Once upon a time, there was a book series called “Doctor Who”. (You might have heard me mention it from time to time.) It was based on the then-defunct TV series, and took the show in some fairly strange new directions. Specifically, and I know this is going to sound a little bit crazy, it featured the Eighth Doctor finding out that at some point in his own personal future, Gallifrey was going to wind up going to war with a mysterious unnamed Enemy…a war that future Gallifrey was losing. Different Time Lord factions reacted to this in different ways; the Celestis, for example, planned to flee space-time altogether and exist as beings of pure intellect outside the universe as we know it (something that should sound more than a little familiar to viewers of “The End of Time”) while Faction Paradox…
Faction Paradox was a strange creation. Invented by Lawrence Miles, they were a group of counter-culture Time Lords who revered the two things that immortal guardians of space and time would naturally fear: Death and paradox. They dressed up in skull masks, practiced a peculiar form of voodoo (okay, three things–the technophiliac Time Lords were freaked out by the seeming magic of the Faction) and reveled in creating “safe” temporal disruptions. They weren’t exactly enemies, but they didn’t have much love for the Time Lords, either.
Fast forward a few years, and the TV series comes back. The book line pretty much dies out, becoming a vague, inoffensive adjunct to the show, but due to the vagaries of British copyright law, Lawrence Miles remains full owner of the Faction Paradox concept. He launches a spin-off line of books, set in the Doctor Who universe with the serial numbers filed off (the Time Lords become the “Homeworld”, but the Enemy stays the Enemy because Miles insists he never intended them to be the Daleks.) Surprisingly, these books are quite good. This is the story of the best of them.
“Warlords of Utopia”, by Lance Parkin, is perhaps the highest of all “high concept” science fiction stories; it starts in an alternate reality where Rome never fell, but in this novel, the inhabitants (with the help of Faction Paradox) discover another reality where Rome never fell. Then another, then another, until they have a vast cross-time Roman Empire ruled by a Council of Emperors.
Then they discover all the universes where the Nazis won World War II…
The concept, and the ensuing war, is one of the cleverest ideas I’ve seen explored in science-fiction in a long time. (Full disclosure: I’ve been on a few mailing lists with Lance Parkin over the years, and am on a first-name basis with him, even if we’re never going to see eye to eye on Buffy or the Star Wars prequels.) The book genuinely feels like an idea that someone needed to write a book about, and Lance was just the person to write it. I recommend it to anyone who’s seen the two relevant tropes more time than they can count.
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It’s a good ‘un, but I wouldn’t say it’s the best. Maybe the most accessible, though Of The City Of The Saved… is pretty easy to get into, but WoU is *nowhere* near as good as The Book Of The War.
I recently posted a longer look at the first few FP books on my blog, BTW – http://andrewhickey.info/2011/01/03/eschatology-escapology-4-faction-paradox/
Semirelated link is semirelated: Have y’all and Our Host seen this one?
Like all really good Doctor Who stories, it’s a scary tale – by current showrunner, Steven Moffat
“All the Alternative Universes where the Roman Empire didn’t fall go to war with all the Alternative Universes where Nazis won WWII” is quite possibly the greatest ever summary known to man.
@Andrew Hickey: The Book of the War is wonderful, don’t get me wrong; in fact, I’ve liked all of the FP books to date (and the audios, as well.) But “Warlords” has the best core concept of all of them, and Parkin executes the hell out of it. I’d recommend all of them, but I’d recommend “Warlords” first.
@John: Thanks for the link! I have read it (I have a copy of Decalog 3, the anthology where it first appeared) but it’s always nice to point people to a great short story. I consider that one to be the “ancestor” of this year’s Christmas special. 🙂
(Fun side note: In the original anthology, the little girl the Seventh Doctor saved wound up creating a nanite plague that the Fourth Doctor had to stop. That was the theme of the anthology; the Doctor makes a minor change to history in each story, one that his past or future self encounters. The last story, of course, leads into the first.)
An infinite number of Romans vs and infinite number of Nazis? Yeah, I can see myself reading that.
Is it accessible if you’ve not followed Dr Who/read the Dr Who books etc?
“Is it accessible if you’ve not followed Dr Who/read the Dr Who books etc?”
Yes.
Kid Kyoto:
There’s one, single, reference to Doctor Who in the entire thing, and that’s done in a sort of knowing in-joke way. To be honest, you’re missing more of it if you’ve never seen Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, or never read Graves’ I, Claudius (the whole thing is written in a rather good pastiche of Graves’ style), or don’t know enough Latin to get the punning names Parkin put in.
Which is to say, you’re missing essentially nothing – it’s a stand-alone novel with only the most tangential connections even to the other books in the Faction Paradox series, which themselves have only a tangential connection to Doctor Who.
None of the Faction Paradox books require any knowledge of Doctor Who, but The Book Of The War and Dead Romance are improved by that knowledge in a sort of “oh, that’s clever what he did there” way. The rest of them don’t even have that much of a connection.
(You will, however, need to be very familliar with Doctor Who to read Parkin’s Doctor Who novels if you enjoy Warlords Of Utopia and want to read more – he plays around *hugely* with continuity and references in his other stuff).
I know this is a very late comment, but I wanted to thank you for the book recommendation. I couldn’t put my copy down!