Faction Paradox: A Somewhat Sloppy Beginners' Guide I Wrote on my Work Breaks Last Week

Faction Paradox has garnered a reputation among Doctor Who fans as the series’ most obtuse, inaccessible spin-off. This isn’t entirely unfair, it’s been saddled with some awful marketing over the years and it’s certainly plenty alienating at times. It’s kind of hard to explain to people, even close friends who know I’ve followed it closely since high school. After carefully considering things for a while I've come up with the following post, which is split in two parts: an introduction to Faction Paradox, the fictional setting and an introduction to Faction Paradox, the series. The latter is the more important matter, in my opinion, but the former is also obviously really important to a newcomer.

So, ah. If you want to imagine the world of Faction Paradox it wouldn't be a bad idea to take a look at how Eccleston and Tenannt used to describe the Time War. Before it actually appeared, it seemed like this impossible mythical clash between factions of gods who could change all of history on a whim. Then it actually appeared in the 50th anniversary special and it was just Star Wars with Daleks. This disappointing revelation was the catalyst for certain fans to dig deeper and discover that the Time War existed before Eccleston brought it to TV. That certain tie-in books had introduced the idea of a Time War years ago. That the writers of those books had long since forked their ideas over into a brand new series, mostly disconnected from Doctor Who, which has remained ostentatiously obscure (and seemingly proud of it) for more than twenty years now.

Faction Paradox's setting, then, is the general idea of a war fought in time rather than space - but taken to much greater lengths than one can achieve when one is trying to appeal to an audience of, well, normal people. Many of its stories chronicle events that are undone by the last page and a good number of them seem completely non-canon to one another - sometimes within the same book! The participants in this war, usually referred to as The War or the War in Heaven, are best seen as literal actual gods. Average people generally have no place in this world - and yet Faction Paradox has managed a few genuinely great character pieces, I promise. Although in general the appeal lies in the series’ consistently high concepts.

So let's talk about the things fighting this War. I'll skip some of the minor groups, you can learn about the likes of the Celestis, the Remote and Faction Hollywood on your own. There are only four the absolute novice needs to know about to understand your average Faction Paradox narrative. First, and most familiar to your casual Doctor Who fan, are the Great Houses (essentially the Time Lords as seen in The War Games taken to their logical extreme). They’re a collective of “houses” - organizations that sit somewhere between biological families and political sects - who work together under the single banner of their Homeworld. They’re damn near godlike, the very model of technology indistinguishable from magic - and yet their reign is also the reason for Rationality. At the very beginning of time they essentially anchored the universe in place (in an event called The Anchoring of the Thread), ensuring linear time and all other laws of physics (their domain, what Doctor Who would call the “web of time”, is called the Spiral Politic) even as they continue to break those laws to their own ends. They're *necessary* in some sense, most of the universe as we understand it simply couldn't be without them. But they're also disturbingly authoritarian hypocrites who pissed off an entire pantheon of pre-universal, lovecraftian irrational entities when they anchored everything together.

Which might or might not explain the Enemy, depending on who you ask. The Enemy is the other major player in the War in Heaven, the only force to ever scare the Great Houses in their entire ten million years of lordship over eternity. In part because they are demonstrably powerful as hell and in part because, as of fifty years into the War, nobody actually knows who the Enemy is. Some details are known, fuzzy things that lie around the fringes: the Enemy has something to do with the Yssgaroth, the Lovecraftian enemy of the last War in Heaven, and they might also have originated on Earth. They demonstrably have a pitch-black sense of humor and it’s incredibly evident through the text of the series that most information regarding them is self-censoring.

If the idea of a war between gods and things it’s literally impossible to describe sounds limiting to you, you’re not wrong. I can count on one hand the number of Faction Paradox writers who can effectively portray that kind of scope. Series creator Lawrence Miles was great at it, the way you feel the scale of his ideas is his greatest strength as a writer. But there’s a reason he wrote the series’ encyclopedia with co-writers and introduced so many lower-level factions. The War in Heaven as experienced by the so-called Lesser Species is essentially a mixture of proxy wars and occasional bursts of Lovecraftian terror whenever the two Big Unknowable factions bother to show up. Most stories concern the smaller-scale factions, the groups struggling to carve out a niche in a world growing less suitable for regular life-forms.

Faction Paradox, a cult originally formed from defecting members of the Great Houses, is the most prominent group with an overt interest in the Lesser Species - especially humanity. Their cult is mostly composed of humans as far as we, the audience, can tell. Their base of operations is an alter-time realm constructed from the ‘shadow’ of London and most of their cultural values frame time paradoxes and the like through the lens of appropriated human cultures ranging from Voodoo to Native American beliefs to Christianity. They present themselves as a sort of egalitarian rebel group with the noble goal of giving the Lesser Species a chance, but a running theme is that the upper echelons of the organization are just as authoritarian as the Houses. Most of the series’ sympathetic characters are lower-level members of the Faction. Also do note, despite the name of the series, Faction Paradox don’t appear nearly as often as you might expect. Entire anthologies exist where they barely feature at all, honestly. They’re just the most frequent ‘messenger’ between man and the outer universe.

That’s kind of all you need to know to get started, I think. Now onto the series from an out-of-universe perspective.

Faction Paradox is a unique beast from a very unique period in Doctor Who’s history. From 1989 to 2005 the show was off the air and the void would be filled by the expanded universe. Since the series barely existed in the eye of the general public, the BBC wasn’t closely monitoring it anymore. This meant that for a while, Doctor Who existed with very little regards for censorship or reigning in its ideas for a mass audience. The books found their niche and sustained themselves on that niche, albeit just barely. This isn’t the Doctor Who I grew up with - I’m in my early twenties, I was raised on David Tennant - but it might as well be. Right when my childhood infatuation with the series was giving way to a disheartening acknowledgment of the show’s many faults, I discovered Steve Cole’s Twelve Little Aliens at 13 years old through the 50th anniversary reprint series. It changed my life.

This was a gritty, militaristic sci-fi thriller featuring Will goddamn Hartnell. It was awesome. Less so now, but it fucked when I was 13. Then I went on to read Jon Morris’ Festival of Death, which was like a Douglas Adams novel with even more mind-boggling time travel. Still holds up. Then I got to EarthWorld and fell in love with Paul McGann, the Doctor who only ever appeared on TV in one kinda crap movie. Turned out he had seventy-odd books to his name, too. And most of them were really easy to pirate. Pretty soon I’d amassed a collection of nearly 500 scanned Doctor Who novels and ripped through the Timewyrm saga in one summer between Short Trips. After that, the likes of Jim Mortimore, Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Kate Orman, Jon Blum, Dave Stone and Paul Magrs all became staples. I remember an English teacher I had being shocked how literate some of these TV tie-in books were.

Which is kind of what I loved about this time period for Doctor Who. It was a perfect blend of high and low culture, fanfic and real literature, working class and pretentious. Lawrence Miles and Jim Mortimore took cinematic high concepts to unfilmable extremes while Kate Orman took character work to extremes, all while writers like Magrs and Stone fucked around doing things I don’t have time to describe.

Lawrence Miles kind of synthesized everything I loved about this version of Doctor Who with Alien Bodies, which for a time was my answer when you asked me for my favorite book I’ve ever read. His characters are well-written if flat, his prose is stunning, and his ideas are out of this world. Alien Bodies wasn’t ever meant to start a definitive story arc, but Miles did want to give other writers a backstory to draw from in a range that was floundering without much direction by 1997. And people definitely fucked with his depiction of an impending future war between the Time Lords and an unclear Enemy, where the Doctor was fated to die in the first battle. He followed it up with Interference and Dead Romance, both arguably his best novel, and a couple other authors followed suit too. Then the series’ editor wanted a clean slate - fair enough, if anything Miles had imbued the series with too much direction. But the final book in the arc sucked and treated all the series’ best elements like jokes.

So Lawrence Miles made his own series where he pretended that story - and, in turn, the entire subsequent path of Doctor Who as a series - never happened. He and the couple of people he still had in his court came together and put out something wonderful, something I’ve fallen head over heels for even harder than I did with Doctor Who. There’s a simple reason for that. Faction Paradox does exactly what Doctor Who sometimes struggles to do: change.

That’s one of the things that’s alienating about it, to be honest. Doctor Who changes in superficial ways. Actors change, story arcs change, effects budgets change. At the end of the day, though, almost every actor since Tennant and Piper have been playing Tennant and Piper and almost every season since 2005 has been aping the Buffy formula. Doctor Who’s last genuine metamorphosis occurred in 2005. 

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, a stable and consistent formula with the same old characters is the standard for a reason. When you come back to a favorite series you expect to be met with the same sorts of things you used to love about it. Faction Paradox isn’t built like that. It has no central cast, no ongoing story arc beyond the general concept of “there’s a Time War on”. There’s no easy way to describe what actually happens in Faction Paradox, to be honest. It’s not a series insofar as a linear sequence of events, that’s for sure. It’s a ‘series’ in that everything that happens is drawn from the same basic well of ideas. It’s a series where references to continuity aren’t signposted, where entire novels hardly mention any of the series’ central concepts by name. There’s actually a very tightly-woven, consistent Bigger Picture here, but the writers expect you to put it together yourself. The standalone nature makes it accessible in its own right, but it sure isn’t what most people want from a series. (It should also be noted that the series’ structure as a collection of standalone glimpses at some big, unknowable picture one can only speculate on is also an apt metaphor for the way the Enemy works).

Faction Paradox is an increasingly anomalous body of work in a world where wiki culture and low-effort critics like Cinemasins grow in prominence. In a media landscape that increasingly values stories as pre-packaged wiki articles about themselves that do all the thinking for you, Faction Paradox sticks to the old ways. It refuses easy answers, doesn’t spell out what’s going on or what it believes in. This can be frustrating, especially if your main reference point for written fiction is tie-in material. To a certain kind of person it’s rewarding, though.

At this point I need to make something else clear: Faction Paradox is only a “spinoff” in purely legal terms. Its central concepts originated from Doctor Who tie-in novels. The Great Houses and some of their agents are, if you squint, sorta like the Time Lords cranked up to 11. They’re the only major faction with any direct link to the TV series and even then, can it truly be said that the comedy space-British-Empire of Doctor Who has anything to do with the literal Lords of Time seen in Against Nature? Faction Paradox is its own beast and has been since This Town Will Never Let Us Go. It’s not trying to be Doctor Who, it’s not trying to take you back to teatime in 1973 or whatever.

Though on that note, the series is basically identical to Doctor Who mechanically. Both series are anthologies that apply the same general aesthetics and themes to a diverse array of settings and characters. The two primary differences are what those themes and aesthetics are and the lack of the Doctor in Faction Paradox. Aesthetically, Doctor Who has one foot in old-school sci-fi and one foot in its contemporaries. Thematically it’s humanistic, liberal and almost aggressively optimistic. Faction Paradox draws from that same well of sci-fi but mixes in magical realism, weird fiction and macabre vibes of both Gothic and Goth varieties. In themes, Faction Paradox is basically exactly what you’d expect from a series born in the late ‘90s and brought into its own a year after 9/11. It’s moody and nihilistic, built on narratives of fruitless rebellion and forever wars.

The lack of the Doctor is, in my opinion, the greater divide. I’ve already mentioned that it leaves the series without a main character. It’s also the major cause of the series’ nihilistic tone. See, Doctor Who is kind of a cosmic horror universe in disguise; the Doctor takes on a very literal deus ex machina role. You take “the man who stops the monsters” out and all that’s left are monsters.

The first Doctor Who novel to feature Faction Paradox also features the Doctor dying in the first battle of the series’ War in Heaven. The Faction Paradox setting is about Doctor Who without Doctor Who. It’s a series that rarely presents you with good people or good deeds. It’s not for people who want to root for anyone. It’s as bleak and morally gray as 40k fans pretend 40k is. Sympathetic characters are generally subjected to horrors beyond their comprehension and then killed - because the weapons of this War aren’t guns or anything. They’re time machines and the products thereof, things that alter reality on a fundamental level. Any kind of positive change is impossible because every influential faction kind of sucks. 

It’s set during a War that encompasses all of history, which has always existed and which can only be replaced with some ill-defined, probably equally horrible Peace. Its first stories came out during the early days of the War on Terror. As I’m writing this, War continues in the Middle East. The enemy’s name has changed. The means of conflict have changed. Culture becomes an increasingly influential weapon. War goes on regardless. The innocents only exist to be killed by governmental abominations so massive and ugly it’s hard to believe there’s really one person at the top of it all. There’s no sense that we’re supposed to be cheering for anybody or enjoying the show. Faction Paradox gets war right in a way most sci-fi just doesn’t, and all without being about the kind of wars us humans fight in.

This ain’t for everyone, I fully acknowledge that. If you want optimism or escapism, keep looking. It’s dark and funky and frustrating and the best novel in the series spends like half its runtime going on rants unrelated to the plot. It can be challenging in other ways, too. The series’ obsession with world mythologies can lead to some truly amazing works like the aforementioned Against Nature, but for each of those there’s a clumsier attempt like the Native American stuff in The Book of the War. It’s a difficult but rewarding series, a great bit of modern weird fiction and the perfect rec for anyone who thinks 80s-90s Doctor Who should’ve borrowed more from Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Speaking of, if you’re into Faction Paradox and you haven’t read like, From Hell or The Invisibles, I am giving you homework right now.

And hey, as a queer Doctor Who fan I’d be remiss not to mention that there’s some pretty solid rep in this series. Trans rep never becomes super prominent, but when it appears it’s almost universally better than… whatever Russell was trying to do with Rose Noble. At the very least the Book of the War article about how crossdressing makes you time travel better is peak trans sci-fi. And gay rep is pretty universally good, especially in the Obverse Books era.

I’ll end by mentioning the handful of distinctive eras the series has had over the years. Most notably for Doctor Who fans is the BBC Books era - i.e., Lawrence Miles and co. setting the groundwork in Doctor Who proper. It’s not essential to understanding Faction Paradox but books like Alien Bodies and Interference are legit great and their Time War storyline would influence the revived TV show. They’re essential reading for Who fans, IMO.

Mad Norwegian was the first publisher to take on Faction Paradox as a brand separate from Doctor Who. They produced seven novels and collaborated with BBV, Magic Bullet and Image Comics to try and turn Faction Paradox into a multi-media series. It didn’t work. The Faction Paradox comic was canned after two issues and isn’t worth much as anything but a historical curio. The audio dramas from BBV and Magic Bullet, though? Those are pretty neat. Some low-budget sound design aside, they’re a fun little storyline with some genuinely great writing and an interesting look into a version of Faction Paradox that had recurring characters and an ongoing plot. Not necessarily what I want from FP, but probably the best starting point if you’re looking for, like, a regular series. It doesn’t end conclusively but a couple of short stories from the Obverse run do wrap up some of its storylines. Especially love Going Once, Going Twice by Jayce Black.

The highlight of Mad Norwegian’s run are the actual books by Mad Norwegian. The Book of the War, inaccessible in print but very easy to find as a PDF, is the Faction book. It’s an ‘encyclopedia’ of the universe written by an unreliable narrator, one of the best concepts the series has ever had and executed pretty close to perfection. Subsequent novels were almost all by Book contributors and all expanded on ideas directly taken from it. This Town Will Never Let Us Go is a treatise on pop culture and the War on Terror disguised as a magical realist novel and remains my favorite in the series. Of the City of the Saved, a rare novel from short story guy Philip Purser-Hallard, is about a murder in a world of immortals. I haven’t read it myself but I’ve also heard Warring States is great, a highlight of the series among those who’ve read it.

These novels were what set the stage - all standalone and really fucking dense, mostly genuinely mind-expanding in some way or another. This Town in particular wholly changed how I saw the world in ways I’m still recovering from. At some point MN sold the rights to FP to New Zealand-based Random Static, who unfortunately only ever released one book: Newton’s Sleep. It’s an excellent capstone to the first iteration of the series.

Obverse Books obtained the rights to Faction Paradox in around 2010 and put out the short story collection A Romance in Twelve Parts in 2011. It was edited by Lawrence Miles, which feels a little like a passing of the torch as that was his last contribution to the series. Romance is one of the most influential books in the series history. It was the first Faction Paradox short story collection, and set the stage for Obverse’s prolific library of FP short stories. It also introduced elements they'd return to later, notably a sequel to Of the City of the Saved. Early Obverse anthologies read a lot like weird fiction collections but with nods to series continuity in place of Lovecraft Mythos namechecks. They’re excellent, especially the unfortunately rare Burning With Optimism’s Flames. Later FP collections from Obverse delve deeper into series’ mythology, but the quality remains consistent. The Book of the Enemy is maybe the best anthology in the series.

Novels also remain consistent in the Obverse era. Highlights include - well, basically all of them honestly. Obverse have had Faction Paradox longer than either prior publisher combined and they’ve been treating it with a lot of care. It’s changed in so many ways without ever losing what made it good to begin with. They’ve especially made sure to retain the standalone nature; even Deep Lore books like Book of the Enemy are fairly accessible with little to no context. I definitely have more specific recommendations, but honestly - if you want to get into the Obverse era of Faction Paradox, just pick out a book that catches your eye!

(and stay away from the 2022 BBV revival for the sake of your sanity)