Faction Paradox: The Boulevard, Vol. 2 Review - Beginner-friendly, but I liked it too!

Oh lord it’s been nearly two years since my last Faction Paradox review. I certainly haven’t lost interest in the series, though. It’s just been a busy time for me, between reading and writing other things and moving into my new house. I still plan to continue talking about this series whenever I find time, and what better place to start than the newest book? Especially because it’s one I’d been hotly anticipating. The first Boulevard book ranks among the most disappointing entries in the series for me but I still love the idea of the Boulevard. So how was book two?

        In short: this was almost exactly what I wanted the first book to be like. If the Boulevard as a concept interests you, this is the one to get. Almost every story here is at least good, the variety is impressive and the editing is stronger than last time. Not flawless, mind you. There are still spaces between every paragraph and a handful of typos, albeit not as many as last time. But I’ll take it.

The thing that struck me most about this book is that it felt more accessible than average for the series without losing the energy I expect from Faction Paradox. This feels like a book I could reasonably hand to a newbie without risking alienating them. The stories are occasionally complicated - especially the one by editor Simon Bucher-Jones - but for the most part the strangeness is easy enough to parse. For better or for worse, this book rarely boggles the mind. Instead it commits to telling ten solid stories in the Faction universe, dredging up some obscure lore and sprinkling in some fun new concepts. I didn’t love everything in this collection but what I did love struck enough of a chord that I am legitimately comfortable recommending this as a jumping-on point.

The collection opens with Opioid Painkiller of the People by Athenadora Cat, whom I’ve, ah, talked to a fair bit. So please feel free to approach this particular review with a grain of salt. The story is set in Ming China and - as somebody who admittedly has very little familiarity with Chinese history - it sure feels like the writer did her homework. It’s got a great atmosphere to it, a really solid sense of immersive detail without ever getting lost in overdescription. The atmosphere stumbles for me only when contemporary references, like a Dragon Ball Z namedrop, come into the picture.

The story is also set during an interesting era of in-universe history, directly following the fall of the Thirteen-Day Republic. This underutilized event, given a lot of space in The Book of the War and hardly referenced since, is the driving force behind Opioid Painkiller and one other story later on in the book. It makes a lot of sense as a focal point for multiple Boulevard stories, given the Thirteen-Day Republic was basically the catalyst for the faux-rebellious Faction Paradox to turn more overtly authoritarian. This story spends a good deal of time delving into the consolidation of power within Faction politics following the Republic’s downfall.

Its unnamed protagonist has a really fun scheme to overthrow the Eleven-Day Empire, which is the main thrust of events and obviously the reason she ends up in the Boulevard by the end. I won’t spoil that here, but I will say she was goaded on by a figure who’s very deliberately referred to as “the other” throughout. Which in-context is as in “the other time-traveler in this era” but… well, y’know. Between that nod back to Doctor Who and the various mentions of Grandfather Paradox in the story, I think it’s ominously clear who this guy is meant to be. It’s another fun later of mystery in a story oozing with small details. One more for the road: time-active biodata prevents the protagonist from catching any historical diseases. How cool is that?

Next up is Alan Taylor’s A Consignment. His Office Politics was among my favorite entries in Burning With Optimism’s Flames, so I was pretty excited for this one. I wasn’t disappointed, though it certainly isn’t as good as Office Politics.

It’s got a similar central thrust to OP, dealing with a weird and kinda fucked up entity created through a time travel ritual. The ritual is detailed in depth, as is the Consignor created from it. Which is cool, but kind of a let-down after the journey undertaken to create it.

That journey is, in its broad strokes, deeply beholden to the classics. It’s got big Miles-era FP energy with a sleazy working-class setting (including Factiony rituals done using regular household items, which is so neat!), a time-travel storyline and a narrative voice full of ironic detachment. Taylor doesn’t manage that voice nearly as well as Miles, for the record; it feels too removed where Miles made it more obvious he gave some kind of a shit about what he was saying. It’s also pretty damn horny, an essential piece of the Faction puzzle we don’t always remember. This time we’re dealing with a working-class gay man, which is a nice change of pace in some ways. He bumps into a DILFy Faction member whose bone mask is a gas mask! I am willing to forgive all this stories’ flaws for that alone. Another great NSFW concept here is rope play used as a form of magic ritualism. Shit goes so hard, man. Some unfortunately common FP tropes - noncon and a piss scene - rear their head but at least the former doesn't feel gratuitous this time ‘round. Polish the general vibes of the NSFW bits of this story a little and I'd be totally down for a fully NSFW-themed Faction Paradox anthology, honestly.

As far as being beholden to the classics go, there’s even a call-back to Tiffany Korta from This Town! Apparently she’s on a “posthumous farewell tour”, which is an incredibly nasty coda to her role in that novel. And while we’re on This Town, the entire culture war commentary can be seen as a 2024 retelling of the Ghost Point.

Which, ah, isn’t a Miles-era concept I’m especially keen to see brought back. It works wonders in This Town but there’s a reason basically everyone else has ignored it.  This story doesn’t directly name-drop the Ghost Point but, well, internet conspiracy theories feeding into a war that outright destroys the concept of culture is definitely Ghost Point-adjacent. Like This Town, this story acts as a possible beginning for the Ghost Point. It’s just not nearly as good of one. This Town embroils itself in everything wrong with Western culture in 2002 for nearly 300 pages, revels in the depravity of celebrity culture and the like and makes you believe in Miles’ often bizarre conclusions about where culture is going. A Consignment offers limp commentary on conspiracies late into the text, and doesn't do nearly enough with ‘em. It’s fine, it doesn’t matter to the story all too much so its failure doesn’t detract from it too much. But it is the biggest flaw in a good story.

I'll also mention Taylor's depiction of the Boulevard, a more explicitly "simulated" environment with several interesting small details I'm pretty sure are unique to this story, was the most immersive and compelling take on the Boulevard in either collection for me. He does a lot of little things to make it feel more like an actual setting rather than just a street full prisons. I felt like I was getting to know the Boulevard for the first time after more than ten stories set within it and I appreciated that a lot.

Overall it’s a solid modern coda to the ethos of early Faction Paradox with most of the bite but not as much to say. It’s a refreshing return to the energy of the series’ first entries, proof to me that FP isn’t quite as sanitized as certain recent entries have left me worrying about. It’s got flaws and ain’t as deep as it could be, but I still love it. A highlight for sure.

Story number three is Please Exit in a Calm and Orderly Fashion, by Ben Kasson. His name is the only one not listed in the table of contents for some reason; he also seems to be a fairly newbie writer based on a cursory Google search. Props to Obverse for taking so many new people into the fold.

Also, this might be among the shortest Faction Paradox stories ever written if you don’t count individual Book of the War entries as short stories - it’s only like fifteen pages long. I’m a big believer in diverse lengths as a strength of short story collections, so hey, that actually really caught my eye! I wish Kasson had done more with the fifteen pages he had, but what’s here is still a pretty competent straightforward adventure story.

In short, a couple Little Siblings discovered a dark secret within a company Faction paradox was using as a front. Now they, and the rest of the building’s employees, are resigned to the festering ruins of their old office. The story is basically a narrative of their attempt to escape. It’s not anything crazy deep or memorable, save David Coleman. Poor bastard is a victim of some unclear experiment who now has lengthy tendrils for arms but nerve endings on all of them. His role in the story is basically as a rope ladder that can feel pain. That in particular is a delicious little concept that had my imagination filling in some gaps about what happened here.

Overall, I wish more had been done with stuff like that instead of the escape sequence. There are a few interesting ideas here, all stuck nibbling at the edges of a fairly standard sort of story. It’s engaging enough, I liked it for what it was, but I’d still consider it the collection’s first miss.

After that is Stories of the Space Psychopaths by Simon Bucher-Jones, one of the series’ longest-serving writers and a respected figure for more reasons than I have time to list. He’s among my personal favorite contributors to the series, both as an editor and a writer, so needless to say this is in fact the other story I was looking forwards to. How’d I like it? Well, ah, one of the bullet points in my notes for this one literally just says “holy fuck”. If that’s any indication.

Space Psychopaths is a full-fledged cyberpunk story set in the year 2096, with all sorts of classic dystopian imagery plus modern anxieties like climate change and especially lockdown anxiety. See, a good portion of society in this world is so agoraphobic that there’s a major political/philosophical movement devoted towards remaining inside as much as possible. We also have to contend with the secret police of this world, a group called HAND.

The story’s formatted as a brief introduction to the setting, followed by four descriptions of people held prisoner by HAND and finally an interview with each of them by the narrator. He’s a journalist trying to make sense of an absurd crime that took place here; I won’t spoil any more of the insane main plot than that. I’ll just say I love weird formatting and Bucher-Jones has always been adept at them. He manages a number of distinctive character voices well, even the use of invented future-slang doesn’t usually grate. Sometimes it does feel like it’s lapsing into the author’s voice and as far as invented future dialects go we’re not exactly at the top tier here, but he’s come up with some pretty solid stuff all around.

Not a moment of this story is wasted. Every single section is fascinating and dripping with new details that let the reader slowly unravel the plot with the protagonist. A few very important concepts are never spelled out explicitly, either. The nature of the setting, for one. You’ll have to pay a good amount of attention to this one to get the most out of it, but trust me, it’s worth your time. Just one small problem: the spacing between paragraphs does genuinely mess with the pacing this time, in a story built around so many smaller sections. Aside from that one niggle, this is maybe the best story in the collection.

Literary Figure by JA Prentice is the first of a handful of tales in this collection to delve into the theme of “living stories” in some capacity. This time, in the form of the classic meta device of the character attempting to escape her story. That character is Faction Paradox’s Cousin Nerissa, a creepy little conceptual ghost who manifests in a body made from literally any sort of physical media where stories can be recorded. That’s fun stuff and I was overall mostly feeling her up to the end, where she becomes a major speaking role and immediately dissolves into a sea of “my OC could beat up your OC” dialogue.

Before that, her role is as a muse in a series of vignettes set throughout history. She influences the narratives of everything from Athenian theater to hacky 21st century screenwriters in a Hollywood satire that doesn’t feature Faction Hollywood. Which is a first for the series. It’s not a particularly unique or interesting Hollywood story, unfortunate because that particular storyline keeps coming back between the other vignettes. I would’ve liked more of the comic writers, myself - also, how weird is it that both of the Boulevard books contain sections written in the style of comic scripts? I mean, I love that, but it sure wasn’t something I was expecting.

There’s also a fun twist at the end, which I won’t spoil though it isn't exactly hard to predict. So overall, a decent story with a good twist and a pretty effective if flawed villain. I definitely wish “writer’s block manifesting itself as a villainous muse” had been done a little more justice, but I still like this story overall.

After that is Love is an Accuracy Algorithm (an abridged opera) by Julio Angel Ortiz and Vince Stadon. Both are new authors to me, which actually surprised me because Ortiz in particular is a pretty seasoned contributor to Obverse anthologies. Glad to be filling that blind spot in, though I’d definitely like to get a taste for some of Ortiz’ solo works at some point. Which certainly isn’t to suggest this story is without an individual personality, not at all. It’s chock full of strange, quirky personality, with its basis in opera and a character named for Edwin Drood. In fact, given I’m not at all familiar with opera, it’s possible I missed some stuff here. What follows is another review I recommend taking with a grain of salt.

What worked best for me about this story was the plot. I’ll get to the characters later; for now, yeah, the title really isn’t kidding about “accuracy” as a central focus. The entire plot is about an increasingly unreliable narrator, Poppy, attempting to bug out her jailor’s “accuracy algorithm” by getting piss drunk and telling a rambling, absurd version of the events that led her to the Boulevard. She starts off only slightly believable but by the end the story she’s spinning is entertainingly buckwild while still being remarkably well-paced and carefully considered. There’s a good punchline at the end, too.

I also really fuck with the various settings; this story is very free-wheeling in its use of Faction Paradox’s anything goes attitude toward alternate universes. The best of them is the universe where the Aztec Empire never collapsed and they participated in World War I using what are basically Aztec equivalents to 40k Dreadnoughts. I also love the basic concept of Delilah, who makes a living selling “impossible” art from other universes.

But yeah, uh, the characters. The characters have this sorta ironic, sarcastic quality I didn’t always gel with and given the nature of the story, that often leaks into the narrative voice. The worst offender here is the wistful, romantic opening sequence which is brought down a peg by some cringeworthy dialogue and narration that never felt entirely “within” the scene. It’s almost there at the best of times but never brought it all the way home for me. There’s a really good observation made in here about how, in consciously believing the good times were a rare commodity in need of preservation, Poppy brought their end upon herself. I liked that, especially in retrospect considered as the product of a drunken unreliable narrator recalling better times.

The good times and their end are the most tragically weak portion of the story for me because I should feel more strongly about them. I’ve been in nearly the same situation as Poppy before, losing a short-lived flame to some random person materializing out of the blue and feeling more jealous than that relationship ever deserved. I just can’t get attached because her flame, Delilah, is a borderline manic pixie dreamgirl who basically only exists to make Poppy jealous. The personality and interest in art she displayed early on disappears entirely once Tomas enters the picture; she’s reduced to just loving him. Which, yeah, points off for having the one male lead break up a lesbian relationship. This is the unfortunate by-product of the drunk, unreliable narrator setup and it brought the entire story down a peg for me. Shame because the parts that worked for me really worked.

IGOR by George Wells was another highlight, but then again of course I liked the Faction Paradox story told as a series of vignettes about various world mythologies. Faction Paradox is, in general, very suited to stories about world mythology and stories in the form of short, fast-moving scenes. This one gets some extra steam from its protagonist actually being a part of one of the world cultures on display. Specifically, she’s Jamaican, which is especially neat in a world where the most focal Faction yanked several important terms directly from Caribbean culture. This story isn’t about that, but it did make me realize I wanted a story that was about that. A Caribbean equivalent to the exceptionally detailed Mexico of Against Nature would be great.

The story is actually about Igor, of course. But who’s Igor? Igor’s a kind of composite entity Pam accidentally creates, based in part on a number of creatures from world mythology who are known to steal away misbehaving children. The narrative here is her turning from a runaway girl to a benevolent protector of runaways to the more sinister force she calls Igor. It’s told with the help of two poems and a piece of sheet music, though the latter is printed in somewhat low quality.

Wells delights in describing music and monsters, and he does so through very crisp and clean prose. It’s easy to parse but full of an obvious passion for the subjects at hand, sort of reminding me of the higher end of the YA fiction I read as a kid. I’m not used to this style in Faction Paradox and I’m tempted to call it a little too trad between the prose and the kinda simple ghost story plot. But I can’t dislike it. It’s a good story told well.

Also gotta mention that Igor, as a series of variations of one central concept communicated through vignettes, feels a lot like the same kind of entity Nerissa was. I like to picture them as members of the same conceptual species, whatever that entails. And while we’re on the subject of connections, this one and Space Psychopaths both feature descriptions of train platforms as lonely despite the crowds. It makes me wonder if the Boulevard doesn’t transition into a train track at some point; sure seems to be a common feeling among the street’s residents. I like the idea of an infinitely long train platform as a prison.

Blood Feud comes to us from another relatively unestablished author in Leo Healy. It’s rough around the edges but left me curious what else Leo might bring to the table - I sure wouldn’t mind if Obverse brought them back! This is another short, action-oriented tale in a series that usually doesn’t benefit from that kind of story but I found myself shockingly intrigued by it. Its unique blend of cultural touchstones helped; the protagonist is a former Japanese pro wrestler who survived the fall of the Thirteen-Day Republic and now lives in a Boulevard cell themed after the Bolshevik Revolution. She spends her days living out the revolution and the rise of the USSR on repeat, never able to change the fate that led to the authoritarian regime. It’s among the most conceptually horrible prisons in the book, I think.

Naturally, parallels are drawn between the revolution-turned-authoritarianism of the USSR and the Faction’s faux-rebellious sheen. Pro-wrestler Rhino Sasaki was spared death after personally pissing off underrated classic character Cousin Octavia during the fall. She decides to send her to the Boulevard instead of letting her off easy. Rhino is approached in her prison by a Faction member who asks her if she’d like to be set free in exchange for agreeing to assassinate Octavia, who’s apparently a threat to the Faction now. What follows is a Sisyphean cycle of failed revenge that might all be a part of the time-loop we already know she’s damned to. It’s not particularly deep, but it’s a revenge story well-told with just enough detail on characters and setting to keep me invested.

Oh hey, another Burning With Optimism’s Flames writer! Juliet Kemp’s contribution this time around is A Bright Future, a dystopian story about empowerment through telling stories. Very little here is presented in an unexpected fashion. The authoritarian regime is thinly characterized enough that it’s obvious from the get-go it’s not fated to survive past the end of the story. The power of storytelling, via Faction Paradox’s conceptual fuckery, is a force for good that the authoritarians want to stamp out. The protagonist and the leader of that regime are the only two people with the gift to see every possible future at once. This makes the hero a great storyteller who genuinely can affect the world with her stories but it drove the entirely off-screen bad guy to try and create a world so buttoned-down and predicable that only one future was visible.

There’s really not a ton for me here, but if you’re a sucker for this kind of fantastical dystopian narrative it’s pretty well-told. While the story never grabbed me, some of the prose definitely did. There’s a palpable sense of wonder to the way Kemp describes the process of seeing the alternative futures and even some wonderment to their descriptions of the now-familiar Boulevard. I wish more of that energy had been put into describing the anti-wonder of the Bright Institute, but as it stands there’s more than a sentence or two here that I really dug. And a short coda does end things on a nicely ambiguous note after the expected happy ending. There’s stuff to like here, I just suspect it’s going to click with other people a lot more than it clicked with me.

Also, connections! There’s obviously lines to be drawn between the guys reducing history to one predictable outcome and the Great Houses. Specific to this collection - like Pam, Kiria in this story is a rebellious character who travels using the rooftops! Their power in both instances comes in some form from stories, and both of them are in a relationship with another woman through their respective stories. Does this mean anything? Probably not. But then again, Simon Bucher-Jones edited this one. Maybe there’s some unifying theme here I’m only beginning to see..

Wrapping things up we’ve got The Complete History of Faction Paradox, Vol. 1 by Aaron George. That’s a hell of a thing to see at the very end of the table of contents; I almost skipped right to this one! Glad I waited, though, this was a heck of a way to close things out. I’m not sure I entirely jive with this one, honestly. There’s some cornball humor, expect hacky jokes about pineapple pizza and iPhones - though the latter turns into a pretty funny Chekhov’s Gun by the end. Also present is what might be the most audacious Doctor Who cameo in recent memory. The, ah, nameless Invaders from GodEngine are back and in the Eleven-Day Empire to boot. I’m never sure I love Faction Paradox hanging on so tightly to Doctor Who, really. Miles-era Faction only gets a pass because Miles’ vision was so specific and he did so much that Doctor Who proper wouldn’t have dared to. The present meta of funny little cameos doesn’t do much for me.

That being said, despite my critiques I do genuinely feel like the Faction Paradox universe is a little richer for now containing this story. No matter whether it worked for me, it’s chock full of ideas that I loved. There’s a pop-sci deep-dive on the Observer Effect, an act of revenge that basically ends in a second Anchoring of the Thread and a race of aliens nobody wants to fuck with because they built a big telescope that threatens to take the ambiguity out of this series’ almost hilariously ambiguous rogues gallery. My favorite bit, and the only joke that totally landed for me, was the university lecture section where pieces of fiction are presented as factual documents in-universe. Borges is cited as a journalist, for instance.

Overall, this story wasn’t fully to my taste but the good bits left me wanting more which is something I can’t say for every story from the Boulevard diptych. Godspeed Aaron George and anybody fucking insane enough to try and follow up on the ideas introduced here.

So yeah, Boulevard Vol. 2 was pretty damn good! A few clunkers aside I really am feeling this one. Like I said at the top, it’s probably gonna be my new go-to for newbies. And at the end of the day I’m just glad I can finally give this series the overwhelmingly positive review it deserves. The 2020s haven’t been Faction Paradox’s best decade, but in this collection Obverse proves they’ve still got it and with a fair few books having recently been announced I couldn’t be more excited.