Faction Paradox: Of the City of the Saved... (Faction Paradox, #3) by Philip Purser-Hallard

Faction Paradox: Of the City of the Saved... (Faction Paradox, #3) Reviews

• 
  Leo H

  What's annoying about this book is that because it's a Faction Paradox book, a book in a spin-off series of a spin-off book series of Doctor Who, very few people will ever read it, which is a crime, because it's fantastic. You kind of need a bit of a background in the 'relevant' Dr Who and Faction Paradox books, which doesn't really help; there is no 'Read THIS then THIS then THIS' guide, for example, but I honestly think you could read this on its own without any prior knowledge of anything and still get as much enjoyment out of it as I did.
  
  The book is split into chapters which each follow one of several main characters, which at first I found kind of annoying in a 'this reminds me of Game of Thrones which I'm super tired of' sort of way, but I warmed to it as it allows PP-H to let loose with a wide variety of styles for each chapter; a cod-epic ballad for chapters concerning Gnas, the terrorist leader of the terrifyingly chauvinistic Manfold, a film script for Faction Paradox's Grandfather Avatar, a punctuationless block of speech-like text for an illiterate Roman slave, and so on. The sections written from the perspective of The City itself are my favourite, they're the only ones written in the first person, and provide a fab twist near the end.
  
  I should probably explain the premise of the book, so I'll do that here, in this section. Basically The City of the Saved is a city the size of a galaxy which houses a resurrected form of every single human, neanderthal, posthuman and part human cyborg that ever lived. Fictional characters also exist via a process called Remaking. There are several dozen Sherlock Holmes, who all live together in Baker Street and solve crimes as the Great Detective Agency. It exists in a bubble at the end of the universe, and, having already died, no human can die in The City. Until, of course, the novel begins with a murder.
  
  PP-H peppers the text with little 'in-world' articles by various fictional authors, which give us some lovely little bits of backstory. These help flesh out the concept of the city, and can get quite philosophical at times, which I love, I've always said Faction Paradox is to Philosophy what Hard Sci-Fi is to Physics, in that you pretty much need a degree in the latter to understand the former, so being a Philosophy graduate I am as happy as a pig in muck when reading Faction Paradox books.
  
  All of which says nothing of the plot of OTCOTS, which is.... probably one of the best 21st century sci-fi books I've read? It manages to satisfy my intellectual urges while at the same time being a pretty rollocking who-dunnit style thriller (especially tricky when everyone who dies is resurrected shortly afterwards, which you would think ruins the suspense a bit, but it really doesn't), the concept itself is fascinating, and I know in the next few months I will find myself purchasing pretty much all of the short story collections set within The City, including the one concerned entirely with the dozens of Sherlock Holmes' I mentioned earlier. Very much looking forward to that.
• 
  Alex Sarll

  An excellent attempt at a tricky niche genre - a murder mystery set in Heaven. Or at least, the Omega Point-style city in which everyone who ever lived (or might have lived, given history is in flux) is technologically resurrected. So in one sense it's Riverworld redone by someone who can write, and isn't tiresomely evangelising for metric and Esperanto. But beyond that, it has a lot more to say about parent-child relationships, and identity, and how it felt to realise that we were not in fact living at the End of History (remember that?) than a thousand navel-gazing litfic dribbles. As is so often the case, because science fiction has every trick available to realist fiction, but also the option to turn it up to eleven and create a world which better illustrates its points.
• 
  Remi S.

  Absolutely phenomenal. This book is quite different from the preceding two in the range, but no less amazing, and is brimming with a plethora of mind-boggling ideas and fascinating concepts. The way that Purser-Hallard (who has a doctorate in religious themes in science fiction – and like he himself says, it shows) weaves together the narrative with the different points of view, each written with their own remarkable style, is fantastic, and the story itself is gripping, and I always had trouble putting it down. The book is also elevated by Compassion/Tobin, because I love the EDAs. I would recommend this to everyone, even my non-Doctor Who steeped friends, though it might be a bit of a steep learning curve. 10/10.
• 
  A Cask of Troutwine

  Of the City of the Saved... is a phenomenal novel, doubly so for being the first novel by the writer, Philip Purser-Hallard.
  
  The novel takes place in a city at the end of the universe where all lifeforms containing human DNA, from the earliest caveman to the last post-human, is reborn. Everyone is impervious to damage and immortal in The City of the Saved, which makes the murder that occurred that much harder to figure out.
  
  The murder mystery drives most of the plot, with a web of characters and events that the novel jumps between in order to explore what's going on. These other POV's are some of my favorite parts, as the writing changes to reflect the how every character thinks (i.e. different slang in the narration, a running sword-and-sorcery-style pulp narrator, broken syntax, etc.).
  
  The book is juggling a lot of ideas at once, and I don't really feel it drops any of them. There's ideas here about the interactions of different cultures and their inhabitants, themes about cultural stagnation (a point I've noticed in the last few Faction Paradox books as well), and one that becomes more and more relevant as the novel carries on, which is the relationship between parents and their children, both figuratively and literally. It's a lot in one novel but it works together, and each builds off of each other throughout the book.
  
  I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a good read. There's some elements that might go over your head at first if you aren't well-versed in Faction Paradox/Eighth Doctor Adventures lore, but I feel the novel does a good enough job giving you everything you need to follow along.
• 
  Matthew Kresal

  Following on my reading of This Town Will Never Let Us Go last year, and attending been to this year's Chicago TARDIS, I ended my 2019 reading year with the second Faction Paradox novel from Mad Norweigan Press. And what a wild ride it turned out to be! One part SF noir, one part political thriller, and a whole bunch of historical mashups with high concept SF, it's everything you'd expect a follow-up to This Town Will Never Let Us Go to be. In this case, almost entirely unrelated (minus what I believe was a passing reference) to the previous volume as Philip Purser-Hallard takes us into a galaxy (?) sized city at the end of the universe where every human who ever lived (or, in the case of some really popular fictional characters, should have lived) have been resurrected. As with the previous novel, I'm not 100% I "got" everything, but it was a hell of a read all the same.
• 
  Nicolle

  Absolutely loved this complex, postmodern book in the Faction Paradox universe. This is a franchise in its own right, which spawned from Doctor Who. Of The City of the Saved is a standalone and interesting SF/F whodunnit with tons of surprises and twists. Each character is unique, has its own PoV/style, and the city is most impressive. I recommend it! This is a great read to get acquainted with the universe.
• 
  Richard Wright

  Warning - this is another book I can't claim to be unbiased about. Having been fortunate enough to be asked write a short story based in the city of the title, I picked this book up to get to the know the place. I'd been aware of the novel's reputation for a while, but it had yet to end up on my TBR pile. So with that in mind...
  
  The City is a galaxy sized habitat at the end of time, where every human who ever was or ever might have been lives a resurrected life of immortality. That simplifies things somewhat, but it gives you the idea - a vast non-secular Heaven of sorts, where cultures clash, history's personalities have built new lives, and politics are infinitely more complex than they have ever been. It shouldn't be possible to murder somebody in a world where immortality is the norm, but when somebody manages to do so it sets off a chain reaction of violence and consequence that brings change to what should have been immutable, and rewrites the balance of power.
  
  The plot is, to be honest, the least of this book. The City itself is overbearing, a fascinating world where cultures we know have evolved and new ones sprouted up, and the book swoops around the place plunging you in and out of a handful of its infinite combinations and possibilities. Each of the many central characters is written differently, the author switching styles (sometimes inventing new ones) to represent the vast array of cultures and backgrounds on offer. It's a heady brew, initially disorientating, and those styles are so disparate that the book occasionally feels like four or five different novels (by different authors) woven together. While this is one of the novel's greatest strengths, it also prevented the book from being a wholly immersive read for me, as each point of view switch demanded a mental reset that pushed me out of the story and forced me to work my way back into it. The problem vanishes with practice, so that by the time the plot was charging towards revelation and resolution I was able to follow more fluidly.
  
  And it was worth doing so. This is a Faction Paradox novel - I still don't know much about the Faction, but everything you need for this particular story (where the Faction works slightly differently than usual anyway) is seeded into the plot. The City is bigger than the Faction though, and makes its mark so strikingly that it's clear why new stories set there are in demand. The ambition and scale of the setting is remarkable, and the dizzying range of stylistic approaches used by the author sets this apart from anything I've picked up in a long time. It's neither an easy nor a light read, asking a level of engagement from the reader that few books equal, but it's a tremendously unique and rewarding one, and will leave images and ideas with me that will stick for a long, long time.
• 
  Lori S.

  Just one of the best SF books I have ever read.
• 
  Nicholas Whyte

  https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/of-the-city-of-the-saved-by-philip-purser-hallard/
  
  The City of the Saved is a place where all humans who have ever lived or died are resurrected; but they then engage in the usual city hall politics of any small state, and I failed to really engage with any of the characters.
• 
  Andrew

  Second (or third, or twoth) of the Faction Paradox spinoff line.
  
  Stop me if you've heard this one: at the end of history, the entire human race is resurrected on an alien world, to live all together in immortal bodies. (SF writers take this premise as an excuse to throw lots of entertaining historical figures into the story. ...Yet another demonstration that Dante was an SF writer.)
  
  Anyhow, this is the same trope as _Riverworld_ and vulgar Christian eschatology, but it embraces the space-time-opera gonzosity of the Faction Paradox setting. The City of the Saved (parse that term as Calvinism or a flash drive, your choice) is not planet-sized; it's galaxy-sized. It's inhabited by every human being in recorded history. That is: every human being in the history of *homo sapiens* -- tens of thousands of years of prehistorical rock-banging, thousands of years of technological development, and then *millions of years* of interstellar civilization. Civilizations. Colonies, empires, republics. All of them. Prehumans, posthumans, part-humans, cyber-humans, mod-humans, uploaded humans... a population measured in septillions.
  
  (Or, perhaps, trillions of times greater than that. Whenever a time-travelling Warship alters history, the City seems to contain all the human lives from *both* alternate timelines. And with the Time War raging, histories are being altered and re-altered all the... well... all the time. As it were.)
  
  One fears that the storyline might be unable to stand up to this fantastical backdrop. One would, regrettably, be right.
  
  It's a murder mystery. Among N-illions of immortal beings, one politician gets stabbed (this is impossible) and bleeds (impossibly) (and messily) to death all over his office. Why? How? Has the War finally reached the City? (It's tried before.) Will death's foothold in Heaven prove contagious? (Hint: yes.) Is it a good murder mystery? Not really.
  
  We get a bunch of narrative viewpoints and a bunch of narrative threads; I guess it's trying to pull same trick as _This Town..._. But it fails. The characters aren't interesting and threads don't stick together. Worse sin than either: _Of the City..._ is fanfic in the way that _This Town..._ *isn't*; it relies on canon. The story (and solution) depends on knowing the history of Compassion, Timeship and mother of Timeships, in the Doctor Who novels that Faction Paradox originally split from. Oh, the book tries to introduce the necessary backstory -- it's packed with sidebars and footnotes -- but it's both insufficient and too much information. It doesn't work.
  
  So, whither Faction Paradox? I've read three volumes, which score two idea-packed failures and one success despite itself. I have three more volumes on the shelf, plus a collection of short stories. I expect the success ratio to remain low. And yet I'm still interested. Faction Paradox is an inchoate narrative fog which may contain nothing but will-o-wisp and ambition. How can I say no?
  
  (Added afterwards: I have now looked up some of the drama from fifteen-odd years ago -- when the Who novels in question were being written. I am adding this footnote to say: don't. I shouldn't have looked. Maybe that should taint this whole review, but you know, I'm just gonna go back to reading the books.)
  
• 
  Lawrence

  
  http://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2014/04...