Faction Paradox Retrospective (2001–2025)

Yes, I finished it! The dying months of 2025 saw the end of my lengthy quest to consume all of the licensed Faction Paradox material released to date*. Took me a solid twenty months, and now here I am, supercharged with knowledge about a franchise most Doctor Who fans are unjustly terrified to even dip their toes into. It's been a long ride through thirty years of franchise history, so strap on your seatbelts, loves: through Sphinxes, Sabbaths, and Sutekhs, Newtons, Naris, and Nambiro, I'm here to give out all of my takes.

(*As of Rose-Coloured Crosshairs. This excludes Vanishing Tales of the City and Hellscape: Lucifer; the former I'll get to eventually, the latter I don't think needs to be dignified with a listen.)

0. Induction

Put simply, I got into Faction Paradox because I was tired of trad-Who.

My Doctor Who expanded universe journey had started some months prior, in the autumn of 2023. Curious about this Big Finish thing everyone in the Doctor Who fandom was talking about, I'd dipped my toes into the audio-drama adventures of the eighth Doctor Who, Paul McGann; his initial run, with companion Charley, was produced during a time when Doctor Who was off the air and independent companies effectively had carte blanche to play with the license. As a result, the largely by-fans-for-fans series could often be absurd or nonsensical, drenched in continuity or divorced from all established concepts of what a Who story was; it was sometimes dull and sometimes riveting; it was nothing if not audacious, and that was what I cared about. Rock-solid storytelling tends to take a backseat in my priorities compared to sheer novelty in fiction.

And then I got to Lucie. You see, in the mid-2000s, the Eighth Doctor's audio adventures rebooted, redesigned to fit into a NuWho-shaped slot. A new companion, a new series structure, and a new, often much safer, style of storytelling. I wasn't thrilled. After a season of Eight and Lucie, I was still enamored by Eight's character, but the stories themselves had broken me down, driven me to sheer frustration with the way each and every episode felt like Who in distilled, averaged form. I'd later come back to this series and develop an appreciation for its finer points, but for the moment, I needed to break out of the mold.

And, well, thus was the time for Faction Paradox, Lawrence Miles's strange little independent break-off from the BBC-sanctioned Eighth Doctor book series. It had been in the back of my mind for a while, spoken of in whispers in the Doctor Who fandom: it's the deepest part of the EU iceberg, it's impossible to understand, all of its worldbuilding is nothing short of insane. All of these statements approach "close, but not quite" levels of truth, but my curiosity was piqued, and the reality of what Faction Paradox was wouldn't disappoint. 

I. Diversification

Like it or not, it's hard to find an opener to any series that leaves quite as much of an impression as The Book of the War – and personally, I loved it. The Faction Paradox franchise introduced itself by jumping right into the fray: a book with a million and a half ideas and stories to tell, all winding inwards to form one big crazy-quilt of a history. It's hard to look at the thing and not at least be impressed by what its myriad writers accomplished. If creator Lawrence Miles had the goal of distinguishing his fledgling franchise from Doctor Who while keeping all the most Milesian bits, he succeeded. Certainly it dragged me in.

And the crazy-quilt was only beginning. After this, Faction Paradox took its first steps as an independent franchise by throwing itself at three different mediums and seeing which one stuck; the audio drama series was my first foray into the world after Book of the War, and it colored in the lines of the Book perfectly. The one thing the Book was really missing was strong characterization, and the cast of the audios – Justine, Morlock, Eliza, Lolita – was immediately arresting, with Justine and Lolita being particular standouts for me. It put people into the picture painted by the Book, making it that much easier to love in the process. What's worldbuilding without scrappy, relatable characters to experience it? And though the low production value of its first season might have put some listeners off, I felt that it matched the esoteric tone of the franchise wonderfully. (Not like you can take a series with character names like Shuncucker and Veeble entirely seriously anyway. And that's a good thing!)

And oh, with this franchise being on the fringes of everything, featuring so much esoterica, it was all so queer-coded. And that's before we get to the lesbians. Eliza and Justine, Octavia and Anastasia, whatever's going on with Kresta ve Coglana Shuncucker – I love them all.

That said, looking at the other offerings for this early iteration of the Faction franchise, it's not difficult to see why prose is the medium that won out. Another one of Miles' attempts to jumpstart the franchise involved a short-lived comic series which seemed to foster his worst impulses: racist and exoticizing portrayals of foreign cultures, and an amount of text that borderline called into question the importance of the story's visuals to begin with. Meanwhile, the audio series was much more successful, widely praised by fans as it moved into its second season with a new production studio; still, something about that second season never quite clicked for me personally, with drastic recasts for protagonists Eliza and Justine making shifts in their characterization feel sudden rather than natural, and a complex story arc that was a bit too far-reaching for my personal taste in audio dramas. Where the first season had been too scrappy for some, the second season was too tangled up in itself for my personal abilities of audio comprehension.

Comics and audios may be more accessible or engaging for curious newcomers, admittedly; from my limited experience it seems as if Who fans breaking into the world of the Faction tend to gun for the audios first thing, likely thanks to the popularity of Big Finish's myriad audio drama series. Still, this is balanced out by the stress these formats put on production. Prose is, in my experience, a medium that demands high skill but has a comparatively low bar of entry and production cost; the costs of all that art and all that sound engineering seem to have added up, as the comics screeched to a halt before ever really beginning, and the audio series' release schedule grew notably sparse in tandem. And yet, the prose section of the Faction Paradox franchise lives on to this very day.

II. Breakthrough

Perhaps another reason for this longevity is the imaginative strength of prose. Comics demand direct pictorial representation of characters, settings, and events in most cases; audio dramas are much more lax but still ask for sound design, and plot is often limited to what types of exposition can be made to sound natural, or what can be instinctively understood through foley. One can do great things with these mediums – JoJo's Bizarre Adventure on one end, Big Finish's Torchwood range on another – but a series as experimental and audacious as the Faction's calls for a medium where writers can depict as much or as little as they want, leave everything to the imagination, and describe appearances and sounds in unorthodox ways that simply couldn't be done in other formats. (And in the case of various authors named Lawrence, diverge into authorial soapboxing for a couple paragraphs at a time.)

Certainly Mad Norwegian Press's initial run of Faction Paradox books was the most internally diverse of the franchise's initial offerings, and it was all the more memorable for it. I love a series that's not afraid to try new things, and this book series was the epitome of that mindset: jumping from a sociopolitical essay in novel form, straight to a sweeping capital-N Novel about a galaxy-sized afterlife, through to a much more contained and personal story about a time traveler's romance with Sherlock Holmes. Some of these stories I adore, others I can't stand, still others I have deeply conflicted feelings about, but there is no installment in this run of books that I do not have some kind of strong opinion on. That's the kind of beautiful audacity I look for in fiction, and the editing hand of Lawrence Miles knocked it out of the park.

And while I did say quality takes a backseat to audacity in my own preference, that's not to say my love for the era wasn't bolstered by my love for many of the stories. This Town Will Never Let Us Go had a strong and memorable writing style and a character I saw myself in; Of the City of the Saved had an admirably sprawling scale that kept me turning the page just to further subsume myself into this world; Warring States had a scintillating mix of atmosphere, wonderment at the worldbuilding, and joyful queerness; hell, even Warlords of Utopia I loved to hate. This, and many of the series installments thoughtfully expanded on the themes of cultural stagnation and development which The Book of the War was so eager to establish, giving them an extra back-current of things to chew on.

There's quality in some spots, absurdity in many, and never a dull moment. I think this initial era of Faction Paradox will continue to be my favorite period of the franchise's history for a long while yet.

III. Origins

At this point in my journey, I'd been all but ignoring Faction Paradox's origins as a part of various Doctor Who book series. I didn't actually read "Alien Bodies", the first-ever appearance of Faction Paradox the group, until I was nearly over with the Mad Norwegian line. Dead Romance, a Doctor Who side-story of a side-story tying in with Faction lore, also took a moment for me to get to, and "Interference" I read much later in my journey. In some ways these stories benefited from this unusual order, in other ways they were hurt; if I'd read these as Doctor Who stories, I would have been blown away by how imaginative and structurally unique they were. Looking back on it, I still was, really. Yet, looking at them from the perspective of the Faction series, they stood out just a little less than they frankly deserved to. My fault entirely.

Still, these are three incredible stories. Lawrence Miles injects the Doctor Who franchise with a scale rarely seen in both themes and story, and while his frequent sociopolitical commentary can be rather contemporary and on-the-nose, it resonates when you give it a chance to. Dead Romance highlights his talent for authorial voice and character perhaps the best any book of his has, whereas "Alien Bodies" is a veritable feast of worldbuilding, and "Interference"… well, it says enough that a poster of I.M. Foreman hangs on my wall as I write. I can't help but admire what Miles brought to the franchise, and even beyond all the spats he had behind the scenes, everything about his writing in this series feels like it's screaming to branch out into something truly its own. I admire these books all the more for that, and they make me that much more grateful for the independent media they eventually bore fruit to.

IV. Steps in the Dark

Let's get back to Mad Norwegian, though. Would that this kind of obscure franchise could self-sustain forever; but keeping it afloat demanded more interest than the books and their branding could provide, and Mad Norwegian Press had to end its line. With several novels left out to dry in various stages of conception, Faction Paradox moved to Random Static Ltd, then to Obverse Books, enduring a several-year-long gap in publication before being picked up by the latter.

While Faction Paradox has never really been known for the simplicity of its writing, this in-between "era" stretched that to the limit. Random Static's single offering, Newtons Sleep, is the first book that truly lives up to the franchise's reputation for opacity, and while there are kernels of intrigue in there, the way it buries that intrigue in walls of fanciful language wasn't quite up my alley. Still, a couple of the books workshopped at Random Static were eventually moved over to Obverse Books, which put in all kinds of work on them – and the resulting two novels keep the superdense nature of Newtons while smoothing it out a little bit to make it more palatable. At least by Faction standards.

Of the two, Against Nature takes Newtons Sleep's thematic density, while The Brakespeare Voyage takes the density of its storytelling, piled on top of an audacity in worldbuilding from Mad Norwegian (for which it was initially pitched). Both books feel like paintings, setting a scene and a tone impeccably, and both know just where to stretch themselves and where to come down to Earth. If there was ever a period where the cosmic nature of Faction Paradox shone brightest, it's this one. Stories span time, space, universes, realms of space and of concept and sometimes of nothing at all, and attentive readers are rewarded with a wealth of layers in all respects. I won't say any of these books are quick and easy reads – I needed a break after some of them – but Obverse fine-tuned what the other two publishers started with such efficacy that one almost wishes this publisher-casserole era had never ended. 

V. Stasis

At the same time as Obverse Books was bringing Against Nature and Brakespeare to life, it was working on its own entirely original publications: starting off with a duology of short-story collections, Obverse spent the 2010s alternately releasing anthologies and novels based in the Faction Paradox universe, coming from a range of writers new and old. This would go on to become the franchise's longest-running publisher era by far, still going strong today with one or two new releases each year.

Obverse's Faction publications present an interesting paradox. In a lot of ways, this era continues to a T what Mad Norwegian and Random Static started; some stories feature Faction Paradox the group head on, but most see them flit in and out of the narrative like the quietly meddling flies on a wall they are. Stories introduce new elements willy-nilly and play with the flexible nature of reality in many ways. There's an incredible tonal diversity in the stories, some being wild, wacky, and direct while others are quiet, ominous and opaque; and in terms of changes, it was delightful to see tens of new authorial voices appearing, many of whom had never contributed to the Who media gestalt before. In some ways, Obverse Books has its hand on the pulse of the franchise perfectly.

But looking back on the Faction Paradox series's evolution throughout the 2010s, there's something missing too, something that makes the series feel stalled, and it's taken me a long time to figure out quite what it is. I still enjoy my time with the series; the books are fun, the stories are good, and I love the range of authors Obverse has brought in. But there's a sense of investment in the franchise itself that's been lost.

There's a couple of factors here. For one, there's a huge expansion of thematic scope: Obverse is willing to put out a wider range of stories under the Faction Paradox banner than Miles ever was. Mad Norwegian appealed because of the diversity in narrative style and story elements, but still struck a consistent tone to the series; a certain gothic macabre with vast, sweeping settings, story elements somewhat inexplicable yet leaning on the Book of the War's scaffolding. And almost always, themes of progress versus stagnation permeating the narrative. Obverse has kept the macabre tone, but sends it in so many different tonal and narrative directions it's hard to know what the series identity is anymore. Add to this the abstraction of the universe's mechanics, where time-technology and the Faction's rituals can do pretty much anything with very little explanation: suddenly the narrative diversity crosses a line and stops feeling like a coherent series so much as a collection of interesting tidbits with a vague tonal tether.

I do love some of those stories, mind you. Liberating Earth is perhaps the least Faction Paradox–feeling Faction book to have ever been released, but it's simultaneously in my top three for the entire series because on its own merits it's just so damn good. And while Spinning Jenny doesn't really fit into the lore provided by the rest of the series, I still had a great time reading the thing and diving into the story's own internal logic. Even The Book of the Enemy, which openly eschews consistency between its own narratives, throws its weight in so many different directions that some of them were bound to stick. I love you, eldritch meme-kraken.

But still, looking at it as a whole... the earlier series built on itself, adding new elements and connecting preëstablished ones. Of the City of the Saved tied together the City of the Saved with Compassion and her progeny; Warring States gracefully tied those things back to the Thirteen-Day Empire, and yet this complex web of lore doesn't preclude stories working wonderfully on their own. Most famously, the audio dramas pull together elements from The Book of the War and licensed elements from Doctor Who in ways that cause massive story shifts. Obverse may play with these kinds of preëstablished elements, but it rarely builds on them. I see plenty to invest myself in within each book, but rarely anything to invest myself in the broader universe of Obverse's Faction Paradox.

VI. Newbloods

But this is starting to turn around. The late 2010s onward seem to have sparked an expansion of interest in these esoteric corners of the Doctor Who licensing fractal, not least in Faction Paradox. It's a tight-knit sort of group, but a passionate and inviting one full of new voices. While franchises should never give in to infinite self-referential loops – this particular franchise practically screamed that from its very beginning – they should absolutely still build themselves up and play with their own legacies so as to feel like a whole, and that's once more what's happening to Faction Paradox.

New concepts based on what came before are arising and spreading: The Boulevard, for instance, is a new spin on the Faction's activities that feels tonally in line with what came before and has spawned multiple volumes of stories with a smooth connecting thread. My favorite of these Boulevard stories is "The Complete History of Faction Paradox, Vol. 1", likely my favorite Faction tale released since Liberating Earth: it's a story that takes old concepts like the Anchoring of the Thread and remixes them into a comical, engrossing, and all-around novel premise. You want to know what made me go "oh shit", random Bluesky user? It took a moment for the post-Brakespeare franchise to get there, but— "you're fucking anchoring" did it.

(source)

Even more notably, Jayce Black's contributions to The Book of the Enemy and The Book of the Peace introduced the character of Auteur, tied him into the existing lore, and sent him on wild new adventures within the world established by the franchise thus far. These kinds of new concepts create a baseline for stories to tie into one another more thoroughly, which is a great start: now we just need to move those concepts forward, something the Boulevard has admittedly been lacking in, and the City of the Saved has been on-and-off about. As such, I eagerly await Arcbeatle Press's upcoming Auteur series…!

Speaking of Arcbeatle Press and Faction Paradox, they've planted their own stake in the worlds of Doctor Who, one intricately connected to Faction Paradox. There is, of course, their licensed Faction content, spawned from an ill-fated collaboration with a shady figure not worth mentioning further; but after leaving that particular company to fester in its own sins, Arcbeatle salvaged the best of their own writing work, and from then on their Doctor Who expanded universe content blossomed. Beyond Auteur and their offerings under the Faction label proper, they've pioneered a series centering around Who and Faction character Chris Cwej. While Cwej: The Series is largely its own in tone and style, it uses its own expansions and interpretations of the same lore zeitgeist to tell exciting new stories. Their Dionus series is yet to make a proper release, and I haven't dipped my toes into SIGNET quite yet, but these series have very similar prospects to Cwej when it comes to giving new life to old Faction ideas. To me, this pseudo-Who output of Arcbeatle Press is a modern iteration of what Faction Paradox was to the franchise for a long time; if not in tone and style, certainly in creative spirit.

This probably sounds rather dismissive of modern Faction Paradox itself; and it's no secret that that franchise has lost a bit of its luster for me. The stories are quite good, the franchise label itself not quite thriving as it once did. But at the end of the day... isn't it incredible that this series has persisted for so long and continues to be a magnet for new talent despite its obscurity? Somehow, this absurdly inside-baseball series has forged and preserved such a unique identity that it's still getting passionate new readership and new writership. Obverse is notable for taking on new writers, most conspicuously with the recent open-submission Boulevard series, and tiny indie Arcbeatle and its offshoot The Cheshire House gladly accept interested writers as they grasp onto splinters of lore and give them new life. And all of this is happening almost three decades after Eliza, Faction Paradox, and the War in Heaven were first introduced to fans. That's nothing short of a miracle, and to me it speaks to the sheer power of the seeds this franchise planted and continues to plant every time a new release occurs, a self-fractalizing crazy-quilt of epic proportions. I can't imagine a future where those seeds don't continue to spawn a diversity of new and incredible things.

Thank you to Lawrence Miles, Stuart Douglas, James Wylder, Aristide Twain, and every other powerhouse creative building on the outer fringes of the Who universe, for the sprawling world you've introduced me to through your work. My relationship with Doctor Who, and frankly with media as a whole, will never quite be the same. An especial thanks to Theta Mandel and everyone else at the Cheshire House, who later brought me into this world in a much more personal way, and continue to do so with passion, grace, and confidence in my work. Long live weird, hyper-obscure pseudo-Who shit.