purplecat

In the name of full disclosure I should point out that, to the extent that I have ill-gotten gains from the writing of fiction, these have come via the editorial largesse of Philip Purser-Hallard writer of The Pendragon Protocol.

( NB. Also Spoilers )

I would definitely recommend this to people interested in Arthurian Legend, and in how Arthurian retellings can be integrated into the modern genre of urban fantasy. I find it harder to judge how it might work for people with less of an interest in the core myths.

Faction Paradox originally appeared in Alien Bodies, a Dr Who book released by the BBC in the lean years between the Paul McGann movie and Russell T. Davies' new series. They are a time-travelling voodoo cult set up in reaction to Time Lord culture. In recent years, with the increasing fragmentation of the Who spin-off market, the Faction has found a number of homes with small press publishers and has built up a fairly respectable back catalog of original novels/novellas and short story collections which are divorced from all but the most oblique reference to Doctor Who itself.

Obverse books is, I think, the newest kid on the block when it comes to this kind of "ideas that started off in Doctor Who" publishing. I've reviewed a couple of their Iris Wildthyme short story collections in the past but, like with Big Finish's Benny Summerfield short stories, I felt that I wasn't fond enough of short stories to really warrant buying these collections with the frequency they were published. However they recently released two Factor Paradox-themed short story collections as ebooks in which format, it turned out, I found them a lot more tempting than as actual physical books (go figure). They were Tales of the City edited by Philip Purser-Hallard, featuring stories all centred around Purser-Hallard's City of the Saved where all humans find themselves in some kind of strange afterlife, while Faction Paradox: A Romance in Twelve Parts edited by Lawrence Miles was a more wide-ranging collection.

I enjoyed Tales of the City best of the two. I really like the setting and the authors demonstrate that there are lots of interesting things to be done with it. My favourite tale was The Socratic Problem by Elizabeth Evershed in which Socrates is let loose in a (broadly speaking 21st century, western) university Philosophy department. I was less taken with A Romance in Twelve Parts but I'm not entirely sure its contents are of a lower standard. Faction Paradox technology has always been powered by ritual, bone and blood and so the horror story has never been far from the universe. Horror isn't really a genre I'm all that fond of. There were some clever ideas in this collection but they seemed at once both too self-consciously clever and too eager to shock for me really to engage with them. This is a pity, since I think Faction Paradox is easily the most interesting spin-off concept to come out of the Who Merchandise industry.

I know I keep saying I'm going to stop buying the Bernice Summerfield books but they keep putting ones out with strong author line ups: in this case Mags L Halliday, Kelly Hale and Philip Purser-Hallard. I remain unconvinced by the three novella format. I would have welcomed more depth and complexity to each of the three stories here. But I think this is, nevertheless, the strongest Benny book I've read for a while.

( more under the cut )

Another day another Doctor Who spin-off. Not Bernice Summerfield this time but Iris Wildthyme. Iris, well Iris is both easy and difficult to describe. She's a disreputable woman of uncertain age with a penchant for gold lamé who drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney. She travels through space and time in a double-decker bus which is smaller on the inside than on the outside and takes irresponsibility to a level that makes the Doctor look like a straight-laced puritan. More importantly she began her literary career entirely separate from Doctor Who in Paul Magrs' magic realist novel, Marked for Life (which I've not read so I'm taking this on trust), but was later integrated into his Who novels and was used to comment upon the Doctor as a kind of non-evil but entirely irresponsible anti-Doctor. These Who novels were nearly always commentaries upon or pastiches of story-telling forms of one sort or another.

The background is important because, in conceiving a series of Iris Wildthyme short stories, someone obviously had to decide what an Iris story was when there was no Doctor present for her to react against. Somewhere along the line it seems to have been decided that, where the Doctor has adventures in time and space, Iris Wildthyme has adventures in story-telling so the collection predominantly serves us up a selection of pastiches and "Iris meets an author" stories. While many of these are very good they all began to get a little samey after a bit which made Craig Hinton's Came to Believe one of the stand-out stories in the collection. It's one of the "Iris meets an author" stories but Hinton appears to have been drawing more heavily on the magic realist tradition than on the literary pastiche idea. Its an, in many ways mundane, tale of an alcoholic journalist in his first couple of days at a rehab clinic. This stay enlivened by the magical presence of this eccentric woman called Iris. It made me think that a collection of magic realist stories about Iris would have been better and more interesting that the set of story-telling stories that we get, however good some of them may have been. I was all ready to write this review about how Hinton's story was the highlight of the book when Jonathan Blum's The Evil Little Mother and the Tragic Old Bat snuck in right at the end and stole all the honours with an intelligent, gripping and heart-wrenching take on Medea which nevertheless managed to include all the compulsory Iris meddles irresponsibly and gets completely legless parts.

Honourable mention also goes to Philip Purser-Hallard's Minions of the Moon which is best described as Science Fiction as Shakespeare would have written it had he been writing short prose-form stories instead of long verse-form plays. Sadly Purser-Hallard sets up his story and then seems to lose interest in it, stopping it all rather abruptly.

Frankly these three stories alone make the collection worth the cover price. None of the other stories are bad, though some are a little heavy handed in their humour (Lance Parkin's The Mancunian Candidate Narnia pastiche (or more accurately critique) and Jacqueline Rayner's Iris and Irregularity) and others are simply rather slight (Justin Richard's Most Horrid Most Haunted pastiche, Jake Elliot's The Sleuth Slayers which appears to be a cross between an Agatha Christie/Sherlock Holmes pastiche and an Avengers Tribute and Kate Orman's Rough Magic - the only story in the collection whose link to story-telling of one sort or another wasn't clear to me. Either I've not read the works that inspired it or Orman is attempting something entirely different from the rest of the authors in the collection. Whichever, I didn't find much to sink my teeth into in this tale of magical goings on in a holiday resort in the space-time vortex).

Altogether though, this is a superior effort on the Big Finish Short Story Anthology front.

bunn asked about the Faction Paradox novels in a reply to my last post and my comment in return was too long so I'm putting it here as a new post

( Notes on the Faction Paradox (and related) Novels )