I came up with the idea of a Coloth series as a joke on a Discord server.
Let's poke fun at Big Finish's habit of making spinoffs about random characters by creating a spinoff about a one-off character from a random short story who dies before anything interesting could possibly happen. Let's parody Tardis Wiki's past tense perspective and fickle validity policies by featuring a Library situated somewhere after the end of the universe, populated by bookkeepers who are really book-burners.
The idea came amid the dramas of the wiki's Faction Paradox inclusion battle, the same stew of emotion that led to the Wallowing in Pessimism's Mire hoax rediscovery. But as tempers cooled, and as Tyche McPhee Letts and I spent more time with the wiki's rules and users, the thoughts occurred:
What if, however mad the wiki's project may be – an in-universe history of a sprawling and frequently self-contradictory fictional multiverse! – there's something to admire in the people who donate their time to contributing to it, and (as Lawrence Miles showed) there are great adventures to be had in a Borgesian Library?
What if the short story "War Crimes" – published in the original Short Trips anthology, featuring a fleshed-out alien culture from the amazing imagination of Simon Bucher-Jones, set during The War Games at the cusp of that greatest alchemical moment of change in franchise history – is actually an excellent jumping-off point for a spinoff?
Best of all, what if Coloth and his unlikely trio of friends – the Bookkeepers Callum and Maritsa, and their vortex-traversing steed Rich the Time Rooster – are actually really fun, and I'd like to spend some time with them, and I bet others would, too?
This idea has followed me, occupying my notebook margins and doodles, from my first year of college, through grad school, and into my early career. I planted seeds: Callum and the Library in "The Library at the End of the Universe"; a mysterious cactus boy and the Plume Coteries in the background of my Faction Paradox stories; and the Bookkeeper and birdhemoths in one of my Book of the Peace Dossier fics. But when it came to the debut Coloth novella, demands on my time pulled me in other directions. Instead others carried the torch.
It was James Wylder of Arcbeatle Press who introduced Coloth and his Bookkeeper friends in the 10,000 Dawns crossover stories "White Canvas" and And Today, You. It was my brilliant co-brainstormer Tyche who peeked at Coloth's future with Rich in "Sonnenblumen". And finally, it was the inestimable @AristideTwain who took the initiative and debuted the Coloth series title in the Auteur crossover story "The Cactus and the Corpse".
So when Aristide told me he wanted to use Coloth in the framing narrative of Arcbeatle's winter anthology The Book of the Snowstorm, and that the anthology would have a big COLOTH logo on the cover (!!!), I knew I couldn't miss it!
I could go on and on with more behind-the-scenes tidbits, or wax poetic about all the emotions this brings up in me (and Holly's cover art! by god!), but ultimately this is not the last Coloth-related story annotation I expect to write, and I have to save something for next time. The topic is the story at hand: and the topic of that story is the Library.
"The First Noël"
Our protagonist is named Caspar, just like the Biblical mage of the same name. This is the story of his pilgrimage, his sojourn.
"long-lost schismatics" — I believe this is the first published hint that not all of the Plume Coteries who originally discovered and settled the Library became "Bookkeepers".
"a Valid book" — A reference to the Tardis Wiki, where for years "validity" is the term which stands in place of is distinct from, and should not be confused with, "canonicity".
"1177 levels up, 312 miles over" — A quaint number compared to the Floor 899,167,435,042 mentioned in "The Cactus and the Corpse". This story is set some generations in Coloth, Callum, and Maritsa's past.
"random gibberish" — When the Library first appeared in "The Library at the End of the Universe", my intention was that it was more-or-less the Library of Babel: finding a readable book in the haystack is like a monkey at a typewriter plunking out This Town Will Never Let Us Go. You can experience it yourself by spending a few minutes clicking through LibraryOfBabel.info; the snippet of gibberish was sampled from that website. Since people are really bad at comprehending true randomness, it's easy to slip into treating the Library's contents as less dauntingly incomprehensible, but part of my motivation for this story was to grapple with the implications head-on – more on this in a moment.
"⁎⁎⁎" — Snowflakes :)
"He had asked Mother," — Originally, there was no stylistic distinction for the dialogue; I've always been delighted by how disorienting this is in Cormac McCarthy's writing. The editor and I settled on italics as a compromise.
"veins of Validity" — Despite my original focus on randomness, it has been more convenient for other stories set in the Library to assume that all the books on the shelves are coherent. Stories such as the framing narrative of this very anthology! These stories all must be set in veins, known or unknown, or otherwise in the neatly organized inhabited section.
"progress had slowed" — If only they had some means to interview eyewitnesses… This particular case may be part of the Bookkeeper's motivation for asking the Great Houses for time ladle technology in "A Farewell to R.M.S.".
"fantastical stories about some random passerby, whom all other accounts agreed had been killed and devoured without further incident" — Not unlike the Coloth series, come to think of it…
"the investigators wouldn't miss it" — Maybe not, but it might explain why they didn't expect anything to go awry when they later ladled up one particular specimen!
"The leather blackened and curled in the heat." — This idea might be new to the Library, but on Earth it's a well-established mode of divination: fire serves as a random number generator which, when hunting for caribou (or for books), yields better results than human approximation.
"amaranthine, or indigo, or both at once" — Colors with significance in one of my prior stories, as I noted in my notes on "A Farewell to Arms". Maybe the results of Caspar's particular number generator aren't purely random, after all?
"vandalism" — A major concern on any wiki!
"The endless rows of spines gave him solace in their monotony. Sometimes he didn't sleep at all." — Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is both an aesthetic inspiration and one of my favorite stories.
"no time at all" — A beloved thought experiment. I like the idea that the clock "started" for the Library when the Plume Coteries showed up. Or did it?
"strange aeons" — An obvious nod to Lovecraft as well as Caspar's mental state.
Of course, the mystery box is the identify of the "wader". Their three annotations:
"A single line had been crossed out… This family of antivirals is effective for two-hearted populations, but it is inevitably toxic to other human species."
"the necessity of mechanical protection in the face of temporal winds. Unless a timeship digests you and your bloodline & you recreate a recording of its signals. That's how I waded here & how I'll wade away."
Random letters, like a recording of signals ritually recreated in handwriting.
I think it's fairly obvious – the connection between the stories that I'm drawing together is an open secret, after all – but then again I'm the author, so of course I would!
Finally, in parallel to the first Noël, just as the Biblical Caspar found the end of his pilgrimage in a place he least expected, our Caspar stumbles into the climax of his sojourn: a wintry snowscape. But his reaction is grief rather than joy, and his burnt offering … well, it's not frankincense.
We leave Caspar in "ash, and smoke, and tyranny." We'll meet him again, although perhaps not by this name!
References in my “Book of the Peace Dossier” stories
My three contributions to The Book of the Peace Dossier – “A Farewell to R.M.S.”, “A Prelude to a Prelude”, and “A Shift in Focus” – were written in a single sitting a few months after I finished “A Farewell to Arms”. You can read all three for free on the Obverse Books website!
Below the cut, expect spoilers for those three vignettes as well as “A Farewell to Arms” itself, which I recently covered in a similar fashion. Please consider buying The Book of the Peace from Obverse Books!
A Farewell to R.M.S.
This story expands significantly on the brief line in “A Farewell to Arms” about the history of the planet R.M.S.
The Bookkeepers didn’t used to be called Bookkeepers. This is because, as astute readers will note, Huxley had called them the “Plume Coteries”. Named, perhaps, after the majestic multicolored birds they used to ride!
The Great Houses arrived on the planet in a vast cathedral, one of the 91-forms which The Book of the War mentions serving as bulky embassies for the Great Houses. The description “vast cathedral” links back to my earliest piece of published fiction: the poem “A Vast Cathedral” in the fan anthology Shit Trips: Volume 1. (I am forever grateful to that anthology’s editor for giving me my start!) That poem never explicitly connected to the rest of the universe, so I used this Dossier vignette to tie up the loose thread.
Credit for “House Bluewood” goes to my friend Nilso, who offered a list of spectacularly creative Great House names inspired by great TV composers, like House Marigola. Of course, I summarily ignored all those options and picked his simple, nature-sounding “Bluewood” instead. Thanks again Nilso! I imagine House Bluewood to be a counterpart to the House of Redloom, perhaps with a connection to the Lune Forest?
The obtuse description of the Great House representative – a whirring silver creature which cocks its head and speaks in a buzzy voice about its generation unit – and the Bookkeeper’s description of it as a “House Military bitch” and instruction to “sit” – might seem extraneously crude. But I promise there’s a very good reason.
The “agreements” the Houses have made with other powers include the treaty Chris Cwej negotiated with the Daleks in Dead Romance, giving them time technology in exchange for their neutrality in the War. Surely nothing could go wrong there!
The Bookeepers’ field agent deficit is a problem that will be solved sometime soon, perhaps using whatever technology they’re trading for the planet. We hear more about the Houses’ treaties with other powers in the next vignette:
A Prelude to a Prelude
Long before I was invited to the Dossier, I wrote a little story called “A Prelude to Arms” which was published in the fan anthology Shit Trips: Volume 2.5; it’s also been reproduced on this blog. That drabble follows the two characters who provide the italicized commentary in “A Farewell to Arms”, and it ends just before they start watching the reconstruction of the body’s biodata.
As a prelude to that prelude, “A Prelude to a Prelude” takes place during the first four lines of “A Prelude to Arms”, told from the point of view of the she/her technician rather than the he/him.
Primer for the Spiral Politic (Post-War Edition) has never before appeared in a story proper, but it was excerpted on the “back cover” of all the Faction Paradox Protocols audios. Given its encyclopedia-entry-like format, I think it was an early version of the Book of the War concept.
The message-boards are a loving reference to the old Faction Paradox forums and rec.arts.drwho, which I’ve had much fun poring over through the years for insights into the Faction Paradox universe and series history. The Emperor is the Emperor of the Needle.
Originally, this vignette was an imaginary The Book of the War excerpt about the Peace, but the editor was afraid it might mislead readers, so I cut it up and added the context narrative. For posterity’s sake, here’s the full text of the original entry, with the missing part(s) in bold:
THE PEACE [All Sides: Events] The War in Heaven was defined by its lengthy entrenchment phase. Both sides were bunkered-down for decades, continually reinforcing their noospheres and meeting only in minor skirmishes. However, less well-known to the Needleborn are the many attempts to find an end to the War even during this time.
One of the first of these attempts took the form of direct negotiation with enemy representatives on Dronid. These talks came to an abrupt end when the Cataclysm began mere hours later, but they were responsible for paving the way for the Utterlost Accords, which first cemented the concept of “Hot Peace” in House Military ideology. This doctrine was reinforced a few years later by the Venue Accords, which were as high-potential as they were short. Some of the more inventive Remote suspected the Venue Accords to be yet another of the many Peace hoaxes orchestrated by the Faction during the first several decades of the War; of course, the truth has become more obvious in recent years.
There were also many attempts to find a path to the Peace without negotiation. [REDACTED (FOR NOW)] Another experiment, secretively initiated by the more traditional Houses in response to the perceived failures of House Military biodiversification projects, involved a dramatic expansion of the Nine Homeworlds project. All of the newly-created, specially-primed “lesser Homeworlds” were given their own enemies to fight in microscopic models of the greater War. Confined as they were in bottle universes and oxbow timelines, none of the resultant conflicts approached the scope or intensity of the War in Heaven, but they provided “homegrown” inspiration for strategies and technologies that could prove useful against the enemy. (One example, notable in hindsight, involved a race of mechanical invaders who gladly agreed to try their metaphorical hands against a few Homeworlds in exchange for the time technology that would give them a fair shake. The sole Homeworld to escape their assault did so through not military innovation but self-enfeeblement: by returning to organic models of childbirth, then enacting the ritual of the “entrenched last stand” of gallant victimhood, they cried out to the unknown future, “We are the ‘deserving-at-war’, rescue us! Won’t someone think of the children!” Their battle against the invaders ended in an uncomfortable détente.
Like all the others, this experiment ended in failure, discontinued when the number of lost Homeworlds became too distasteful to bear for the same traditional Houses that initially sponsored the project. No; the Peace, when it finally came, was achieved much differently…
[2023 edit: Aristide Twain helped me to fill in the redacted gap above, and the result was published as “The Peace: A Lost Primer” on the Faction Paradox website!]
According to The Book of the War, the “direct negotiation with enemy representatives on Dronid” was conducted by the diplomat whose corpse features prominently in Alien Bodies.
“Hot Peace”, like the Utterlost Accords, comes from Simon Bucher-Jones’ The Book of the Peace connecting material. The Venue Accords were featured in The Book of the War. One of the Faction’s many Peace hoaxes was described in “A Story of the Peace” from A Romance in Twelve Parts, although you can probably think of at least one more.
The House Military biodiversification projects, and the traditional Houses’ corresponding squeamishness, were mentioned in The Book of the War. I was first introduced to oxbow timelines by Weapons Grade Snake Oil, and a Homeworld in a bottle universe featured in Dead Romance, as did the treaty with a race of mechanical invaders; these Invaders were also mentioned in “A Star’s View of Caroline” from Burning with Optimism’s Flames (which I’ve written a little bit about). The “uncomfortable détente” framing came from a Tumblr post by @dajo42.
Simon Bucher-Jones very graciously allowed me to interpolate a sample from one of his blog posts, “Faction Paradox Stands”. Simon wrote it right after watching The Day of the Doctor, and it was attributed to a fictional “The Book of the Peace” long before any such anthology was conceived by Obverse. I thought it was only appropriate that some part of the post made it into the actual release, even if just in the Dossier!
A Shift in Focus
In my mind, the neurosurgeon whose actions punctuate Huxley’s thoughts is a partition of her brain operating one or two of her arms/claws. I thought about adding in that description as a “twist” at the end, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and I was under a tight deadline :)
The gender of the Shift’s body was never specified in the original story, nor is it specified here. But it’s covered with white tattoos and it was present at a timeship skirmish. This references two prior Faction Paradox stories, both by Lawrence Miles: the comic “Political Animals”, where the Mayakai are shown to have white tattoos, and the audio A Labyrinth of Histories, where we meet Demetra Kine’s faceless and notoriously hard-to-kill posthuman “trackers” in the middle of a timeship battle.
I realized after sending off “A Farewell to Arms” that it wasn’t clear enough that the Shift’s body’s tattoos weren’t physically changing but just “shifting” in meaning through mind of the beholder. I made sure to spell that out here!
The bit about the buyer ties in with the deleted Huxley scene and cut Nambiro plotline I explained in the “A Farewell to Arms” notes. Space HQ is a reference to the recurring location in the 60s Dalek stories. The airships in Czechoslovakia are a story for another day…
Editor Philip Marsh and Obverse CEO Stuart Douglas were so kind as to include my short story “A Farewell to Arms” in the late 2018 / early 2019 Faction Paradox anthology The Book of the Peace. The prior October, to promote the anthology’s preorders, I posted “References in my Book of the Enemy story” on this blog discussing the references I included in “Cobweb and Ivory”. I don’t have anything new to promote yet (although watch this space!), but now that almost two years have passed since I finished writing “A Farewell to Arms” at 2:44 AM one morning, I figure it’s about time I sit down to finally re-read it and share some notes in the same fashion.
Standard warning: Quite predictably, this post is chock-full of spoilers for my story “A Farewell to Arms”, so you should read it first. If you haven’t and you read this anyway, please consider buying The Book of the Peace to read it and several amazing other stories!
Part One
To begin, the incredibly original title explains how my story is connected to the theme and title of the anthology: the end of the War means that the weapons trade will take a big hit, provoking Huxley’s scheme. In other words, the discovery of the Book of the Peace heralds a Farewell to Arms.
The original “Shockley’s Den of Almost Limitless Iniquity” appeared in Alien Bodies. “The DALI” is unsurprisingly a reference to the Salvador Dalí Museum, which I have enjoyed spending many hours visiting.
Of course I have to mention military nuns, because you’re not a pulp science fiction author until you mention military nuns, and part of my motivation for this story was parodying pulp science fiction within Faction Paradox, which I feel very strongly is not in fact science fiction at all. Did I fulfill more tropes than I subverted, and become the very thing I sought to parody? That’s for you to decide!
I’ve always wanted to see how members of non-human-descended species cope with the existence of the City of the Saved, which offers an afterlife exclusively for humans and posthumans. Nezf’s story is one idea of how that might play out.
T mentions the Utterlost Accords, which were first mentioned in Simon Bucher-Jones’ linking material for The Book of the Enemy.
There are a few unpronounceable names in this story as a joke about pulpy stories where characters have names that I can’t pronounce in my head. Nezf and Ka(h) Loquo are two of them, and the “sounding it out” was meant to be a wink to the audience. Did my attempt at metanarrative wit fall flat? For you to decide, yada yada.
There’s a reason for the (h) in Ka(h), but the world isn’t quite ready for that yet.
Enter Huxley and the Shift, moments after “A Shift in Focus”. In my opinion “crime boss” is unfortunately often a male-coded role in fiction, so I intentionally didn’t specify Huxley’s pronouns until her arrival. I had a lot of fun writing her character, rhetorical questions and all; I hope I get the chance to do it again someday!
The ivory cube with Homeworlder hieroglyphs might call an image to mind for any fans of a certain British television series; ditto the phrase “Greater Key”. The one person who thinks it’s a metal rod is obviously Lance Parkin.
The story of RMS’ new name is portrayed in “A Farewell to RMS”. The Plume Coteries and the Amazolian system each appeared briefly in “Cobweb and Ivory”.
The Big Bang was nicknamed “Event One” in Castrovalva.
Huxley remembers when the old war king was a magistrate. This nods to the hint from The Taking of Planet 5 that the Magistrate from The Infinity Doctors became the War King during the War. Depending on when you’d like The Book of the Peace to fit in the timeline, you can read “old war king” as meaning “the previous War King” or “the War King who is old”!
Cheers to my friend Nilso for donating the name “Yvleperal”. In a previous draft, it was specified that they’re the species who inherited RMS from the Plume Coteries; the “Yvleperal’s allies” line could have used some more editing. Whoops!
Speaking of prior drafts, this scene originally ended quite differently, although I had to cut it in rewrites:
“One more thing,” Hux called as the Shift opened the door. “Don’t even try to pull any shit, got it?”
Everyone nodded, and, one by one, they left the room. None of them noticed the puddle on the floor beginning to steam.
“They bought it?” it hissed. Bit by bit, the pool of blood bubbled into a more concrete form, a crude body with spindly fingers and hair like a jester’s hat.
“You did perfectly, my love,” Huxley said to Ka(h) Loquo. “After our performance, none of them dared doubt the plan.”
“Just imagine their reactions the next time they see me.” Ka(h)’s face, still putty-like, stretched into a crude imitation of a shocked grimace.
“Oh,” she said, tilting back her head so he could kiss her neck, “I doubt they’ll see either of us ever again.”
“No?” The jester-puddle began to creep towards the crime boss’ throne.
“My buyers are already waiting right outside the base. When the crew opens the way, the Military will be too busy dealing with these goons to notice anyone slipping in and stealing the Key.”
Ka(h) grinned as he curled into Huxley’s lap. “Now, that is proper devious.”
The whole first scene, and maybe the whole story more-or-less, was influenced by the film Baby Driver – or more specifically its soundtrack, which I listened to quite a bit while writing. Hence why the Beach Boys’ “Let’s Go Away for Awhile - Mono” is one of the songs accompanying this story in the Book of the Peace Spotify playlist.
Part Two
The italicised lines are a conversation between the two observers from “A Prelude to Arms” and “A Prelude to a Prelude”. They’re watching a reconstruction of the story’s events, extrapolated from the biodata of a body they found floating in space. The black hole is meant to be the one at the end of the Needle, as mentioned in The Infinity Doctors.
Each of the passers-by Nezf sees in the labyrinth are significant:
The green man covered in thorns is Coloth, a Simon Bucher-Jones character who previously appeared as a “cactus boy” in “Cobweb and Ivory”.
The minotaur carrying a book is Mr. Smith, who (naturally) lived in the labyrinth in Lawrence Miles’ The Faction Paradox Protocols.
The gigantic beast whose skeleton sits in the labyrinth is a mammoth – perhaps the mammoth whose skull rots in the Permafrost Kingdom in Yakutsk, Russia.
Wade is extremely suspicious of both robots and Homeworlders. There’s a reason for this which I’ll elaborate on one day. This little conversation is the first scene I wrote for the story when I pitched it to Phil Marsh; thank you to Niki Haringsma @nikisketches for his incredible advice at that stage!
T’s weird physical form was fun to picture in my mind, and it’s explained that it’s the result of his being tortured into his timeship in the manner suggested by Dead Romance. Others have noted that he resembles a Dalek mutant!
Another snippet from the two italics characters watching the reconstruction establishes that they’re from after the end of the War – as you might expect, from an anthology named after the Peace.
The new exit that had been drilled in a dangerous part of the labyrinth leads straight into the base on RMS. This seems like a very convenient coincidence, but there's a reason for it.
In Greek mythology, the Daktyloi are a race of finger-sized men connected to the Cabeiri. I’ve always been fascinated by cthonic gods!
The conversations begin to loop. For a brief moment, the Shift addresses the viewers of the reconstruction; unfortunately, they dismiss the message as a glitch.
The conversation about Foyle and the Eremites is a little love letter to some of the painfully underexplored concepts from The Book of the War. Wade’s belief in the Eremites is consistent with her disdain for the Homeworld; if only there were a faction of people who shared her sympathies!
T’s full name is “Tabrenilsodvoravitas”. This references House Dvora (per the standard Homeworlder naming convention) as well as my aforementioned friend Nilso, whose online handle has always amused me.
Part Three
I had the most fun writing this section, particularly the bits where characters are just stumbling through the fog. I’m more comfortable writing series of vignettes than long scenes (something I’m still working on). The mood is set by Angelo Badalamenti’s “Dark Mood Woods / The Red Room” from the Twin Peaks soundtrack!
Now we see that it’s the enemy who drilled a hole to RMS through the labyrinth. The totemic gun is a D-Mat ornament often carried by regen-inf troops per The Book of the War. The gauntlet may be similar to that seen in The End of Time, Everything Changes, and/or Remembrance of the Daleks. Homeworlder blood is ichor, another reference to Greek myth. The flashing light is mauve, the universal color of danger. T hasn’t seen anything like this in a long time – specifically, not since Mohandassa and Utterlost.
An unfamiliar figure runs up out of the fog. There’s never actually been a physical description of Nezf before, although there were hints (T’s eyes rolling right over him) – but here we see exactly how Dactyl-like he is. However, everyone is forgetting things: Nezf has forgotten his mission; Wade and T have forgotten who Nezf is; and mid-conversation, they forget he’s even there. Farewell to Nezf – perhaps it would be worthwhile to ROT13 his name.
Tears are dripping down Wade’s cheek, but she didn’t know she was crying, and this worries her. Random tears are a sign of forgetting in one of my favorite TV shows.
Wade is right: the Houses have indeed stopped making new mechanical timeships. But maybe the enemy hasn’t. The Shift helps them piece it all together. (In hindsight I cringe at the cursing in this, but they’re career criminals, so whatever.) What Wade was starting to mention about the Shift(’s body) was that it had apparently learned to use punctuation during its time in the fog.
Once upon a time, I wrote a fake The Book of the War entry about Godmother Quelch and posted it on this blog. It detailed how she was a human who traveled with a Homeworlder before being abandoned on an alien planet, where she was constantly pursued by bots determined to administer a deadly vaccine. She taught herself enough engineering to fend off the bots and survive. Eventually the Homeworlder came back for her, only to trick, betray, and abandon her at the last moment. Overwhelmed, she let the bots administer the vaccine – only to find that it was made for alien biology and had no effect on her. Using the computational signals that her defense systems picked up from the timeship, she opened a door through the Very Fabric and literally waded through time until she wound up in the Eleven-Day Empire. Of course, this gave her a reputation among the others as “the girl who waded”. I deleted the post while writing this story, and the Quelch connection was obviously abandoned, but there are two reasons that the song “Thought Contagion” was picked to accompany this story: first, because its title accurately describes the memetic predator, and second, because the band Muse is known to have at least one notable fictional fan.
In the original accepted pitch, there was an extra element to the plot: it was the Nambiro who found out about the base and hired Huxley to execute the heist, with the understanding that in exchange for a nice fee, they could gobble up any temporal weapons recovered from the base as well as the crew that recovered them. (Specifically, they were waiting outside the breach T opened in the roof: “A screech could be heard from through the gap, and a dark shadow flew in front of the gleaming sunlight.”) However, since I’d slightly misunderstood the nature of the Nambiro and several other stories came to also use the Nambiro as a last-minute plot-twist, Phil Marsh asked me to cut it. Rightfully so! It would have distracted from the story. But don’t get me wrong: it’s still true, just slightly off-camera.
Farewell to Wade’s arm. She’s fulfilled the sacred trope of resembling the Grandfather, and the loa smile upon her by bringing the decidedly pipe-shaped Greater Key. (The Houses’ eye is “amaranthine” because it works like an amaranth from Lawrence Miles’ Christmas on a Rational Planet.) Like Billie Piper, Wade finds herself acting as both Moment and Bad Wolf, so she solves the problem the only way she can: bidding a Farewell to RMS.
… but the problem isn’t quite solved, after all. One corpse survived, somehow, and its identity is unclear. We never see what happened with the Shift’s body – is that it? Or is it the body the Shift originally inhabited, before being Shiftified? Or maybe, could it be a character forgotten from the story, which would explain why the earnings were to be split six ways? In any case, the memetic predator lives on…
Despite not being in the best place when I was writing this story, I’m still fairly happy with it. The only thing pestering me now is that I am certain there’s at least one more “Farewell to Arms” pun hidden in there somewhere, and I’ve completely forgotten what it is…
Up next: References in my Book of the Peace Dossier stories!
Faction Paradox: The Book of the Enemy was released by Obverse Books in January 2018, and it included my first published short story, “Cobweb and Ivory”. In March Andrew Hickey published on his blog a thorough list of all the references he put in his Book of the Enemy story, which came right after mine in the anthology. I thought this was a wonderful idea! It’s been over a year since I wrote “Cobweb and Ivory”, so there’s bound to be some things I’ve missed. (I’m also be intentionally leaving out some stuff, since I’m having a lot of fun seeing all the theories people have come up with!)
Quite obviously this post is chock-full of spoilers to “Cobweb and Ivory”, so you should read it first. If you haven’t and you read this anyway, please consider buying The Book of the Enemy and/or pre-ordering The Book of the Peace, which will include my story “A Farewell to Arms” among many amazing others!
“Avus” is Latin for “Grandfather”, a name that was used by both the First Doctor and Grandfather Paradox. The original draft ended with a little line making it clear that the whole story was taken from The Infancy Gospel of Grandfather Paradox, which would have explained the slapdash King James Version imitation in the parts of the story where Avus is sober. This still would have left Avus’ identity ambiguous, since real-life Infancy Gospels are always named after their pseudonymous authors, not their subjects (eg The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is about Jesus’ infancy). But rather late in the game I decided it was still too on-the-nose, and the line was deleted. Simon Bucher-Jones later used the idea of the Infancy Gospel in “Pre-narrative Briefing O”.
The “city of cobweb and ivory” previously appeared (albeit in a less dilapidated form) in Chris Cwej’s vision of the pre-universe in Christmas on a Rational Planet. I chose this setting because it coincides with the first mention in Lawrence Miles’ writing of … well, you can probably guess.
I could have explained that the palaces had gates of horn and ivory, but the “mammoth doors” joke was too good to pass up.
Depending on what you think of Avus’ identity, the “transcendent lock-pick” might be either (1) a prototype sonic screwdriver or (2) a regular lock-pick which gains its transcendence from being held in the Grandfather’s shadow.
The painted warriors are the “men of stone” mentioned in the description of the city in Christmas on a Rational Planet. In this story, they’re the enemy’s angels for the War in Heaven.
Cultures that use “breeding-engines” have included the Great Houses, Faction Paradox, the Remote, and the Osirian Court. The fact that the engine sits in a cradle might go some way to re-mystify the crib in A Good Man Goes to War.
I've always loved pataphors, and before I ever dreamed of writing for Faction Paradox I always thought they'd be well-suited for the praxis scene-shifts mentioned in The Book of the War’s account of the Rivera Manuscript. The editor added in the formatting change in the first pataphor to make it a little clearer what was going on, what with the channel switching and all.
(A delightful upside of being a writer for a fandom like this one is seeing all the fan theories that pop up. For instance, Darth Bumbles on the Obverse Wiki suggests that “Cobweb and Ivory” might be an excerpt from the Saragossa Manuscript mentioned in The Book of the War. That’s certainly not what I intended, but it’s far more interesting than anything I’d thought of!)
I also had the idea that, in the world after This Town Will Never Let Us Go, the Faction Paradox mask would be replace the Guy Fawkes mask for Anonymous; it was a happy coincidence that Jay Eales used the same idea in “The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy”. Regardless of what you think of Avus’ identity, this is probably the first time he hears the name “Faction Paradox” or sees a skull mask.
In the original outline, Avus became a cat, an allusion to the one-armed feline of Jonathan Dennis’ story “Gramps” from A Romance in Twelve Parts.
After escaping Abigail’s house, Avus gets his first peek at Terra Primagenia. The faintness of his connection to the caldera is meant to signal that this planet is near, or even beyond, the frontier in time.
Next we visit a huddled campfire of ritual and bone. According to the completely-unreliable BehindTheName.com, “Aguta” is Inuit for “gatherer of the dead”. I just like the sound of it.
Aguta’s story is a retelling of the anchoring of the thread, with some fairly obvious naming parallels with the story we know from Time’s Crucible, and a connection to Father Abdullah’s theory about the Mal’akh from The Book of the War.
I believe the first public mention of the Plume Coteries was in this Tardis Wiki discussion (see also the words “New Earth” in Linemica's speech). They were further discussed in my short story “The Library: A Comprehensive History” in the fan anthology Shit Trips: Vol. 2. Keep an eye out for more mentions of the Plume Coteries in the future; ditto the “cactus-skinned child”.
Fun fact: Linemica is the first named character to actually appear whose name doesn’t start with “A”. There’s a pattern there.
“Cernunnos” is a name of the Horned God motif in ancient Celtic art. Of course, it looks nothing like a mammoth, so I’ve recast it as a “tusked god” and hoped no one notices. One day I’d love to explore its connections to Herne the Hunter.
A brief digression. When I was sent the pitch info document for The Book Of The Enemy, or, A Briefing For Fourth Wave Observers, there were three conditions, and I quote:
The enemy must (in whatever sense) originate on, or in, or via the agency of Earth.
The enemy must be sufficiently humanoid (or have humanoid agents who can), in mockery wear Great House Regalia.
The enemy are not the bloody Daleks or anything else we can’t get the rights to, for next to nothing.
George III’s woolly mammoth was first mentioned, almost parenthetically, in Lawrence Miles’ short story “Grass”. In the story, the mysterious Frenchwoman Lucia Cailloux kills a herd of mammoths in the Louisiana territory. (In Christmas on a Rational Planet, “caillou” is the word the French Shadow Directory uses for Time Lords.) The mammoth was subsequently mentioned in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and The Book of the War before debuting with a central role in the Faction Paradox comic, where it’s a relic in the 18th century in the same way that the Faction is a relic in the post-War universe.
The mammoth appeared in the first teaser images for the comic as well as on the the cover of the third issue; as the comic was cancelled after two issues, those two images of George III’s mammoth bookended the Faction Paradox comic and, with it, Faction Paradox’s last best shot to break out to a wider audience and rescue itself from its ostentatious obscurity.
These are all facts that anyone could tell you; I’m not going to provide any extra commentary. If I did, I might say that I’m very annoyed no one has ever returned to Daedalus’ war against the universe in The Blue Angel. Or that I’m a big fan of Robert Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth and its particular adaptation of … well, anyway. Back to the story.
“He wondered how, now free of the warrior, he could get back to the Homeworld.” A little nod to the arc of a certain character in Doctor Who.
This temple is the one Avus saw earlier at the end of the avenue. Since he’s out of his praxis-induced stupor, the prose returns to the faux-KJV style, complete with “thou hast”s and all. (I’m pretty sure there’s actually a mistake in the grammar of Cernunnos’ speech; I tried to have it corrected for the final manuscript, but the edit apparently didn’t make it in.)
Depending on what you think of Avus’ identity, “he lashed out like the shadow of a falling guillotine in the streets of a purgatorial city” might be a shadow weapon or simply a descriptive instance of regular old Great Houses psychic powers!
Avus’ final visions include an abbreviated tale of two cities: the “purgatorial city” with its guillotines is revolutionary Paris, and as is made clear, the “busy city” is London in 1774, on the cusp of the British Empire’s own 18th century revolutionary war.
The bestiary is straight out of the Faction Paradox comics. At the time, I expected this to be my one and only contribution to the series, so I really tried to throw it all in there! The presence of a girl named Lucita is a nod to one of the most inexplicable loose ends in the Faction Paradox audios. Still, I tried to leave it just vague enough to accommodate any future contradictions.
Regardless of what you think of Avus’ identity, the loomshed he stumbles out of is probably House Lungbarrow’s, the “elder” that greets him is probably Quences, and the “one Homeworld shall be brought down by [Avus’] will” is probably a reference to The Ancestor Cell.
It’s worth reiterating that if you enjoyed this, please consider buying The Book of the Enemy and/or pre-ordering The Book of the Peace, which will include my story “A Farewell to Arms” among many amazing others!
