Love this franchise though I might, when you've spent the last couple of months making your way through Faction Paradox anthologies of various flavors, the format does start to take its toll over time. Given that context, it's somewhat of a feat that Burning with Optimism's Flames ended up landing for me quite as well as it did – though it took its sweet time getting there.
Burning is a relatively similar anthology to the previous entry, A Romance in Twelve Parts, if somehow both more diverse and more coherent. It takes a look at various rituals of Faction Paradox as they interfere with various corners of history, with occasional diversions into more tangential tales – and it's all from the perspective of outsiders. The result is a smoother read than Romance – Jay Eales absolutely knows how to assemble an anthology – but when you take its similarity to its predecessor together with the fact that its stories are generally rather short and thus can feel staggered, it's hard to conjure up a meaningful impression of the thing as a whole. The only way I can really talk about it is going story by story – so, let's do it that way.
The anthology starts with a few stories that landed well enough, if all with their own strengths and weaknesses. Liz Evershed's "Raleigh Dreaming" had a slow start, but that slow pace started working to its advantage as it accumulated intrigue over time. It was a fun puzzle to work through, with a cute ending to boot. "Office Politics" by Alan Taylor similarly had me crafting theories as I read, culminating in a deliciously dark ending – though the worldbuilding involved in the reveal did strike me as somewhat underbaked. The prose throughout the whole story similarly felt straightforward to a somewhat distracting degree, though it didn't detract from entertainment value really – and in some ways I prefer it to the alternative.
Serving as direct opposition to the previous story is "...and from the Tower she did fall" from Cate Gardner: Faction Paradox lore as abstract art. It'll require a few more readthroughs from me to really parse what the intention was here, but it was a good read nonetheless – its brevity and vaguenesses didn't really bother me, in contrast to the next story, "La Santa Muerte", whose brevity led it to feel like a total nothingburger, rather than intriguingly open-ended as I assume was intended. And all I can say about "Dos Hombres – A Fable" is that Kelly Hale continues to write for a distinctly non-me target audience, with enough pulpy narration, focus on attractive men, and gratuitous hetero sex to make me feel entirely distanced from her world. Also, she really didn't need to introduce a character by telling me said character was part of the gentrification of a neighborhood that resulted in all the black people being driven out.
It's at this point that the anthology starts getting more divorced from real-life settings, and here to usher in that change is "All the Fun of the Fear", which... uh... is this what Doctor Who fans who haven't read Faction Paradox think when they hear people talk about Faction lore? At any rate, its zaniness blended into white noise after a point. "Wing Finger" was the biggest success thus far in my book, a short and sweet tale of Faction agents interfering in history, and it was followed by "The Strings", a beautifully-written tale of far-flung worlds. "Squatters' Rights" is the second story I've read from Juliet Kemp, and once again they knock it out of the park with a simply written but well-paced and evocative tale. Plus this time it's horror, which Faction Paradox's setting (and Kemp's prose style, apparently!) is built for.
From here we enter the home stretch with Simon Bucher-Jones's "After the Velvet Eon"; the main connection I can make between this and his wildly-different story from More Tales of the City is that the guy's brilliant (he wrote half of The Brakespeare Voyage, after all) but his stories can get buried in their own prose at times. Still, that at least means it's evocative. "Remake/Remodel" is the first bit of Faction Hollywood content we've gotten since The Book of the War, and was a simple and clever story that got me all the more excited for the Faction Hollywood novella coming up. And right after was Aditya Bidikar's "Dharmayuddha", a dense one which will require a couple rereads from me, but which was exciting all the same as it transposed Hindu mythology onto Faction lore.
"A Star's View of Caroline", directly following it, was perhaps the most personally evocative and absorbing tale in the whole thing, though the realization it was connected to Doctor Who lore disappointed me a bit, as it has more than enough going on to stand on its own two feet. But hey, that's to say I loved it for what it was, and along with "After the Velvet Eon" and "Dharmayuddha", it's one of the stories I'm most excited to come back to. And finally, Philip Purser-Hallard makes his first contribution to the franchise outside of the City of the Saved in the form of "De Umbris Idearum", a brilliant thought-piece on religion and morality whose nested structure strikes a perfect balance between being understandable and intriguingly unconventional. Purser-Hallard once again proves he's one of – possibly the – strongest author in this franchise; I love to see him using his stories to branch out to new corners of the lore, particularly the morally fascinating concept of remembrance tanks.
All in all, this is an anthology whose quality starts alright, suffers a big dip somewhere before the midpoint, and ends up rising up near the end for some truly spectacular stories. One can see how I have trouble assessing it as a whole, given how much it tired me out and subsequently impressed me. Even beyond that, when so many of the stories are particularly short, it's even tougher to come out with a strong impression of them, to say nothing of the struggles I have coming up with a single mental concept of the book as a whole. These anthologies are reasonably fun, but they really do need to be spaced out with novels to make them fully land – or maybe just to be more intraconnected in and of themselves. At any rate, I'm eagerly awaiting the later, themed anthologies, and this particular tome once again reassured me that Obverse has the tone of this franchise figured out to a T.
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