I finally reread Lawrence Miles' "This Town Will Never Let Us Go"

        No book has ever made me feel so strongly like I was in a gas station at two in the morning. I actually did read parts of this book at a gas station the first time around, and the novel opens in a gas station, so there’s precedent. But the feeling persisted long past leaving the station; also, somebody on Tumblr made the same observation years back. It’s some memetic property inherent to the book itself, I think. If you handed this book to a caveman he would spontaneously comprehend the entire history of oil.

So am I rereading this book in 2026 because I just wrote an essay about the parts of my life I spent hanging out in gas stations? No, ah… unfortunately this book is back in my head for more severe reasons. It was published in 2003, written as the horrors of 9/11 and the War on Terror unfolded. Lawrence Miles’ vision of a future War between a staid superpower and a faceless Enemy was, all of a sudden, not science fiction. Appropriately, he used what wound up as his final novel as a trail marker of sorts. It’s simultaneously “the most 2004 novel” and a very prescient piece of writing. 

Take, for example, the setting: an unnamed small town in the UK. The world is at War, with a capital W. Out of nowhere rockets started striking random people. Usually fairly anonymous people, folks who’d have never made the news without such a violent unexpected event. So these aren’t politically motivated attacks, and the technology is beyond human. The War, then, becomes a new form of extreme weather. That’s how it’s treated in the narrative, as something frightening and unprecedented that no politician or celebrity can really talk about because they’re all powerless to stop it.

Transposing the anonymous, high-tech remote bombing of civilians from the Middle East to the UK is one of the book’s best moves. The paranoia, the constantly taut, violent atmosphere, the feeling of civilians under constant threat by foreign powers… but it’s people you, the reader, could know, instead of anonymous, disposable foreigners. Reading this novel in 2019, as an idealistic, youthful dork, it felt fantastical. It hit as one of the book’s many successful strokes of magic realism. A nurse who protested whenever he wasn’t on the clock and a couple women with Spanish names under threat from a faceless power in a town that looks, sounds and moves just like mine… it’s hyper-real, it’s a charmingly 2000s piece of protest art. It could never happen here, but watching it happen here helps you appreciate how fucked up the War on Terror is.

Then the government murdered Alex Pretti. He was a nurse and a protestor, shot down by a government fighting a thousand wars against a thousand faceless enemies. The forces that ended his life are still there, whether or not the news is reporting it. The last time I was in Minneapolis, I was reading this fucking book. That’s why I’m rereading it. Is that precocious? Is that a lot to put on a novel primarily known, to most of the people who are aware of it, as an entry in “that weird goth Dr Who knock-off”?

I don’t think so. I mean, obviously I don’t. My entire purpose when I write these reviews is to serve as an antithesis to how Faction Paradox is usually treated. Not that my reviews are the deepest discussions in the world, but I view myself as a conversation starter. I want to help normalize having actual conversations of these books, instead of viewing them as the wiki-fodder they were transparently designed not to be.

Hey case in point this book, actually it still might be the most successful example of this series’ rebellion against its roots. I’m not only talking about its Doctor Who roots, either; the concrete links to the Faction Paradox universe, which had just been established one book ago, can be measured on one hand. This is the equivalent of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard putting out a cowboy radio drama as their second album: a culling of any prospective readership who went in expecting More Of The Same.

This Town Will Never Let Us Go is thematically set in the world of Faction Paradox, insofar as it’s a magic-realist novel about cultural stagnancy, war, culture, encroaching authoritarianism, rebels, fake-rebels and the information age. Those are the core components of any given Faction Paradox story. In literal terms, it involves several potentially nonexistent groups that might call themselves Faction Paradox, there’s a War involving a Ship, and the Ghost Point comes up a lot. In even more literal terms, it’s a book of unparalleled importance to the Faction Paradox series for one crucial reason: it’s the first entry with that fucking font on the cover. 

You ever think about the Faction Paradox font? All-caps but the letters are melding with their lowercase forms, like they’re in temporal transit. I think this font rocks. It’s such a crucial part of the series’ adorably janky visual identity. See also the posters plastered on the wall. They’re the same exact image that was used for the Faction Paradox mousepad. God, I love that a limited-edition mousepad exclusive to comic book stores is still the only existent merchandise for this series. That’s perfect.

Oh, and while I’m off on this unrelated tangent it’s probably a good time to mention Lawrence Miles’ prose. It’s… if you’ve ever read his blog, it’s the same exact authorial voice for the most part. So, more chatty and casual than his prior novels. He tends toward grand, cosmic and anti-cinematic - you can visualize everything perfectly but he spins his yarns in a fashion that wouldn’t work in any medium but prose. That’s still on display here; the language is as powerful as ever, at its best it’s maybe his most evocative work. It’s just, like I said, written the way you might write a blog post. Some of the dialogue is quippier than I remember Loz getting, too - the backmatter advertises a Buffy guidebook he cowrote, which makes sense. Some of Inangela and Horror’s banter is in that realm.

In places it’s both his most and least “adaptable”. Though he wrote everything with the explicit intent of creating novels that worked best as novels, that didn’t feel like “lost episodes” or glorified film scripts. His consciousness for the medium, and his constant disdain in interviews towards overly “filmic” novels, makes moments like presenting a scene through the lens of the speed camera Inangela is vandalizing feel satisfyingly ironic but also just, like, good? It’s effective visual storytelling.

Another aspect that brings audio-visual media to mind is the format itself. The book is split into six sections, which are individually split into sixty minute-long chapters. These range in length from a single point of punctuation all the way to two pages. That’s a good move given the prose style. It’s dense not in terms of purple prose, but because it feels like a nearly 300-page one-sided conversation. Having the ability to dip in and out in short bursts prevents burnout, allows Lawrence’s delineations to feel natural and relevant, keeps the pace tight and means that during the really good bits you can always justify one more chapter.

This format - six fast-paced, information-dense hours of story - hints at TV without being it. It still couldn’t have ever been anything but a novel, but it also hints at the mass-media landscape this book is about. There’s also the excellent pacing. At the start you fall into a steady rhythm - two chapters in a row following each primary character, with occasional oddballs in the form of unattributed dialogue, exposition, essays et al. Once the plot kicks into gear that breaks down. Partly because the characters begin to share more scenes, partly because shit starts hitting the fan. The moment you realize it’s happening is one of the book’s more subtle “oh shit” moments.

Alright but basically none of that works if the characters aren’t good, and Lawrence isn’t always regarded as a brilliant character writer. Memory of his Dr Who work suggests he mostly wrote walking high concepts with stock personalities. In that sense and few others, he was a very trad writer. But maybe I’m wrong? The characters in this book rock. I mean, they all serve transparently obvious roles in the plot. Of course they do, this novel’s plot is so rigid that by the end the characters’ lack of free will has actually manifested itself as a character (if you think I’m exaggerating: I’m referencing the helicopter in 5.39 and 5.47. Whether you count its unseen pilot as “a character” is up to you).

But you never feel the plot’s mechanical nature as it’s running. The characters are all fully realized, relatable people who have good reasons to be doing the things Miles needs them to do. Inangela Marrero is the kind of ambitionless goth girl I used to know about a million of, before they all stopped living here, stopped being goth or stopped being girls. Some dialogue at the end even suggests she might be transmasc, which tracks. I’m happy to learn that was a known stereotype so many years ago. 

She’s also got some kind of autistic thing going on. I hate reducing fictional characters to a diagnosis but her whole thing is having these long, passionate conversations about occultism and how she sees rituals in every aspect of life. The whole of creation is a complex series of occult rituals to her, and she could tell you about every single one of them if you gave her the time of day. It's a worldview that becomes a little infectious; I began to think about my own life in terms of rituals the deeper into Inangela's chapters I got. 

She’s particularly tuned into the now heavily mainstreamed Faction Paradox style, a goth subculture incorporating sci-fi and fantasy elements and plastic replicas of the bone masks the “real” Faction might use. Only she knows that there must be an actual real Faction somewhere, and that they must be seeking initiates. One night, one of those nights, she decides to get in touch through a ritual she thinks might impress them. See, there’s something buried in this town. She’s felt it. Not long ago something happened in the sky that was louder than any mere rocket attack, which ripped a hole into the town’s fairgrounds. She laid there unmoving for 44 hours and became convinced that something was sleeping beneath the earth. Something she could wake up.

So she folded up a map of the town in an arbitrary fashion that let five speed cameras line up in a neat pentagram and contracted her buddy Horror to chauffeur her to each one. She’d spray-paint their lenses, resulting in a pentagram that lived on in part each time the speed cameras triggered. Eternal ritual through the memory of the mass-media machine. It’s, erm, smart in a contrived way. The exact kind of ploy somebody like her would come up with. Horror, the sarcastic woman of few words, goes along for the fuck of it but never lets Inangela forget how dumb this scheme is. Not that Horror is just there to serve as a straight-man, naturally. I mean, she named her van the House of Marrero. It’s accident-free and it can park anywhere she wants because Inangela performed a ritual involving the dried vomit of a dead homeless woman to create a Douglas Adams somebody-else’s-problem field around it.

I love these two. They’re like a white trash Ghost World, which is probably the most “god of course Max likes that” sentence I could ever type. The two of them putter around this book’s framework in a shit-ass van, always arriving just before or just after something happens. They work as indirect POV characters, and there’s a kind of mutually-assured obfuscation at play here: they have no idea how many events they just barely miss, and you have no idea why what they’re doing is as important as what the other characters are doing. And all of that is okay because they’re just fucking great to be around! The tense camaraderie of a friendship that’s probably past its sell-by date, the sinking feeling that Inangela isn’t as clever as she thinks and Horror isn’t as dumb as the narration wants you to believe. The unraveling of their ritual as they get closer to the center of the action.

The pace in their sections is amiably glacial until late in the game. It's a reassuring hiatus in the sidelines, which isn't to say nothing happens. There’s a lot of exposition, plenty of opportunities for Loz to elaborate on important concepts or themes. But mostly these sections are about atmosphere, an atmosphere so heady that the major impression my first reading left me with was an image of two goth losers on the road eating melty candy bars. This guy is great with words, and in his casual style he’s at his best when nothing is happening. Early on he describes a gas station convenience store’s candy aisle as “a natural history of all the snackfoods. A bestiary of snackfoods”. That entire opening sequence could be studied, as far as I’m concerned. Tension, atmosphere, natural exposition, an immediately striking introduction to all of the novel’s themes by way of an extended gag about George Orwell appearing as a guest on the Muppets… it’s damn near flawless.

There are the character introduction chapters, I guess. Those kinda blow. Each of the four protagonists receive an entire chapter devoted to describing their appearance in detail and elaborating on what led them to look that way. They’re mostly tedious, with a couple worthwhile moments. I love the part in Horror's where it's implied that her propensity for laziness is a form of magic. 

For every moment like that, there's Miles going into the completely uninteresting history of a pedestrian article of clothing or moments like his over-enthusiasm for Inangela's “majestic” hair. I struggle to call the book sexist, the female characters are the best part and Miles doesn't strike me as a misogynist. It's just very much written by a man who was a fan of sexist writers like Jos Whedon. On that note, Inangela and Horror are both fat (but in a hot way) and you'll be hearing about it. Even the skinny female lead, Tiffany Korta, gets an inflation scene later on. It came up often enough that several of my notes opened on some variant of “dude rub one out before you start writing”. I have nothing against sex or kink in fiction. This isn’t sex, though, it's just awkward poor writing. I mean, near the end of the book when they’re all decently well acquainted and we sure as fuck know who everyone is, Valentine is still mentally referring to Inangela as “the chubby goth girl, Inangela”. It’s cringe.

Before moving on I really want to stress that next to nothing happens in the Inangela-Horror sections, and I especially need to stress the fact that that never degrades the tension. Their mission to vandalize some cameras has the same frantic, all-in, devil-may-care urgency as the rest of the book. No matter what happens, nothing matters but the ritual. And I can’t understate how impressive it is that Miles makes you care so much about what they’re doing, because Valentine Bregman is building a fucking atom bomb. They're not risking it all to stop him, none of the other leads know he's doing this at all until the final act. He's like a Tom Clancy villain who stumbled into Ghost World by accident.

Jokes aside, I love him too. Unlike the fairly static Inangela and Horror, he's got a fine character arc. Annoyingly, because this novel is set over the course of six hours most of that arc is revealed to us in flashbacks. Most of the important characterization happens on-screen, but still! There are one or two too many Valentine flashbacks in this book. Even the good ones jar the pacing, and the bad ones are rough. 

Valentine is a lefty, and he used to be a very idealistic sort. Went to a lot of protests. Loz presumably knew a lot of Valentines, hence why the book stops at least hourly to remind you that protestors are useless, hypocritical manchildren who waste all their energy on holier-than-thou infighting. He's not wrong, though the “no real revolutionary would ever go masked” tagline and the bit about how cops never fired guns at peaceful protests are both dated. And the protestors are cartoon strawman, too, who directly protest the War (basically a natural disaster, not caused by any politician or government) instead of, say, the government's response to it. Nobody was mad at George Bush because he pushed a big red button labeled Hurricane Katrina. The ire is directed at a politician when they fail to clean up afterwards. It's the one point where the book's unreality completely breaks down because what's being presented makes no sense unless you substitute the fictional War for the real one.

At the very least, dissatisfaction with peaceful protests moves the plot along. He gets in touch with a group called The Faction, allegedly an offshoot of an offshoot of a group he'd once belonged to. They groom him to do their bidding and by the time the novel opens he's mentally preparing himself to build an improvised nuke. He sheds the last of his naivete quickly, replacing it with the kind of paranoia that, combined with the novel's magic-realism, leads to some unsettling moments of ambiguity. The Dogs of War come to mind. 

By the end of the novel he's still basically the same guy. Not frothing at his mouth, not unrecognizable. Just little old Valentine who happens to believe setting his homemade bomb off is going to make the world a better place. A led to B, B led to C, now he's at Y and you know what A-X looked like. From start to finish he's believable and to the end I could see myself or someone I know and love in him, no matter what heinous act he'd moved on to. Doctor Who did a whole multi-year storyline about “a good man going to war” that culminated in a single scene where the immeasurably evil hidden Doctor was, like, slightly rude. Fuck that, here's a good man descending into terrorism.

Also note that at the beginning of Valentine's story he kicks his sorta Horror-ish coworker out of the ambulance so he can be alone to conduct his business, just after loading a dying Faction-masked goth girl into the back. I don't think I need to spell that symbolism out. It’s simple and effective.

Speaking of simple but effective, that’s Tiffany Korta’s introduction in a nutshell. Okay, not her first couple bits. She’s kinda insufferable at first, or rather the narrative is insufferable about her. She’s a pop star, and the narration in her early chapters is a lot of Miles being a catty bitch about what he imagines pop stars are like. She’s soulless and self-absorbed, quoth the blogger. Much of what he’s on about was already dated or at least old hat by 2003. It’s the least original social commentary in the book (yeah, yeah, I know most of the other social commentary is Loz grafting philosophers he likes into his setting… using sci-fi to narrativize Fukuyama’s End of History is still more original than another grown man whining about Britney Spears. And if it were anything but Fukuyama’s End of History, it’d be a lot less embarrassingly dated, too).

But then suddenly Korta’s part gets crazy good for a bit! She does some coke and invites this poor hotel bellboy into her room, where she’d previously ordered the staff to send her every TV in the building. Each one of the screens is playing a different tape of that night’s concert, shot from different angles and carefully synced into one panorama. She pleads with this perplexed young man to recognize that the Tiffany on the screen is moving in different ways on different cameras. Her identity is coming undone, she claims. The Tiffany on TV is becoming its own person. At this point, it just sounds like the coke is talking. It’s not, of course. Tiffany’s storyline goes some places.  She’s the most directly linked to the War and what’s going on in this Town. 

And of course, she’s a druggie bimbo who has no idea just how bad things really are. By the final hour she’s undergone a sort of metamorphosis (there’s a lot of insect imagery in her bits; specifically the ever-present VHS tapes are compared at every opportunity to the carapaces of beetles) where she’s turned into this modern media-savvy goddess within the machine. All at the cost of her being an actual character, unfortunately, and not long after she’d become more interesting than the bimbo the prose wants you to take her for… her personality isn’t gone, mind you, just sidelined because she’s a plot device now. She comes back near the end for a great conversation with the future incarnation of Horror, one of my favorite individual chapters in the book.

That might sound like I just spoiled a fair bit, and I did, but Tiffany's section is packed tight. Aside from some tiring rants about The Media, her third of the book is an extensive perspective vortex where what looks like drug-fueled paranoia turns out to be completely real. She undergoes a literal ego death (and rebirth) on live TV. Learning who did this to her and how little control they have over this failed experiment is downright chilling, even if some of the details are cheesy. A lot of it was dated at the time, even (the VHS stuff purposefully so). I don’t want to imply all of Loz’s rants about The Media are bad, though; one of my favorite lines in the book comes from him expounding on how little control celebrities have over their image. He goes into the history of Marilyn Monroe as a sex symbol: “Imagine that. Being raped twenty million times a day.”

Good stuff, but in a sense that also lets me get out of the way the main reason I rarely recommend this book to people: Miles doesn’t always know how to give sensitive topics the weight they deserve. It’s the downside of the chatty, blogger-y prose this book mostly uses to its benefit. For every line like that you gotta struggle through awkward descriptions of Tiffany’s sex life, or another description of a woman's body, or the insufferable (yet simultaneously underutilized) character Gareth “Foxy” Taylor. The whole is, like I said, satisfying. You just gotta squint at the details.

For example, the best aspect of this book in my opinion are the scenes early on in which our heroes all commune with some alien god/urban legend. Valentine’s deity of choice is the Black Man. He’s not just black, he’s Black, as in jet-black (still from Africa, though). He’s the “street-level” urban god, presented in direct contrast to Miss Ruth (we’ll get back to her). He rides in the back of a limousine blaring bassy music and he’s a magical arms dealer. In one of his final sequences he drives Valentine to the underside of a bridge at the edge of the Town, where eight other Black Men congregate around the chalk outline of a body (this is referred to as the Land of the Dead and is speculated by some readers to be Mictlan, with the Black Men as the modern version of the Aztec-themed Celestis. I tend to agree, though obviously this Mictlan isn’t a different plane of reality. Just a place in base reality that’s really weird. I wish Miles had gone further with this Land of the Dead, it feels lazy next to the other magical-realist settings the book employs. Especially for all the atmosphere he manages in the limousine itself).

So all of that is a little odd, and a reflection of Miles’ uncomfortable but ultimately harmless fixation on race. It’s hard to get upset about it when the prose in the limousine sequence is maybe the most evocative in the book and, well, Miles has done worse. Look at any of his Asian characters. I didn’t find it offensive, just kind of an eye-roll. The magical black guy is overdone and there’s little here that goes beyond generic “urban” stereotypes. It’s a very well-done repackaging of some corny tropes, basically.

Speaking of, Korta’s patron god is the Executive. They’re a nine-member corporate cult (compare to the Black Man and his eight compatriots… I like to think they’re the same entity, somehow) who all wear skull masks and address each other with familial terms. They’re the closest to the real Faction we get in the book, and even then it’s lightly implied they’re imitators. They definitely do rituals, have magical and time-travel abilities, and maintain a Faction-like interest in media manipulation, but whenever they appear the narration is sure to remind us that there might not even be a real Faction Paradox. 

(Some sections even hold discussions on the nature of time travel, and the fact that the Web Of Time wouldn't break down because of a paradox, since the history of any given matter relies solely on the meaning we give it. Which seems like a counterintuitive thing to dwell on in a series about a Time War until you realize what he's getting at is that the entire Faction Paradox universe is a mass delusion, a world of the media age in which physical matter has violently bent to the will of meaning.)

A few readers have drawn parallels between this book’s depiction of the Ghost Point and the Book of the War concept of the Broken Remote, the implication being that this book represents a failed attempt to turn all of human history into a Remote colony. It’s certainly there implicitly. Agents of The Faction are the ones manipulating Valentine into a set of actions that would result in a Ghost Point. The vibe whenever Faction Paradox pops up is one of weak creatures who believe themselves masters of their environments. They never fully grasp what they’re doing and they also never drop the mask. They must always appear to be in control, even as what they’re doing begins to spiral out into an apocalyptic paradox over which they have no power. The climactic confrontation with Tiffany, the very personification of their manipulation gone awry, is another favorite scene.

And then there’s Miss Ruth, the most memorable of these alien bastards. Also the one with the least obvious connection to the series’ established pantheon. She’s presented as being aware of, and not at all a fan of, the Black Man. That’s kinda all we get. She’s as ancient as the other parties yet she might be her own, third party, just some eldritch Thing aroused by the chaos surrounding it. The Ross Perot of the War in Heaven. And if this is what the side characters look like in Miles’ vision of the War, well, I’d hate to be caught in the War proper. To this day, Ruth stands as one of the goddamn spookiest characters the series has produced. The way she's rendered in prose is so vivid. Not to mention her servant, the long-suffering Jacqueline. Like the Black Man, Jacqueline is a collection of stereotypes, this time horror cliches. She's an abused young woman and a psychic, doll-like entity who dresses like a Victorian schoolgirl. Like the Black Man, Lawrence's prose breathes fresh life into these cliches. I mean, it helps that her psychic ability is so… Milesian. She can read the contents of a VHS tape merely by looking at the spine. Miles spells it out in more unsettling terms than I do.

Which leads us nicely to Ruth herself. She's the epicenter of Miles’ media universe, the only resident of a tower block at the end of Chemikaze Lane (chapter 1.33, describing the Lane, is another favorite. And Chemikaze is such a 2004-ass word, I love it). Her abode is nearly featureless but for an enormous collection of unlabeled VHS tapes. She's well-known enough in this Town that there are rituals associated with visiting her. Inangela has even swung by her place previously. Which raises the question of how normal this world actually was before the War came to town. 

She and the Black Man are both described in terms of being the latest incarnation of something primordial, and in Ruth's case you really feel it. You get the sense that this is not only the newest, but the most powerful incarnation of whatever she is. That the mass production of recorded media has caused her influence to balloon out of proportion, to turn her into the apex predator of the Ghost Point era. She’s got the highest page count of any given alien bastard, hosting every character except Valentine. Tiffany in particular undergoes an initiation through Ruth, resulting in her metamorphosis… which raises even more questions about Ruth (she’s ancient, media-savvy and given what she does to Tiffany I assume she’s working against the Ghost Point. Trying to ensure something rivaling the Houses can come from Earth. So like, I think she’s part of the Enemy but YMMV). I love Miles’ level of restraint in this book: he's loud and chatty about so much but knows exactly which cards to keep held to his chest.

Case in Ghost Point, the most important theme at hand. It's expounded on in a number of essay sections, you know exactly what Miles is getting at and why. The final twenty pages are probably half-essay. And yet there's still a lot to chew on after you've digested everything. I'll try my best to explain what I mean while avoiding spoilers. This book is about the End of History, and how such a concept could ever hope to bear fruit in a post-9/11 world. If you're unfamiliar (and keep in mind I haven't read his book on the subject): Fukuyama's basic idea with the End of History is that liberal democracy was the final form of civilization and that following the end of its greatest rival, the Soviet Union, history had seen its final great ideological conflict. Culture would flatten itself out and everything would be boringly Okay forever.

The position this book takes, during the bits focused on Valentine and his bomb, is that History could still End even if ideological conflict doesn't. A terror attack of sufficient magnitude would result in a world where everything even tangentially linked to that event would be seen as tasteless. Thus man would censor itself out of cultural and technological progress and die out through cultural dementia. Repackaging the same ideas ad infinitum until familiarity kills us. That's what the Muppets 1984 skit was all about, then, and all the lambasting of vapid pop stars. It's pretty tantalizing stuff, thematically, especially so soon after the wave of censorship, media squeamishness and firings that followed the CIA’s assassination of Charlie Kirk.

It doesn't all work. Like I said all the pop star crap is pretty lame. And I mean, observing this so far into the future we can say with certainty that 9/11 only made culture weirder. That’s even reflected in the book. Valentine’s taking orders from a spacefaring blood-magic cult he met through a left-wing protest group, which has shades of 9/11 trutherism. Korta’s manipulated by the Faction into becoming a more easily controlled media entity, before her brush with Ruth turns her into an unpredictable writhing mass of deepfakes who wears dreadlocks and calls for the execution of her fellow pop stars. There's an awareness that the End of History isn't all it was cracked up to be. The essay-filled ending is bleak but with lines about how we can always try again, but it'll be a little harder to rebuild every time.

The last subject I want to talk about, and the biggest thing I'm willing to spoil, is what exactly we'd be rebuilding: the Ship. I'm not sure any piece of subsequent Faction Paradox material has managed to portray a Ship so well. Inangela and Valentine struggling through fourth-dimensional corridors is gripping stuff. I should probably also note that aside from the control room centering itself around a pillar of light, this Ship has nothing in common with the TARDISes it's ostensibly inspired by. It's a pretty flagrant statement of intent, far from the tee-hee nudge-nudge Doctor Who references we get these days. And I think a lot of those are fun, mind, but I miss when Faction Paradox felt this bold and independent.

The other interesting thing about the Ship is the uncertainty of its origins. Like, materially it's probably a relic of some Wartime power. It's got one of the Homeworld's insect pilots and everything. Only problem is, there's a running implication that these things hide under every decently sized human settlement and might even predate them. By the end the Ship has gone from an unknowable alien horror to a manifestation of what we could've been had the End of History not occurred. We could have built this if we hadn't censored ourselves out of ingenuity. Instead, it appeared on our planet by itself and we blew it up. By the end I was under the impression that these things were conceptual entities manifested by humanity, the literal Ghosts of the Ghost Point. As for why they resemble the Ships of the Great Houses, well, the Enemy came from Earth yadda yadda yadda. 

That's about all I've got on this book, I think. Sorry for the longer than usual review (though I was merciful, really - my notes exceed 14k words!), I just have a lot to say about this one. It's a fantastic read, a really excellent magic realist rant-cum-novel. If you're a Faction Paradox fan and you haven't read this book, go change that as soon as you can. It's easy to find a PDF and the physical version isn't that expensive either. If you're new to this series, I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a jumping-on point. Most of its connections to the series as a whole are loose to metaphorical and it's a dense, frustrating read. But if this review intrigued you, hey, give it a try! Love it or hate it, it'll never let you go.

The reason I wrote 14k words of notes about this book, incidentally, is because of my grandpa. He was a prodigious note-taker. So I decided to up the ante on my note-taking from writing down the highlights to trying to write something about every single chapter, just as an experiment. I'll more than likely never get so thorough again, but I enjoyed the experience. Will be taking notes going forward even for books I'm not planning to review. It'll help my memory if nothing else.

As one final aside: 5.37 is written as one big jumble (to Miles’ credit, he kept the punctuation and capitalization where it should be and scrambled any word that appeared more than once the same way every time). First time around I couldn’t be fucked to figure it out. 2026 Max is coming at this with a multi-week streak on Strands. It only took me like 30 minutes, albeit I got a word wrong… probably? Voice-of-Light-City on Tumblr transcribed the word differently. Looking at it, though, “veils” is such a specific word to use in that sentence, and “lives” makes just as much sense to me. I’m convinced Miles did it on purpose. And my initial transcription of “yes-men” as “ene-mys” made me giggle so I’m pretending that’s a viable option too. Without any further ado, seer’h eth scubnarmdel sirenvo fo 5.37:

Ni yan niainiotti, shert'e a nommte nhew nithvergye asht't aler essem ot tresde uyo. Si't patr fo yevre tyolghyom nda yevre mestys fo nranegil ew veah: asht't hyw “karebownd fo itryela” otressi lwil wyalsa eb os upplaro. Ubt het Rutht si, itryela veern skareb onwd. Yonl oryu essnse kareb onwd. Ludgincin oryu essne fo Su nda Mthe.

Sa rfo het Rwa… ense mrof rehe, het slevi fo het myeen esem sesendl. Nda het mysee'n mys-een rea sa seronumu sa het senagl ni ist Psish, ro het odsg ti rebsde ot peke su ni khecc.

In any initiation, there's a moment when everything that's real seems to desert you. It's part of every mythology and every system of learning we have: that's why "breakdown of reality” stories will always be so popular. But the Truth is, reality never breaks down. Only your senses break down. Including your sense of Us and Them.

As for the War… seen from here, the lives/veils of the enemy seem endless. And the enemy's yes-men are as numerous as the angels in its Ship, or the gods it breeds to keep us in check.

You can see why he scrambled it, right? It spells too much out. Nicely written and very cool, so I’m glad he didn’t just axe it. Making you work for it was the right move.