Faction Paradox is a lot of things, and perhaps the most obvious to those with only a fledgling familiarity of the franchise is its lore and worldbuilding. It's got cosmic, grand-scale ideas aplenty and a tendency to blur the line between the jaw-dropping and the ridiculous, and nowhere is this more apparent than the corner of the franchise that is the City of the Saved, created by Philip Purser-Hallard.
First introduced in The Book of the War and expanded upon in the vast and thrilling Of the City of the Saved, the City of the Saved is a galaxy-sized city containing every human who ever died in the Universe, from early australopithecines to the last posthumans. It's split into Districts populated by people from across the whole timeline of humankind, making it a wildly diverse place where all sorts of genres, technologies, and cultures can cross over with each other. It's got endless potential, and really the only surprising thing about the existence of the City of the Saved spinoff is that it took until the third publisher with the Faction Paradox license to make it a thing.
This first installment in the series pretty much delivers. It's an anthology of six short stories, plus two bookends that tie the stories together and back into the overall story of the City of the Saved. Each story focuses on a different corner of the City, from a posthuman who turned themself into a car and now spends their days picking up hitchhikers, to a District with no ground populated by winged humans, to a District populated entirely by people from regency-era England and Jane Austen fans, and so on and so on. The diversity keeps things exciting, as the reader has no idea what they'll find from story to story: one moment you're reading about a cigarette-smoking posthuman with the six-week-old body they died in (eesh), the next you're reading about Lazarus from the literal Bible and his annoyance at everyone asking him how to cope with resurrection. The sheer wealth of ideas on display is astounding, brilliant, thrilling, insert your own overenthusiastic adjective here. I love it to bits.
The diversity in stories does fall short in some ways. For one, it seems reluctant to explore real-life cultures outside of Europe and the United States – most characters are cavemen, humans from well-known corners of Western history, or individuals from future cultures after humanity made its way to the stars. Given the lack of diversity of the authorship, perhaps this is a blessing in disguise, but I'd still prefer the franchise to show a little more interest in representing other cultures, same as Faction Paradox proper has. And hey, if that means there has to be a more diverse set of writers involved, that's all the better. The whole thing both feels like a missed opportunity in terms of the content, and exclusionary in a meta sense.
And on a lighter note... way too many of the perspective characters in these stories are the hard-boiled, self-serious type. Like, over a third of the book is taken up by it. The stories themselves are diverse, but the personalities aren't, and it's kind of bizarre. In Of the City of the Saved, Philip Purser-Hallard put effort into making each character come across as a distinct personality, and with his work as the editor of this anthology I'd have hoped the characters would be similarly thought-out. The themes and settings of the stories are wildly different enough that it still ultimately comes together well, but some of these characters are underbaked, even for the standards of short story protagonists.
Still, the tones of each story are very well-considered. Most stories feel distinct from one another, and there's a gradual shift and building of themes which works very well, starting from Philip Purser-Hallard's short-but-cute introduction piece "Akroates". Blair Bidmead's "Happily Ever After is a High-Risk Strategy" then begins the anthology proper with a wildly entertaining screwball energy that still finds something to say about how an afterlife would work in practice, exemplified in the story's title. Elizabeth Evershed's "The Socratic Problem" follows, continuing the silly energy (though it's rather less eventful), and then Juliet Kemp's "Lost Ships and Lost Lands" and Helen Angove's "Highbury" enter the scene.
Through the winged humans' Cerulean District and the high-society Highbury District, these two middle stories instill a sense of wonder and excitement about the city's scope while simultaneously reflecting further, demonstrating how manipulation and crime can still take place even in a world where nobody can die. I perhaps wanted a bit more nuance from both of them, as both stories presented situations as a little more black-and-white than they struck me as being in reality. Still, I guess that's how it is with these short stories: you only get so much time to explore. At any rate, "Highbury" in particular takes a lens to certain issues in a way that's both intriguing and a tinge vindicating, and it gets bonus points for naming a species "Homo phobovore".
The last two big stories of the anthology, Dale Smith's "About a Girl" and in particular Dave Hoskin's "Bruises", are where the themes culminate and Tales of the City really starts to get introspective. The City of the Saved isn't for everyone, and that's what these stories devote themselves to exploring. There's something existentially draining about a place where nobody can truly be hurt or die, where suddenly there's no danger or sense that life is finite. "Bruises" was a particularly fascinating piece, initially taking an eye to how sadomasochism could possibly work in the City, before broadening its scope and revealing a deeper longing for any kind of stakes to City life. Oh, and there's a great twist near the end. It was, in my mind, the most thoughtful and clever story in the anthology, rounding it off very well; the latter of the two bookend pieces, "Apocalypse Day" by Philip Purser-Hallard, tops it all off with a look into the protagonists' states of mind during the beginning of the Civil War that began as Of the City of the Saved ended.
This book isn't perfect, but it's commendable for its ideas alone, and it carries the setting from moment to moment, from absurdist to thoughtful, with a lovely sense of enthusiasm and energy no matter the story. Through its ups and downs, the anthology is permeated by a sense of fun; the setting is a canvas for authors to do whatever they want, and boy, did they take advantage of it. Anything can happen in the City of the Saved, and every author here took that thought and ran with it, making for an entertaining and engaging read even in the spots where it's lacking. And after all, it's the City of the Saved. When is it not exciting?
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