as was what became of The War King (The Master).
How I got the book: I bought it many many years ago when it first came out but despite many attempts at trying to read it found it too hard to get into.
How I got the book: I bought it many many years ago when it first came out but despite many attempts at trying to read it found it too hard to get into.
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