The Boulevard Volume 1 - Faction Paradox is back; was it worth the wait?

 After about three years, Faction Paradox is back. This is the first new book in the series since 2019, and the first one since 2018 that exceeds 200 pages. It's also another of their themed anthologies, like the excellent Books of the Enemy and Peace. I'd have preferred another more general collection of stories, personally. Romance and Burning remain among my favorite Faction books for the sheer variety they offer, their pages expand the boundaries of what Faction Paradox can be immensely. But then, this is a fairly loose theme. And,  well, I do love Book of the Enemy, and in general putting a laser-focus on one aspect of the universe can be just as fascinating as the more scattershot approach. 

    It's not actually about its titular setting, a prison containing those Faction members who go too far even for the Faction. Instead, it's about how an assortment of characters ended up stuck there. That sort of concept lends itself well to a less focused collection than I'd anticipated - albeit one without very varied endings.

    This is also the first entry in a very strange rebrand, 'Worlds of the Spiral Politic'. I guess this series is meant to focus more on the wider universe beyond the general War setting, with its familiar factions and themes. But if that's the case they chose an odd place to start. This is the only Faction Paradox anthology where every story features Faction Paradox! Also, isn't it odd that a series which is meant to be less about the universe's deep lore includes 'Spiral Politic', a term only familiar to well-versed fans, in its title? This is a confusing, clunky rebrand.

    Speaking of clunky, this book features big ol' gaps between all its paragraphs. That's annoying. It's about 280 pages long, but I wonder how many pages are only there because it's spaced so obnoxiously. It feels a little like filling a bag of chips with air. This strikes me as especially off given who edited it - Stu Douglas, owner of Obverse Books. It's a disappointing move from a company I'm usually willing to defend with tooth and nail.

    I'm very happy that Simon Bucher-Jones was brought in to edit Volume 2. Stu Douglas has a good track record as an editor insofar as he picks good stories, and I've historically been willing to excuse his tendency to leave typos and bizarre comma usage in his books because of that. But this decision really, really bothered me and it's a big strike against the entire collection.

    This would be a pretty easy fix in an ebook, the choose-your-own-adventure story aside. So if you do end up picking it up, this is a rare instance where I'd recommend the digital version. But, um, let's move on to the stories now.

    We open with a piece of "apocrypha" from The Book of the War, an encyclopedia of the Faction Paradox universe that came out in 2002. This isn't the first of its kind, and it's just as entertaining as all its predecessors. This one especially works as it's an article about something we've seen in prior stories, making it not only a piece of exposition but a reminder of how much bigger the Faction universe is now than it was in 2002.

    I am moderately obsessed with this idea that the 2002 Book was an incomplete document. Makes me want a full-on sequel, or at least a reprint (with unmarked new entries, perhaps, as a fun little scavenger hunt for the dorks like me whose 2002 editions look for all the world like an artifact from a hundred years earlier). Because at the core of the Book there's one unanswered question the book never explicitly asks: what is the Book? Who made it and why? Is it an actual book, in the fiction of the universe, or a physical document collecting certain pages of an encyclopedia that exists elsewhere in some other format? There were, may I remind you, plans for an extended CD version of the Book.

    Introducing new articles, exploring bits of the universe that didn't exist when the Book came out, adds to that mystery in a delicious little way: at the time of its release, the Book was all we had. Sure, the Doctor Who novels where Lawrence laid the groundwork still hold some power over Faction fiction. But Faction Paradox is its own beast, occasional references aside, and BOTW was our introduction to that beast. Its pages told us what the universe was, introduced us to all its concepts as envisioned by Lawrence Miles and a limited group of collaborators 21 years ago - most of which were entirely new even to those of us who'd read miles' Doctor Who novels. Giving us little glimpses into Book-style articles about things that weren't introduced until some ten years after its publication suggests that, perhaps, its true purpose is as a document meant to prepare us, the readers, in the real world, for the War, updating itself as accounts of the War - the fiction - enter our world. That's fun!

    I'm also glad it was included in the physical edition, I was worried it would be exclusive to the Obverse website like the unfortunately excellent Book of the Peace supplementary material. I'm not big on things that are only available digitally (to provide a more absurd example, I have burned several DVDs of Minecraft let's plays. It won't seem so silly when the solar flare hits). This entry is fairly basic but very effective, explaining what the Boulevard is well while leaving enough to the imagination.

    The idea behind the Boulevard is a strong one, by the way! A big, spatially and architecturally diverse prison for those too deranged for the faux-rebellious, but actually quite authoritarian, Faction. That's delectable stuff. It holds a lot of the same appeal as the SCP Foundation. "Here's something we've locked in a box, now let me explain why it needs to be in that box." But the thing about the SCP website is there are some ten thousand of those things and most of them aren't worth your time, even if the best of the best are among the best fiction I've read. This is a curated collection of ten stories, all of which have been edited, and because of that it's easier to recommend than the SCP rabbithole.

    Which isn't to say I liked all of these stories, in fact I struggled with the first three. Gareth Madgwick's has interesting ideas but doesn't go far enough with them, and Tim Gambrell's features plenty of clunky expository dialogue and at least one paragraph where every sentence starts with a pronoun, something that really should've been caught.

    Paul Hiscock's Body and Soul is the first one I find to be worth talking about. It has a very interesting premise. I'm a sucker for music history so I was immediately drawn in by this series of vignettes in the life of a musician living through a fascinating piece of American music history. Unfortunately, I'm not too enamored with where Hiscock took his premise. None of the dialogue feels like it's coming from the mouths of mid-century American jazz musicians, and some of the prose is janky too. But worse than that, I just couldn't understand why this guy ended up in the Boulevard. He's not really all that bad, just sort of greedy. Understandably so - he's a black man in the 1960s. The climax is built around him being punished for just doing what the record label told him to, which, money being necessary for survival aside, is perfectly reasonable given the racial dynamics of the time. I don't think black musicians had much choice back then. Hell, even a lot of the mega-successful white guys didn't. Look at Elvis. It's a pretty surface-level morality play that feels out of place in this universe.

    I found a way to justify this, if you read the story's Godfather Mephistopholes as some sort of rogue who still has access to the Boulevard and abuses that privilege to go around the universe playing the role of a moral guardian. That's interesting, and you could do a lot with it. The text itself doesn't play him like that, though, which is a shame. I'd love to see a character like that, a sorta corrupted idea of what the Doctor was before the War did him in. Could be a fascinating examination of the relationship between Who and Faction Paradox, or something more original.

    Robert Shepherd's Marticide is the first one I really got into, though keep in mind I'm a huge sucker for pulpy Martian settings so I definitely hold a strong bias. This is a straight tribute to pulp science fiction and its various fantastical interpretations of Mars, with some fun alternate history thrown in too. The main character's powers are drawing from the same general idea as the first story's, but Shepherd takes this idea to its logical conclusion in a way Madgwick didn't quite manage. Basically, this is a scientist who's able to Occam's Razor various concepts out of existence by just observing that, statistically, they shouldn't have happened. His observations get more and more dangerous, which leads to his banishment to the Boulevard. It's not particularly broad or deep, but it's a super fun concept executed very well here. I also think this story has much stronger prose than any of its predecessors, which felt clumsy more often than not. He clearly put a lot of care into these sentences, which is something I notice and will always commend.

    A final note on this story - unfortunately, the writer's autocomplete seems to have taken issue with the alien character Zyln, whose name is consistently given as Zayn. This really should've been caught.

    I wasn't looking forward to The Sisterhood of Little Moments, not being particularly fond of Kelly Hale. Her prose is fantastic, nigh-unbeatable in the Faction realm, but she has a few weird fixations that make her work unpalatable to me. Specifically, she's done a lot of stories about rape and most of her fiction features some variety of piss scene. But this story ended up being one of my highlights! It does, in fact, have a piss scene. It also has the clumsy political commentary that mars some of her other work, but I have to say she gets a few really interesting points across! The politician character this story centers around is... broadly unlike most fictional politicians, to say nothing of the world surrounding him. The monster is the sort of thing I love in Faction Paradox, conceptually complex but terrifying in a primal way that almost feels engineered to keep somebody with my particular concoction of anxieties awake at night. The prose here is a league above anything before it; it's very obvious Hale is a veteran. In short, a freaky concept executed almost to perfection. The kind of story you buy a whole book for. I wish Hale would do straight up horror more often, she's amazing at it.

    Up next is Kevin Burnard's You Are the Absurd Hero, the choose-your-own-adventure story I mentioned earlier. This thing sure goes down strangely coming directly after a rather upsetting story. It's very silly, sometimes in an annoying way that reminds me of some of the worst excesses of that whole Joss Whedon/MCU/NuWho style of writing. There are plenty of tired old surface-level observations presented like they're more clever than they are, and a lot of the jokes rely on those observations hitting harder than they do. That being said, there are a good number of genuinely entertaining, funny moments throughout this story and I don't think it's as grating now as I did when I first read it.

    It's a shame that I don't like the writing because I really love this story's format and plot. The plot is, basically, about an attempt to steal a copy of The Book of the War, an obscure and highly sought-after pulp-SF novel which goes for an insane price on eBay. It deals in the same sort of melding of reality and fiction that I mentioned loving about the Book earlier in this review, which is lovely, and its various paths are all well paced and consistently intriguing.

    I do also think, after reading the excellent CYOA section of Carmen Maria Machado's In The Dream House, that Burnard using this format to tell a light, cheesy story was a missed opportunity. This style of storytelling doesn't have to be silly or childish, even if most of us associate it with books we read as kids. Imagine what someone like Lawrence Miles, whose whole brand later on was using strange formats to fuck with the reader, would do with a choose-your-own-adventure story in a time travel setting. This is a story I can't help wish had been more than it was, but returning to it on its own level reveals a pretty competent way to spend half an hour. If anything, I'd love to see the pitch for this thing and commend Stu for taking him up on that pitch. And I'd love to see another CYOA story in the future!

    Philip Marsh's The Oracle is one that really needed another draft. His story in Book of the Peace is an all-time favorite and I was so excited to see more from him! And yeah, there's lots of good stuff here. It's completely different from Marsh's last story, and I love to see a writer exhibit a diverse range. 

    It's got plenty of good concepts. The titular Oracle is another of those engaging, high-concept-yet-simple ideas that work so well in short fiction. The neo-Western setting is well-drawn, even if it seems odd that this is a whole different planet when very little is done here that couldn't have happened on Earth. And the cliffhanger is done very well. 

    What lets it down are the protagonists, who both made me cringe (one of them has dialogue that reminds me of posts on blogs I kept most of a decade ago; the other engages in some weeb shit that I cringe at mostly because it made me realize that I still think katanas are really cool). It doesn't help that this story has the highest rate of editing mistakes in the whole book. Typos, weird punctuation, one instance where a word just isn't there... One or two more drafts could've turned this into a solid story, but as it stands I was let down.

    Next up is a Faction Hollywood story, The Fixer by James Maddox. This is the first FH story not to be written by Jonathan Dennis, I believe, which is certainly welcome after his disappointing Hyponormalization. That novella plus this short story form a compelling argument in favor of bringing new talent to Dennis' corner of the universe; I'd love to see a whole anthology of stories like this edited by him.

    I have to admit I didn't fall in love with Faction Hollywood at first sight like most people seem to have. On my first readthrough of BOTW I was obsessed with grimdark themes and aesthetics, and the Faction Hollywood articles just seemed like filler between the edgy stuff. Since then I've reread the Book and enjoyed their appearance in Burning, and they've really grown on me. This is another win for them, especially interesting for providing a younger writer's perspective on Hollywood satire. Moreso for what that could mean in the future than what's actually done here, mind.

    This story suffers from biting off more than it can chew, resulting in surface-level satire of a bunch of different things instead of a more focused look at one particular issue - which is what short fiction should be, in general. I'm a little perplexed by how much I enjoyed it; looking back, the satire is spotty and only one or two characters stand out (more of the Fixer, please! He feels a bit like Miles' Black Man, who remains a favorite character of mine despite the... well, obvious problematic elements). There's just some intangible Vibe about this story that I find undeniable. This is a great pilot episode, if anything. It lacks any obvious central theme save, perhaps, for "wow, this could be really good if they keep doing it". I want to see Maddox develop as a writer, his prose and concepts are good-great already. He just needs to work on the focus and scale of his work and I think he could put out something really excellent.

    This is What They Took From You, Phil Shaw's story, does a lot of good with a group that, despite first appearing years before Book of the War, has produced very few memorable stories. That would be the Remote, who have been unfortunately ignored for the most part but tend to impress when they do appear. Philip Purser-Hallard's entry in Burning is one of my favorites, and this one is pretty good too! I, uh, don't really know what to say about it, though. It's got heavy religious themes and I think it's the kind of story you need to form your own take on. Which is something Faction Paradox hasn't produced enough of lately, in my opinion. This is my other highlight, alongside Hale's Sisterhood. Much like The Fixer, it also features a character I'd love to see return: Cousin Treacle, who's basically a detective/inquisitor type within the Faction. You could do a lot with that.

    Finally, there's Charles Murphy's The Crikeytown Cancellations, which is frankly bizarre. Like Absurd Hero, it's got a highly original format. This story is presented as the script for a comic, which gives it a breezy pace that feels refreshing after Shaw's fairly dense entry. It also makes me want a new Faction Paradox comic, but I'll leave that conversation for a later date. For now, I'll say I think Crikeytown will end up dividing people. In the grand tradition of Weezer and Dr. Pepper, this is something you'll either love or utterly loathe. It's an unashamedly goofy tribute to the gag comics a lot of older British people grew up on. It spends a little too much time on fart jokes before the plot kicks in. It's full of dark humor that often winds up just as juvenile as the fart jokes.

    That being said, this is another story where I just can't deny its energy despite its shortcomings. Wow, I loved this thing. It's, like I said, completely unashamed to be a fart-joke-laden tribute to children's comics in a series most well known for having animal skulls on more than half of its cover art. The innocence of the initial presentation makes its descent into dark humor hit pretty hard, and it balances that humor with a decent emotional core and an acknowledgment that these kids' comics depicted a lot of relationships and characters that, hey, are pretty unhealthy if you think about it. Despite never having read the specific comics Murphy based this story on, I certainly grew up with a lot of children's stories that taught me the wrong lessons about how to treat friends/girls/boys/etc.. The ideas here are more universal than the specifics, which is a good way to make a somewhat niche topic accessible.

    The story handles metafictional topics well, which is hard to do! I was impressed by everything except the very end, where he goes a little too far. It's certainly not the worst OTT meta ending I've seen, but it didn't work for me. Overall, though, I'm bigger on journeys than destinations, so at the end of the day I still love this messy little thing.

    I don't like that this book just ends after the final story. The author bios are, honest to God, a highlight of many Faction anthologies. In books like Book of the Enemy and Burning, they're written from an in-universe perspective that's absolutely delightful to pore through. I'll reserve my disappointment for Vol 2, since it's possible bios for both books are at the end of the second half. This is essentially one book in two volumes, after all.

    Overall I didn't like this one as much as I wanted to. Take a drink every time I complained about the editing in this book and you'll wind up a Kelly Hale character. Most of the stories here aren't deep or essential, either in terms of quality or lore. But most of them are entertaining. It's a great way to spend a couple afternoons, I'd definitely recommend it over most of the Doctor Who anthologies that have been released in recent years. Speaking of, I really liked the near total lack of callbacks to Who, especially after some pretty flagrant stuff in recent entries (the Sycorax in What Keeps Their Lines Alive; the Kandyman in Weapons Grade Snake Oil). I don't mind the references, I love engaging with headcanons, canonwelding or whatever you want to call it. But I'd also love to see FP grow more independent from source material that's now some twenty years distant.

    I hate that my take on the last two Faction books has been, basically, "it's not terrible". A disappointing Faction book stings because these things don't come out every month or even every year. With so much time between entries, you want everything to be some series-defining great work unlike anything that came before it. The last time I felt that way about a new FP book was 2018, when I read BOTE and BOTP. But this book is disappointing in a different sense from Spinning Jenny or Hyponormalization because it's an anthology. Thus it has plenty of complete narratives within it worth recommending, as opposed to a poor novel, whose highlights are limited to individual plot elements or characters which are inevitably lessened by what's been written around them.

   What separates this anthology's bad stories from those in prior Faction anthologies, though, is that there's so often nothing to say about them. This feels emptier than its predecessors, in places the same sort of Hollow Spectacular a younger Jon Dennis satirized in BOTW. In prior books, the bad stories made me feel something. I could tell you exactly why they made me mad and that's, in my opinion, a form of quality in itself. Not being forgettable is a good trait to have, even if you're unforgettable for the wrong reasons.

    The emptiness I felt for much of this collection, especially its first three stories, left a void within me that certainly created a bias against the stronger latter two thirds. If I reread some of the highlights independently, I'm sure I'd like them better. But as a complete package, I feel so conflicted on this one. Here's to Volume Two! I can't imagine it'll live up to the standard SBJ set for himself in his previous collection, which is one of my favorite books ever, but I still expect great things given the editor and the list of writers involved.