Faction Paradox: Rose-Coloured Crosshairs review - weird but charming

 A few years back, I said I’d like to go back and review all the old Faction Paradox material on this blog eventually. It made more sense back then, when the series appeared to be another victim of the pandemic. A return to somewhat consistent annual releases starting with the first Boulevard book has given me less time to think about the past. Then again, I read more than one book a year. And, y’know, it’s not like these reviews are particularly broad or deep. They're easy to write. So I had plans this summer to delve back into the Mad Norwegian Golden Age alongside a review of this book.

        Then Obverse Books decided that Summer 2025 was gonna be the most productive point in the company’s entire history. Like, holy crap. The Paradise Towers novel, a reprint of Of the City of the Saved, and an EDA-themed charity anthology? It’s been a big summer for Wilderness-adjacent spinoffs outside of the Obverse corner, too - Jimbo’s Mars book finally came out! I think I was sixteen the last time Doctor Who prose dominated my summer reading like this. Good times. Not all that great, actually, but Doctor Who was better back then. Or, at the very least, it felt better.

Speaking of rose-tinted glasses, let’s talk about Blair Bidmead’s Rose-Coloured Crosshairs. It came out in April, just ahead of the summer onslaught, to relatively little fanfare compared to the earlier Inward Collapse. Or maybe I just don’t pay attention to social media like I used to. I hope that’s what it is.

This book isn’t quite as weird as Inward Collapse either, for better and for worse. In places it’s pretty trad by Faction Paradox standards. The prologue opens on an almost Star Trekkian pulpy note, with four Faction members traversing a wet, rainy alien world surveying things with the scanners in their armor. That’s a kind of funny energy for Faction Paradox to capture, isn’t it? I think it just about works, especially through small details like the armor containing needles that automatically extract blood from one's arm during blood-related rituals. That's clever and pretty funny to boot. Bidmead also coins the term “déjà adjusté” (unless this has appeared in some of his other works? I’m not totally immersed in his side of FP fiction, and I know he’s often impenetrably self-referential). This term means what you probably think it does: the disorientated realization adept time-travelers get that time has changed around them. That’s the core premise of the book, in a lot of ways.

Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is about an experiment Faction Paradox is conducting. They want to create a means of, essentially, weaponizing nostalgia. Trapping a person or a culture in endless reminiscences on false memories until the whole thing disappears up its own ass - not too far off thematically from Inward Collapse, or even Hyponormalization, then (interesting to note that these are the three newest, and shortest, Faction Paradox books). They're accomplishing this through a ritual conducted in the primeval past of an Earth-like planet that should guarantee its dominant culture remains stagnant throughout its history. Something goes horribly wrong, of course. The time-sensitives sense danger and carry on anyhow, plunging everyone directly into various periods in the planet’s future. Most of the book is split into three roughly 50-page sections covering, respectively, the age of (sentient) dinosaurs, something akin to contemporary London and the Posthuman far-future.

I think this book is pretty top-heavy. The earliest section, A Reptile Dysfunction, is the best one. I mean, of course it is. It’s a Faction Paradox story about anthropomorphic dinosaur-people. This naturally includes the three-eyed Trioculates and the gnarly Surf Devils. I’ve lamented time and again that Faction Paradox would be a stronger series without the petty allusions back to the franchise it split from, but the specific way Bidmead approaches Doctor Who refs rarely fails to amuse me. He’s just so refreshingly brazen, I can’t bring myself to hate it.

Though the stars here are definitely the dinosaur people based on real dinosaurs. The pterosaurs live in high-rise skyscrapers modeled after stacks of boulders, the aquatic dinosaurs worship Dagon. They have hair-like plumes of feathers and speak in strange voices. The pterosaurs are named things like Bkwark and Kklak, which just sound like noises a pterosaur might make - I interpreted the double K as a clattering of the beak. It’s fun stuff, once again wearing some pulp influence on its sleeves while still offering plenty of its own personality. This is another 2020s Faction Paradox setting I couldn’t help imagining in low-framerate stop motion. 

The plot is a little silly, featuring talking dinosaurs getting involved in political drama. The politics are unsubtle, integrated into the fiction a little more smoothly than in Hyponormalization while unfortunately never amounting to much more than that book. Pontifex Kklak is basically Pterosaur George Bush and his priorities involve a prophetic chameleon named Anqingo (erroneously referred to as Aquino for about 2 pages) and a recurring nightmare about the evil rodent deity Mus. An explosion goes off in the city and Pontifex Kklak is said to secretly hope the culprit is never identified, so he can use this as an excuse to begin a crusade against anything that might possibly be connected to Mus. Which is to say, anything that isn’t part of the (artificially) established dominant culture. That kind of cutaway, in which the author inserts a couple sentences or a paragraph of flagrant description of a character's beliefs or motivations, is unfortunately common through this book and one of the major downsides of the prose.

 One more thing, I appreciated the choice to make Anqingo a chameleon. To have a modern reptile serve as the “prophet” in a world of dinosaurs is a smart touch. Subtext aside, he's one of the best characters in a really cool little world. I’m always game for anything set in a civilization of sentient dinosaurs, it’s one of the Doctor Who sphere’s great underutilized ideas. And the Hitchhikers-esque punchline at the end sealed the deal for me.

The other two sections are solid. I imagine I’d have enjoyed “The Night-Time Economy” more if I’d read any of the prior Theo Possible and Queenie material. They come off okay here, though I immediately noticed that Bidmead’s over-detailed descriptions work better on dinosaurs and prehistoric cities than on more familiar things like humans and London. He has a habit of devoting a whole paragraph to a character’s appearance as soon as they’re introduced. It’s a style of narration best left on the D&D table. Makes me wonder if he’s been DMing lately.

I also think the setting stumbles a bit here. The first section was an interesting, original world that just happened to be somewhat Earth-like. In this part, though, the alienness of the place is mostly relegated to Queenie realizing not long after arrival that the city they’re in isn’t London and having to occasionally remind herself of that. I do get it; this is a very plot-heavy midsection and an alien setting woulda distracted from that. This chapter already has the task of telling a complete Theo Possible story while also balancing two or three of the most important twists on its head. 

For what it’s worth I got invested enough to be enticed by all the twists and turns brought on in this chapter, and I came away from it wanting to know more about Mr. Possible. If you’re unfamiliar, as I was: in short, he’s the Doctor, but a DJ and also a conceptual entity. Intriguing stuff. He’s about as morally questionable as my favorite Doctors, too, throwing hypnotic mental suggestions around like it’s nothing. He and Queenie have a nice spat about that near the end. I like the whole metaphor about disco, techno and house. I think this chapter succeeds at what it had to do, without too much fluff.

Requiem For a Renaissance, set four billion years later, is naturally back in sci-fi territory. Posthuman cyborgs called cymbionts take the lead here, working for the Company from Weapons Grade Snake Oil to recover valuable resources from derelicts. Cymbionts are symbiotically linked to mecha, and the mecha are designed to look exactly like massive versions of animals from modern Earth. A smilodon, an aardvark and a pelican - a hell of a lineup, I gotta say! Props for choosing unusual, kind of "uncool" animal for two of these mechs; can't say I've spent much of my life considering what a multiple-story-tall robotic aardvark could accomplish. They come across the ruins of the planet, which the Company has been uncharacteristically skittish about, and decide they’ll go under the Company’s nose to sell archaeological rights to the highest bidder. Once they confirm this isn’t a “tomb” occupied by the emotionless cyborg legions of the Disaffected, of course. This is one of the lower-effort Who nods from Bidmead but I’m such a sucker for Faction takes on the Cybermen that I don’t really care (I hear they appear to some capacity in Weapons Grade Snake Oil, too... really gotta read that one). Long story short, it’s not a hive, there are no Cybermen present in this novel, but the danger present in the tomb is much greater than any mere cyborg. Much of this chapter is taken up with action sequences, which aren’t Bidmead’s strength, and I did get a slight sense he was just filling pages for a lot of the runtime here. The conclusion leads into a nicely ambiguous epilogue, though. You get just enough to start to piece things together, but nothing is spelled out and some important questions are left unanswered. Part of me wants to say it almost feels sequel-baity, but I think it works in its own right. A good ambiguous ending is a hard ask, and I think he pulled it off here. Also, I love that the remembrance tanks smell of roses. They’re rose-tinted!

        Overall, this is a weird book, it’s hard to describe it in any way that feels complete. The (utterly glorious) cover art is entirely devoted to concepts that appear for just under a third of the runtime. It’s full of great ideas, executed to varying degrees of effectiveness. The whole nostalgia-bomb concept is a strong one, and throwing the characters into three drastically different pieces of the petri dish allows that concept to be explored more thoroughly than in similar books like Inward Collapse and Hyponormalization. More clumsily, too, but the clumsy aimlessness of the plot leads to a lot of interesting ground being covered. And it’s definitely equal parts bug and feature. Every detail is important to some degree, even most of the stuff that feels like it should be filler. It’s clumsy, but it ain’t haphazard. It’s not my favorite Faction Paradox book, but Blair Bidmead is still a top-tier ideas man with some decent to great plots up his sleeve. I liked it. I’d definitely lend this book to a friend, though with how expensive Obverse’s books are I might hesitate to recommend buying it at full price.