Faction Paradox: This Town Will Never Let Us Go by Lawrence Miles

Faction Paradox #1

by Lawrence Miles

From up here you can see it all, hear it all, taste most of it and feel the rest when the electric lights and the satellite signals prickle against your skin. The town, from midnight to six, marked out in headlights and the flash-fire of a culture in War-time. Séance-messages written in the patterns of the road signs, and ghost-transmissions scrambled into the background noise of the traffic. Animal scent-signals from the fried food stands. All describing something, buried under the tarmac and the street-geometry.Down there, a girl in a fake-bone mask is working on a ritual to bring it to the surface. A popular performing artiste with a navel stud and serious identity problems is finding herself stalked — literally — by her own image. An ambulance crewman is about to find his own way of getting involved in the War.And bringing them all together, in one neat little urban mythology, there's Faction Paradox - part cult, part subculture, part pop phenomenon, and part criminal syndicate, either watching-without-being-seen or simply not existing at all (at least until someone invents it). Assuming they're not wholly imaginary, the archons of the Faction seem like the only ones who know what this town really is - what every town really is — and what's bound to happen when it wakes up.

Genres: Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Fiction, Occult

Hardcover

First published September 1, 2003

Reviews

[Nemo ☠️ (pagesandprozac) · Rating 5 out of 5]

this review is now available on my blog!

“This superstition, that anything you do makes any kind of sense on the grand scale, is only right and proper. It’s the ridiculous, impossible, great and unarguable superstition which makes the whole of humanity possible.”

listen.

i am offended – an offence which cuts not only to the bone, but to my very marrow - that this has so few ratings, that this is so obscure. i understand why. an indie publisher; a spin-off known only to the most hardcore of fans.

faction paradox reaches, with its bare hands, into the dark cosmic horror underbelly of doctor who and pulls it, glistening like obsidian, to the surface. almost literally.

this is a doctor who spin-off, except you don't need to know anything about doctor who at all. i am not joking; they are ALL standalone characters, ALL standalone plots. you will find no Doctor here. even if you don't like doctor who, or tried to get into it and failed, if you like science fiction then i implore you to read this. not only is there no crossover of basically anything except from the general universe, it doesn't feel like doctor who. it's something utterly different. it is doctor who's estranged cousin, the one who none of your family ever talk to, and you aren't sure what they do for a living but something about them screams mortician, taxidermist, and/or mad scientist.

for some reason, it reminds me of a cross between welcome to night vale and black mirror. it is at turns poignant, trippy, what can only be described as batshit insane, and humorous:

“Valentine doesn’t think clothes are particularly relevant, and it shows. Just look. They’re as uninterested in him as he is in them.”

“Now she’ll never get hold of a decent fried malmotti wrap ever again, and if there’s one thing guaranteed to make people turn against the War, it’s that kind of inconvenience.”

but most of all, it’s somehow very Joycean. this is james joyce doing hard sci-fi.

even the format itself is Joycean: it's a book written in chapterlets probably only 500 words each, a format that i adore anyway, but these are not just any chapterlets: each one represents a minute. we begin at midnight, like all good things do, and go through until six. it's an extremely clever format, and i'm in love with it.

so, by now, you’re probably wondering: "nemo, this is all well and good, but what the hell is this actually all about?" honestly, that's a very good fucking question, but one thing i can tell you for (almost) certain is that there are three main characters:

- inangela, a teenage goth who spends most of the book zooming around the town in her Hell Truck with her friend named Horror. she is desperate to become part of faction paradox, even if she pretends it isn't, and even if nobody is entirely sure if this cult/criminal syndicate/subculture is even real.

- paramedic valentine, who has unacceptable opinions about the War. what is the War? nobody really knows. nobody wants to know, because they could never begin to comprehend something on such a celestial, vast scale. this is a War between what can only be gods.

- pop star tiffany, antic and strange, with a public image even more so. i would be surprised if her storyline wasn't based on a crazy, hard sci-fi version of richard dawkins' memes, a word that has been more than a little bit ruined for me due to its internet connotations, but never mind.

this is my first lawrence miles book, which is almost a sin for someone who claims to be such a big fan of doctor who and its extended universe. i don't know if all his books are like this or this is just his faction paradox style, but holy hell. it is incredible. i had a really hard time whittling the number of quotes down, because i just wanted to put in practically everything. extremely witty and profound, miles' narrative sucks you straight into the story and makes you experience the insane acid trip that is this town will never let us go.

i actually started to write this review when i was less than a third into the book. this is astonishing because i never draft reviews or write them before i’ve finished reading; they are usually just stream-of-consciousnesses thrown into the void of this website. but i had so many thoughts bouncing around that i was terrified of losing any.

i hope i have managed to stir your interest. if not, take a gander at the blurb. if that doesn’t interest you, then i don’t know what will.

this is not light. this is heavy and deep, and if you’re not really into science fiction i don’t think i’d recommend it. it does not just tie your brain into knots, it knits a jumper from it. (what a wonderful visual image. i do apologise.) it is slow, yet also captivating in a way that never fails. it took me a while to read this; although i can sometimes read excellent books very quickly, this one is certainly like a bottle of scotch, or a very strong cheese: it’s gorgeous and wonderful and you must take your time - partially so it ends slower and you can savour it, and partially because, despite it being incredible, it can get a little much in large doses.

this town will never let us go is empirical proof that genre fiction, specifically science fiction in this case, is not inherently inferior to literary fiction. on the contrary, it can be deeper and more intelligent. sci-fi can say something profound about modern society in a way that, perhaps it can be argued, literary fiction never can. not in this world, this tech-drenched, augmented-reality world.

(also, apropos to absolutely nothing, for around the last quarter of the book i was listening to the album at the price of oblivion on repeat – which is, of all things, part of the homestuck soundtrack, but don’t @ me because it’s an absolute banger – which matched the mood of the book perfectly and i’m pretty sure made me ascend onto a different astral plane.)

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few years ago I bought _The Book of the War_, which is more or less a setting lexicon for a Doctor Who spinoff, only with all the Doctor Who trademarks ground off. It wasn't a novel, although it contained something like some short stories.

It turns out this was *sort of* an extension of *some of* the Who novels published in the 90s. I have not read them. In these books, Lawrence Miles introduced the notion of the great Time War (later picked up by the 2005 TV series) -- a history-wide conflict between the Time Lords and *somebody*. (Definitely not the Daleks.) They're full of other wild ideas as well: multiple versions of Gallifrey, human-TARDIS hybrids, a temporal base built in the eleven days deleted from the calendar in 1752. And then there's Faction Paradox.

Miles didn't like how the licensed novels wrapped up his arc, so he kicked off and started writing his own Faction Paradox books. _The Book of the War_ was the first, roughly establishing the elements of the scenario. _This Town Will Never Let Us Go_ followed.

It is a very odd book. I liked it.

It is not a Doctor Who novel. Miles has by this point discarded everything which a Who fan would recognize at all. (Which puts this series into a rare and interesting category of fan-fiction.) Instead, we see folks on present-day Earth, trying to understand a War which is only indirectly visible.

Explosions sporadically destroy buildings, streets, or empty fields. Everyone knows there is a War; nobody really knows who is fighting, or why. Nobody ever sees a Warship, but they must exist, so they must be invisible. The rumor that Ships can travel through time is clearly absurd; but then, if an uninhabited field is vaporized, couldn't it be that one of the War Powers attacked a target which has *not yet been built*?

Our viewpoint characters are an angry Goth teen, a paramedic, and a pop singer idol. The Goth is trying to construct a ritual, the paramedic is trying to construct a bomb, and the singer is trying to construct some shred of identity beyond her corporate-managed brand.

But then the *real* viewpoint character is the narration -- snarky, jokey, constantly commenting on culture and history and fiction and itself. I'd call it utterly unreliable, except that it never bothers to commit to anything in the first place. See the handwavy business about Ships of War, above; the book is *all* like that. You're perfectly free to take the surreal bits as drug-induced hallucinations, and read it as a *non-genre* piece about three young adults in a war-torn society. Or you can consider it epic science fiction. Or, *if* you have the backing of the earlier books, you can take it as a fanfic thriller about a plot to blow up a crashed TARDIS.

This sort of narrative effrontery -- painted directly on the fourth wall as you watch -- is horribly easy to screw up. I was startled to realize that Miles *pulls it off*. He's very easy to read; I was pulled right along, despite the rapid-fire jumps between the three characters. His wit is witty, his bon mots are, er, bonny. At least for me. I'm sure that (sorry) mileage will vary.

The underlying strength is Miles's sense of the scale and wonder of his setting. He *has* to present it through hints and indirection; it's too big to be concrete. Certainly the TV show has never done it justice. A single Ship, *even destroyed*, is a godlike entity -- capable of reshaping everything you've ever known. The book just barely gives us a glimpse of that. Beyond, the War is implicit.

I should have read this thing when I was in high school. I read _Illuminatus_ and _Hitchhiker's Guide_ instead, because that's what was available, but this thing is doing the same job: scattering ideas hither and yon, dosed with humor and madness and sense of wonder. I'd like to believe that any younger reader will find elements to pick up and make personal.

Maybe not. After all, the book is ten years old. I have three more Faction Paradox novels stacked up to read (Miles got some of his friends to play in his sandbox) but they're all obscure. They came out of a small press, circulated through essentially none of SF or Who fandom, and vanished. As an experiment, Faction Paradox has already failed.

If you told Faction Paradox -- the *real* Faction Paradox -- about that, they'd just laugh at you. This is the point, I guess.

[Alex Sarll]

When morons complain that British fiction doesn't do politics or state-of-the-nation anymore, this is one of the books of which they are demonstrating their unforgivable ignorance. Likely because they don't realise that topics of substance are nowadays far more likely to be addressed in Doctor Who spin-offs than in overhyped Hampstead litfic.

[Leo H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmm, left me a bit cold that one tbh. I'm a massive fan of Miles' other books, but this one felt really disjointed with the really short sections cutting between different characters. It also felt annoyingly didactic, which I normally don't mind if what the narrator/writer is saying is interesting or intelligent, but this just... wasn't? The observations, philosophy and politics of it felt very dated, even for the time, and especially reading it now. "Videotapes are the future!!" he says in... 2003.

[A Cask of Troutwine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Town Will Never Let Us Go is a book that I think gets unjustly looked over. It's probably one of the best books I've ever read, and would be the one that I would point to to show what Faction Paradox can do. But even if one hasn't read or heard of Faction Paradox or Doctor Who, this book is incredibly well written and structured, and can just be enjoyed as it's own book.

Suffice it to say, this book is Lawrence Miles talking about and discussing everything he can, asking questions about our relationship with media, magic, celebrity, war, culture, and society. The real meat of the book is found in these digressions, and how they fold back into a vast, interconnected web that the characters are caught in.

Like a lot of great science fiction, Lawrence Miles is discussing society and where we fit into it, and he nails down that feeling of existing in a small town and the way that the outer world filters in through the cracks, and just like the title says, that feeling that the town will never let you go.

[Matthew Kresal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nearly a decade ago, I attended a panel at the Chicago TARDIS convention on the topic of the novels of the wilderness years. On the panel were convention guests who had contributed to those books including Jonathan Blum, Paul Cornell, Kate Orman, and Gary Russell. Perhaps it was inevitable that the topic of Lawrence Miles, that looming but an immensely controversial author of the era, came up as the proverbial "elephant in the room". Despite Miles attacking them all in interviews, all four had great things to say about his work and it was Cornell who said that Miles, "should have been the next great British science fiction writer." In reading this, Miles' last published novel (which I bought at the same convention six years later), I can't help but feel he was right in that assessment.

Technically, This Town Will Never Let Us Go was meant to be the opening standalone novel in the Mad Norwegian Press Faction Paradox series of novels. Considering that, it feels like an odd book indeed. The faction hardly features in the novel at all, mainly through little references here and there. Indeed all the things one would have expected from Miles previous set-up in Doctor Who novels like Alien Bodes barely comes into play at all. It's a strange way to kick-off a series to say the least.

Or at least one might think that. Instead of what the reader was likely expecting, Miles instead spends 281 pages following a trio of characters across six hours one morning, the novel presents us with a human eye view of that conflict known simply as The War. We might Inangela, a Goth girl living in a van determined to join the ranks of the Faction by engaging in a ritual across the titular town. There's Valentine, an ambulance driver who has decided to make his own way into The War. Last but not least is Tiffany, a Latina Britney Spears type who goes on a journey of self-discovery right into the heart of modern media. These three apparently disconnected protagonists eventually converge in the plot's last couple of hours but that isn't what's most surprising about the novel.

That would be the fact that Miles does what all great science fiction does. He takes this human eye view of The War and engages in an almighty critique of British society and Western culture in the aftermath of 9/11. The War becomes a metaphor for the War on Terror and Valentine's subplot becomes an all too familiar story of radicalization that wouldn't be out of place in headlines fifteen years or more after the novel was first published. Miles is also keen to take shots at the media, advertising, and pop culture in general as he finds symbolism and banality side by side in places. Despite it being "the most 2003 book imaginable" (to paraphrase and indeed correct something Miles said in the last interview I'm aware of that he did in 2013), it's also a remarkably prescient book as he discusses the spread of information and ideas, kneejerk reactions, and cults of personality around celebrities that doesn't feel at all out of place in the age of Twitter and social media. What's remarkable is that Miles does all that is what is really a novel meant to be aimed at a niche within a niche (Doctor Who fans who not only read his previous BBC novels but also wanted more of Faction Paradox in print) and tells a compelling story along the way.

It's compelling in large part because of how Miles chooses to tell his story. The novel unfolds minute by minute, hour by hour in the unnamed town that seems to have more than a few similarities with London. The novel is full of asides worthy of Douglas Adams and an almost obsessive eye towards the mythological dimensions underpinning behind ordinary things that would not be out of place in one of Neil Gaiman's novels from Neverwhere to American Gods. Indeed, reading this made me understand some of Miles' animosity towards Gaiman that he has expressed on his blog. They're both British writers (though Gaiman spends a lot of time in the US these days) who deal in similar territories at times. Miles is what Gaiman (and perhaps even the aforementioned late Mr. Adams) would be if they were cynical to the extreme. The cynicism and the at times borderline pretentious literary style (along with the small print of the physical edition I read) makes reading the novel difficult at times. It's a novel overflowing with ideas and insights (as painful and difficult to swallow as they are at times) but well worth making it through.

Perhaps the biggest problem the novel has is that it is, ultimately, meant to be a Doctor Who spin-off novel. It's the fact that it is aimed at the aforementioned niche within a niche that made its audience so small. This Town Will Never Let Us Go is a remarkable, breathtaking, even uncomfortably getting under your skin piece of work. It should have been the start of something new, maybe a way of bringing Faction Paradox and its creator to a wider audience.

Instead, it's a footnote. One of many Doctor Who spin-off novels out there at the moment. Miles said in the aforementioned 2013 podcast interview that he has all but given up writing at this point. All of which makes me sad because This Town Will Never Let Us Go ought to be screamed about from the rooftops and Miles ought to be winning prizes. Instead one is out of print (though still obtainable at reasonable prices) and the other has given up writing.

Neither of which feels right.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 2 out of 5]

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3831008.html

Having got all enthusiastic about the first of the Faction Paradox books last month, I'm afraid this left me rather cold. It's a story of a few key characters interacting with a town that is being devastated by a mysterious war. I didn't care about them and I was annoyed not to know more about what was going on. And there is a chapter written almost entirely in anagrams, which is really self-indulgent. Many people like it more than I did, or find it more interesting.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing for this book is one that I’ve rarely come across, all a bit odd and off-track. A paragraph about a celebrity being interviewed veers into concepts like inner selves. The general idea though seems to be that humanity is limiting themselves, cowed by the idea of controversy and stagnating as a result.

The result is a read that is as interesting as it is difficult to get through.

[Cait]

i will read anything if it's good enough and that apparently includes doctor who novelizations? never seen the show but i saw some snippets of this book it looks good and it's standalone sooooo.... i kind of am super interested

[Remi S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breathtaking.

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Typos aside.. holy crap, this was amazing. It had vibes of the "Annihilation" series, and I loved it.

[Cara M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved everything about this book until the end, where I wanted more of it to come together in terms of the plot. But I quoted so much of it! Great book.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a story that's sort of a Doctor who spin off I thought this was one of the most original things I'd read in ages. It wasn't quite horror or scifi or urban fantasy but had elements of each. It was on the same level as Philip K Dick or Alan Moore. Miles had a really great style that just fitted together the story beautifully. The book tour apart modern culture and war and pop icons and celebrity in a wonderfully inventive and honest way. I'm definitely going to get the rest of this series and highly recommend it!

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2014/03...

[Rachel Redhead · Rating 5 out of 5]

As superb a masterpiece as ever, complex, challenging, intriguing characters and yowser what an ending...

[John O'Halloran · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only made it half way through this book. i tried but it wasn't really for me.