Faction Paradox

AUDIOS

The Faction Paradox Protocols: The Eleven Day Empire

Primer for the Spiral Politic (Post-War Edition)

1: Faction Paradox

Era: Non-specific.

Technology: Post-linear (subtle), time-active.

Even before the outbreak of the "War in Heaven", Faction Paradox was regarded as the most unpredictable (and opportunistic) of the time-active powers. Aware of the precarious nature of history — but under no obligation to protect it — while the other Great Houses were still attempting to uphold a "universal order", the Faction was following its own, far more ambiguous, protocols. Ruthless, secretive and at times difficult to understand, it's hardly surprising that the Faction should have eventually found itself under siege from its rival powers...

My Review: The Eleven-Day Empire is a grandiose title, but a deserved one as the story is set almost entirely within the hallowed bolt hole of the Faction Paradox, until it's invaded of course. The story is one of politics and chess. The red king is Godfather Morlock and his pawn Justine is turned into a queen by story's end. The black queen is Lolita, a ruthless sociopath who kills as many on her own side as her enemy. The board is then positioned for the climax in The Shadow Play, ending with two pieces removing themselves from the board and the red king resigning himself to fate, both winning and losing in full measure. It's an interesting tale with a simple plot at the heart of it. Lolita's grab for power.

The Faction Paradox Protocols: The Shadow Play

Primer for the Spiral Politic (Post-War Edition)

2: The Sontarans

Era: Last thirteen-million years.

Technology: Military (blatant), limited time-awareness.

It's perhaps unwise to think of the Sontarans as a species, as such. A homunculus breed, hatched by the million and engineered for full-engagement warfare, the Sontaran military machine is regarded by many time-active cultures as an "occupational hazard": a force of nature rather than a race, compelled by duty and genetics to acquire new technologies for its endless war effort. It should be remembered, however, that with the backing of a higher power even the crudest of breeds can become something quite different.

My Review: Lolita is a canny campainer with 1001 plots and deceptions in play all at once and so it's inevitable that one will succeed, but her victory is pyrric at best as her chief rival and her associate/lackey escape in a stolen time ship just before the Eleven-Day Empire and its contents are consumed utterly...checkmate? we'll see...

The Faction Paradox Protocols: Sabbath Dei

Primer for the Spiral Politic (Post-War Edition)

3: Sabbath Dei (1740-1782 AD?)

Era: Human historical (pre-industrial period). Technology: Acquired, ritual time-awareness.

Right from its creation, the secret intelligence service of Great Britain was touched by a streak of ritual: its initiations were usually occult, its codes based on astrological or alchemical ciphers. When Faction Paradox first entered Earth history in the 1700s, the Service took an immediate interest in the new arrivals' own ritual practices, and in the inevitable feud between British and Faction agents no single figure was as important as Sabbath. He's now remembered as one of the few individuals to bring his own agenda to the War...

My Review: This is something of a disapointment after the high drama and excitement of the previous two audios. Gone is the in-depth exploration of Faction Paradox, it still gets a few curt lines here and there about previous activities, but considering the series is called the Faction Paradox Protocols I did expect things to be a little more Factiony. The dull and simple intrigues of the court are all handled with the ham-fisted incompetence of a bun vendor but things are somewhat saved by the characters, they may spout rubbish at times but they say it in an interesting way. The unconvincing tranny pretending to be a nobleman for instance, I've seen far more more convincing drag kings at a pride march! Sabbath seems to have read the script before the story started and so seems to know what is going on while everyone has to be led like lambs to the plot devices. Sandwich and Bute seem simple cliches and Merely Loopy King George 3 is like a puppy in a room full of kittens, unsure what's going on but quite able to force everyone else to go along with it. The automata sounds like the narrator from Monkey, so that's something at least. And Mary "Compassion" Culver seems to be playing the mad mystic woman to the hilt, did they get her drunk before the recording or is it deliberate?

The Faction Paradox Protocols: In the Year of the Cat

Primer for the Spiral Politic (Post-War Edition)

4: In the Year of the Cat

Era: Human historical (later period). Technology: Military (self-contained), non-time-active.

By the end of the fifth millennium AD, the homunculi created by the human species — clones, cross-breeds, fighting-machines and artificial intelligences of all descriptions — outnumbered humanity by more than thirteen to one: but even so, there were no creations like those of Peking. Heading a thousand-strong army of individually-crafted automata, the twelve commanders were self-aware embodiments of the oriental zodiac, forged to a strict astrological design and said to incorporate history itself in their operating program. After the fall of Peking, however, most were never accounted for...

My Review: This one is much better than the last, it's far more interesting and exciting. The plots are plottier, the nasties are nastier, the shadows are sharper and the come-backs are wittier. It's like all the goodness was sucked out of the last story and added to this one to make it even betterer than it would have been otherwise. The verbal sparing is wonderful, Jussy vs Lolly is really good and Lizzy vs. Tranny is sublime. Lolita makes her presence felt with more subtlety than I'd have thought, instead of an acme anvil-esque clang it's more of an oooh-aaaah Cantona moment. Sabbath is now under remote control so it's safe to assume that he's really been told what's going on this time, rather than suspect him of being a time traveller from the future with an unexpectedly informed knowledge of events, or at least an unusually good telepath/psychic/witch/clairauditant. Maybe he's all of these anyway? Mildewed Mistress Culver is pretty redundant, she may as well have been a voice in a mirror or a crystal ball for all the purpose her being there served. The politics of Homeworld make a strange sort of sense, Lolita is like Thatcher, no one dare question her authority as long as they think they're going to get what they want, no matter what crimes they have to share responcibility for. Thatcher was of course famopusly stabbed in the back by her own party when they realised they were really just the playthings of a dictator and got rid of her while they still could. Lolita's interference might explain why I think Blackadder the Third is the best one of the lot too...

The Faction Paradox Protocols: Movers

Primer for the Spiral Politic (Post-War Edition)

5: The Blood Coteries

Era: Posthuman historical. Technology: Variable, occasionally time-active.

The demise of Earth was followed by a period in which there was, effectively, no such thing as the human species; a period in which humanity suddenly found itself released from its heritage, with genetic manipulation and vast tracts of space separating the survivors from everything they'd once been.

Many "posthuman" societies inevitably became glorious, grotesque Princedoms, and none more so than those of the Blood Coteries who — like the Medici and Borgia families of antiquity — commissioned the greatest art and culture of their age even as they conducted unimaginable vendettas and poisoned their potential rivals...

My Review: This CD sees the introduction of the FP universe version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in the persons of two amiable employees in the Homeworld's top secret prison complex (I wonder if it's called Shada?) They wheel Justine to her slot in the hive-structure of the place. Justine meanwhile dreams of her past, which is in fact her meeting with the Faction and more specifically Godfathers Morlock and Sabbath. They're a couple of hunters abroad, looking for someone to kill. Far more interesting however is the fruit loop Shuncuker, an amiable sociopath when she's not a homicidal maniac. Demerera Cline is your typical vampire in distress, except she's distress because she can't find someone to kill. She's one of these fancy post-human blood suckers that like art and assassination in equal measure. There's also a great possibility that she's channelling Lolita, or maybe she is Lolita or a great-granddaughter anyway. It's speculated that Lolly was infected by Yssgaroth and vampiric in nature (Compassion certainly is) so maybe her children form the blood coteries by perverting human nature and pulling humanity out of the ghost point by the canines? Anyway things all move in random precision towards the inevitable cliff-hanger and Justine's escaped from her prison and confronts the Shunned-Cooker...

The Faction Paradox Protocols: A Labyrinth of Histories

Primer for the Spiral Policit (Post-War Edition)

6: Mr Smith

Era: Non-specific, sub-historical. Technology: Irrelevant

It's now acknowledged that the Great Houses were largely responsible for creating the current shape of history, not simply by interfering in major events (although they may have dabbled) but by engineering the entire framework of history as a single, definite structure. What's less well-known is just how easy it is to access that structure's foundations.

Before the War, it was usual for Great Houses installations to be linked to the Houses' "records library", buried in the framework beneath normal-time: though the War made these access-points a liability, many still exist, and encounters with the library's guardian aren't unknown....

My Review: The One with the Minotaur sees the BBV FP range come to a suitable weird end, with the paradox of Justine's imprisonment and awakening being both resolved and created. Smith obviously met an evil renegade at one point, because he seems to dress a lot like him. Chucki and Jussy have a bit of a hissy-fit before settling their differences and taking it all out on Demorera. We hear about weird creatures with no faces that can hunt down weird time-paths and then there's that whole bit with the maze, if the GH's can off-set a huge library relative to a prison, then might they not off-set a whole new universe to the current one? It's be fun to try surely? They could build easy access tunnels to the empire of the Enemy and sabotage them/it easily. Anyway, we see Stabby Sabbath give poor Emma a terminal scratch and Morlock is more archaic than ever before with his trademarked brand of mystic mumbo-jumbo. Lizzy makes a welcome appearance at the end too, these last 2 stories really could have used someone sane to blance out all the weirdoes. The two boys were just too anonymous and weak-willed to be very effective, although they did try a bit, bless. There's also a cameo appearance of sorts by Compassion aka Mistress Culver, but as the story and this chapter of the saga ends we're left wondering just what the bloody hell it is that she's up to...

The True History of Faction Paradox: Coming to Dust

Naples, 1763. The Great Ape of Posto di Forragio is on show, an exhibition to amuse jaded foreign tourists. However, there are three Englishmen who recognise that the creature is no mortal beast, but a harbinger of ancient evil from before the time of the Pharaohs — and one which may presage the return of something thought long buried.

To prevent this, they must turn to Cousins Justine and Eliza, the mysterious representatives of the Faction Paradox — but any dealings with the Faction Paradox always come at a price.

My Review: Coming to Dust is something of step back, after the build up of characters and events, suddenly everything's ignored and things start all over again with a different enemy, in this case Sutekh. The characters seem to have mutated beyond recognition too, gone is the quiet reassured Justine and in her place is Shuncuker-lite who has none of the grace or poise of her earlier self and even less wisdom than that. Eliza too is different, before she was a sassy counter-point to Justine, now she's a wise-cracking cliche that's more Paris Hilton than Lara Croft. The guest cast are good however, when you hire quality you get it and it's evident as soon as Gabriel Woolf and Julian Glover start talking. The vampire duo are just inferior clones of the ciphers used in Movers and Labyrinth, just the names and voices are changed, circular history or lazy writing? Probably both.

The True History of Faction Paradox: The Ship of a Billion Years

The confrontation between Cousin Justine of Faction Paradox and the Egyptian deity Sutekh has left the adventurers leaderless and Justine herself a prisoner, enslaved by an ancient and powerful being on a billion-year cruise across the universe.

As Eliza and the Society of Sigismondo di Rimini go to desperate lengths to locate their lost companion, and Justine becomes embroiled within Osirian court politics, neither knows that they are on a fateful collision course towards a final clash with Sutekh himself...

My Review: Peter Miles almost steals every scene he's in, his rich tones are like honey. The second half of the story begun in Dust reaches something of a complicated and syncronicitous ending as the results of Sutekh's evil are used against him, lucky, eh? New Justine fails to impress yet again and she's consigned as a slave for half the story as punishment for it. Eliza gets a lot more exposition to say as a result, luckily though she does get some classic corridor scenes and even a meeting with Sutekh so she doesn't feel left out. Then it's decided near the end that suddenly the sub-baddies aren't working for the big baddie after all, but rather against him, again this is lucky, and to get them out of the way they're allowed to go free because they're now the best of friends. There's a cool bit with a sun and a plug n' play baby, but it's really not a patch on anything from the BBV era. I'm hoping that if part 3 is made then it's directed by someone who knows how to do a FP story...ie Nigel Fairs

The True History of Faction Paradox: Body Politic

Facing a divided Council and fighting a nine-hundred-and-twenty-front war across time and space, the War King sends Ambassador Mortega from the Homeworld to the Osirian Court, to combat the new power that has risen in their midst that challenges the might of the Great Houses. Meanwhile, by gathering the complete biodata of Osiris, Justine plans to resurrect the only Osirian capable of standing against Sutekh the Destroyer. But the forces at work on the Homeworld may soon intervene fatally in Justine's plans...

The True History of Faction Paradox: Volume 4

As Sutekh makes a bid to seize the throne of the Osirian Court, Justine and Anubis put their plan into motion. But is the power of Horus himself enough to prevail against the might of the Destroyer? On the Homeworld, the War King has decided, against the wishes of half the Council, to bring Faction Paradox back into the fold-- a move which may play directly into the hands of the maverick hybrid Lolita, and bring chaos to the Great Houses...

The True History of Faction Paradox: Volume 5

Synopsis tba

The True History of Faction Paradox: Volume 6

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Faction Paradox: The Book of the War

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, ritualiists, 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...

My Review: I'm currently up to F (just about to start reading about Fashion Paradox) and it's a very interesting book so far. I'm barely resisting the urge to duck and dive through it at random, I feel that by reading it once through from cover to cover will give me a fuller understanding, and then I can look at specific articles again later when I need to look them up again. I also like the idea of The Shift making an appearance now and again to give an acidic commentary on things. What a nice lady, I like her. One negative thing to say however, the text goes right up to the binding, making it necessary to force the book wider open than I normally would like, especially when there's such a fancy border on the other side this situation could have been avoided imo. Read up to H now, lots of really weird and cool stuff. Not quite sure I agree with this ghost point history stuff, maybe my inner trekkie is rebelling. Mujun: The Ghost Kingdom seems to have a remarkably similar plot to the first 2 BBV FP audios (The Eleven-Day Empire & The Shadow Play), this could be some sort of prediction by Faction Hollywood, or an in joke? I liked the clever dig at Big Brother and other sad-act so-called reality TV shows. Is the Shift's account of the future war destruction of Mictlan considered a true depiction of what happened or rather a subterfuge cover story?

Faction Paradox: This Town Will Never Let Us Go

This is the place where its body is buried... From up here you can see it all, hear it all, taste most of it and feel the rest when the electric lights and the satellite signals prickle against your skin. The town, from midnight to six, marked out in headlights and the flash-fire of a culture in War-time. Séance-messages written in the patterns of the road signs, and ghost-transmissions scrambled into the background noise of the traffic. Animal scent-signals from the fried food stands. All describing something, buried under the tarmac and the street-geometry. Down there, a girl in a fake-bone mask is working on a ritual to bring it to the surface. A popular performing artiste with a navel stud and serious identity problems is finding herself stalked — literally — by her own image. An ambulance crewman is about to find his own way of getting involved in the War. And bringing them all together, in one neat little urban mythology, there's Faction Paradox — part cult, part subculture, part pop phenomenon and part criminal syndicate, either watching-without-being-seen or simply not existing at all (at least until someone invents it). Assuming they're not wholly imaginary, the archons of the Faction seem like the only ones who know what this town really is — what every town really is — and what's bound to happen when it wakes up.

My Review: This Town... is well weird, I like it...Something feels a bit off about the whole mass media idea, it feels more like a Remote agenda than a Faction one (then again the Faction created the Remote so they can do something similar) maybe they're trying to create a version of the Cwejen with Tiffany? Tiffen? Things are well weird with the bomb and the ritual and the weird interviews... Can there ever be a book like this again? well in the end it was all a really big wow, stuff was stopped and happened anyway, things were changed and not noticed, things were noticed and things set on fire and pretty much the shape of things remained the same even if the details were altered. Did Inangela make a difference or did she maintain the status quo? This is one book that demands a sequel and so must never have one!

Faction Paradox: Of the City of the Saved...

For humanity, the war is over... We all remember Resurrection Day. Even now, three centuries later, we cannot forget that awakening: our bewilderment, our terror and our joy. Each of us had experienced death, imagining ourselves bound for oblivion, Heaven or Nirvana, according to taste. Instead, we found, each member of the many human species — from tool-wielding australopithecines to posthuman philosopher-gods — had been harvested, gathered here by the Founders' unfathomable technologies. Reborn in our countless immortal bodies, we were given the freedom of the City of the Saved. A single conurbation as broad as a spiral galaxy, she has been our sanctuary from the ravages of the War. That monstrous conflict between inhuman cultures cannot touch us here: we live our afterlives beyond the end of time, in perfect safety. We may be certain, therefore, that these rumours of a murder (the brutal stabbing of a City Councillor, no less!) are nothing more than lurid fabrications. The supposition that the murder weapon is missing, or that it could have been — as hysterical conjecture has claimed — a "potent weapon", capable of injuring a Citizen within the haven of the City, is equally absurd. The idea that a guerrilla war has already begun in one of our less harmonious enclaves need not be dignified with refutation. Please go about your business, Citizens, as normal. We are perfectly safe, here in the City. Humanity has never been safer.

Faction Paradox: Warlords of Utopia

Rome never fell. Hitler won. Now they are at war. Marcus Americanius Scriptor's memoirs of the war between every parallel universe where Rome never fell, and every parallel universe where Hitler won the Second World War, have long been regarded as the definitive account of that turbulent time. Scriptor's life story, from his early life among the housesteads of an obscure province to his role in the ultimate confrontation with Nazism, was intimately connected with the major political and social developments of his time. His highly personal record of events was praised even in his own lifetime for its honesty and intimacy, as well for capturing the scale of a war that consumed thousands of worlds. This exciting new translation of a classic work of military history is accessible to new readers and existing students of the War alike.

My Review: Warlords seems ok so far, I'm intrigued by the Roman culture that's portrayed so far... Warlords was a blast, really well written and fun to read. I loved the hidden Monty Python jokes too, it would almost have been a crime not to do a version of the Romans Go Home grafitti gag.

Faction Paradox: Warring States

Dragon Flies, Phoenix Dances. The Year of the Metal Rat has brought with it greed and self-preservation. The Everlasting Empire is dying, eaten up from within, and the young upstarts Britain and Russia are circling like carrion-birds, for crows of every nation are equally black. The peasant-sect of the Righteous Harmonious Fists attacks all foreign devils. In the capital, the ancient heart of the Empire, the Europeans are besieged by the Dragon Empress' army and the blood of a thousand Christian converts runs in the gutters. When there is War in Heaven, there is War in the Land. A dagger can be concealed in a smile and this House of Paradox smiles often. Its servant here carries grief like dead petals in her hands and wakes the ancient spirits. Their anger makes the sky weep blood, and we shall all pay dearly for her trespass.

My Review: Warring States is cool, although I keep expecting Darla, Angel, Dru & Spike to turn up at any moment... Warring States seems to have gone back in time and changed it's POV... nearly finished Warring States... it's very weird, although the two split sharacter POV sections didn't work for me at all, I'd have preferred them mixed up and in my face right from the start... ok, so Compassion is a vampire time machine that feeds on human life force...interesting...

Dead Romance: Special Edition

'All right, let's start with the basics. The world ended on the twelfth of October, Nineteen Seventy...' I don't know why I'm writing this. It's not like anybody's going to read it. At least, nobody who cares about the fact that I'm a desparate, dying, 23-year-old human being who's just had the whole of history taken away from her. To whoever's out there, to whatever's left, this is the way things were, just before the end. This is the story about the last days of London, about murder and love and waking up in the ruins, about all the people buried in the wreckage... I'm lying, obviously. This is my story. This is what I was doing, when October the twelfth came. Because, let's face it, I'm the only one who really matters. I'm the only one who got out alive.

My Review: it occurs to me that the Gods of Dellah could be an incursion of the Enemy's devising, while the Horror in the bottle could be a simultaneous plan by Lolita to disrupt/prevent the evacuation plans of the Great Houses from Homeworld, thus making her the real enemy, as Compassion points out in the Book of the War...

Toy Story (Short Story)

Lolita has a word with her sister...

My Review: Toy Story was...um...short, but kind of interesting. It's set after Interference Book 2 and before Compassion becoming a Time Ship and doesn't feature any evilly renegadey characters. The implication is that the box-shaped time ship is deliberetly turning Compassion into something of its own image so that it can become a mother to the future. Is Lolita a threat to this future or a rival? Perhaps, is Lolita in league with the Enemy? No idea, but that could be one possibility as to why ther future Compassion will see Lolita as the real threat to Homeworld...

Grass (Short Story)

The president of the US is happy with a land deal, but someone seeks to deny him a great prize...

My Review: Grass was weird and decidedly non-linear. It melds vaguely into the comics in an abstract way, the idea that wooly mammoths were taken to French Louisiana as a gift and then seemingly killed to deny the US president a rich cultural treasure in intriguing.

Faction Paradox: Erasing Sherlock

On a fine October afternoon in 1882, Rose Donnelly, maid-of-all-work, disguises herself as a boy in order to follow the callow, yet brilliantly determined Sherlock Holmes in his pursuit of a thief. Through narrow alleyways and cobbled lanes wedged between Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and the broad back of the City, she's led into deeper territory — worlds he knows well. So well, in fact, that he nearly has her collared on her first time out. Still, Rose learns he has a bolt hole somewhere in Spitalfields. He speaks a smattering of Yiddish. He has a talent for picking pockets. He's a genius with the deceptively simple disguise. It's a thrilling start. It's for her doctoral thesis. Or so she believes.

My Review: Not a bad plot, but not quite as immediately gripping as All-Consuming Fire (still my favourite Holmes book - so far anyway). I was a bit disappointed by ES in the end, no real ties to the FP universe at all apart from a brief maybe pseudo-nod to the Celestis and potential FP time travel rituals (both by the same person - are they a double agent or is there a secret alliance between the Faction and the Celestis?) plus there're hundreds of missing words, typos and other grammatical errors, will there be a finished version made available at some point?

Newtons Sleep

Don't tell her what it was like. Don't tell her how you had to dig your way out through heavy layers of clay to reach the fresh air, because that would distress her. Don't tell her about the box, because that would confuse her. And don't tell her about the light, because that was sacred. Lately cannonballs have flown their arcs, leaving the crystal sky unbroken, while on Earth their traces are all too visible. Yet though Heaven has never seemed so far away, the divine is terribly closer. War on Earth presages War in Heaven; the struggle between the holy houses of Christ and their eternal Adversary has erupted among the living. These are the signs of the last days: in 1651, a dead angel is found in a tree in Lincolnshire and a nymph rises from the waters of Kent; in 1642, a dying man is miraculously healed in the grave; in 1665, uncanny skull-masked doctors descend upon a plague house; in 1683, the French secret service unveil mirrors that show the futures; in 1671, Aphra Behn - she-spy and poetesse - infiltrates a gathering of alchemists; in 1649, the English kill their king, and history begins...

My Review: Full of sound and fury and signifying nothing...FP at its very best :)