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Faction Paradox
Faction Paradox is a series of novels, audio stories, short story anthologies, and comics set in and around a "War in Heaven", a history-spanning conflict between godlike "Great Houses" and their mysterious enemy. The series is named after a group originally created by author Lawrence Miles for BBC Books' Doctor Who novels.
Originally a subplot in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, the War involves several characters and concepts evolved from the original Doctor Who set-up. In several cases, the Faction Paradox series still features these groups, albeit with names changed for reasons both literary (most of the groups or items mentioned are described from different perspectives) and legal (the Faction and the Enemy are Miles's creations, but other elements are not – thus the Great Houses are the Faction Paradox range's equivalent to Doctor Who's Time Lords). Faction Paradox themselves are not the enemy in this War, and play a neutral part, willing to act against both sides in their own interests. Miles has described them as "a ritualistic time-travelling guerrilla organisation".
The semi-mythical founder of Faction Paradox is Grandfather Paradox, named after the grandfather paradox of time travel theory. Originally a member of the Great Houses himself, the Grandfather created a new group after he became frustrated with the ways of the Great Houses. Faction Paradox therefore takes a good deal of pleasure in irritating the Great Houses, and many of their traditions and rituals are aligned in direct opposition to the way the Great Houses do things. Their time machines are bigger on the inside, in much the same way as TARDISes are, and the familial titles its members use (e.g. "Father", "Cousin") reference family units which the Great Houses lost when they became sterile.
Faction Paradox also take a perverse pride in causing time paradoxes (something that is against the laws of the Great Houses) and achieving impossible or absurd effects for their own sake. For instance, they typically wear ritual skull masks which are in fact the skulls of vampirised members of the Great Houses who, in the Great Houses' version of history, never existed. Their stronghold on Earth exists in a version of London, within what they call "The Eleven-Day Empire", bought from the British government in 1752. In that year, the British Empire first adopted the Gregorian calendar, and in so doing had to correct their dating scheme by 11 days (2 September 1752 being followed by 14 September 1752). Faction Paradox claimed the missing 11 days as their base (building on the illogicity that only the numbering scheme changed and no days were actually "missing").
One method of recruitment utilised by the Faction involves infecting others with the Paradox biodata virus, which warps the mind of the infected subject to share the Faction's perspective. A key storyline in the Eighth Doctor's adventures at this time involves the Faction manipulating the Doctor into changing his own history so that the Third Doctor not only regenerates "ahead of schedule" on the planet Dust, but also in a manner that allows him to be infected by a Paradox virus while his system is weakened by his regeneration. While the virus would still be too weak to affect the Doctor immediately, it would gain greater influence on him until the time of his eighth incarnation, at which point the Doctor would be converted to a Faction agent. Fortunately, the TARDIS was aware of this divergence from the timeline and took the infected timeline into itself, thus essentially preserving the timeline where the Doctor wasn't infected even as the timeline where the Doctor becomes a Faction agent still had the potential to exist.
After a brief mention of Grandfather Paradox in the Virgin New Adventures novel Christmas on a Rational Planet, Faction Paradox and the War in Heaven made their debut in BBC Books' Eighth Doctor novels.
The most relevant books to the Faction Paradox universe are:
Several other Doctor Who novels featured or referenced Faction Paradox, most notably The Ancestor Cell (written by Stephen Cole and Peter Anghelides in 2000), The Quantum Archangel (written by Craig Hinton in 2001), and The Gallifrey Chronicles (written by Lance Parkin in 2005), but were contradicted or otherwise ignored in the Faction Paradox series.
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Faction Paradox AI simulator
(@Faction Paradox_simulator)
Faction Paradox
Faction Paradox is a series of novels, audio stories, short story anthologies, and comics set in and around a "War in Heaven", a history-spanning conflict between godlike "Great Houses" and their mysterious enemy. The series is named after a group originally created by author Lawrence Miles for BBC Books' Doctor Who novels.
Originally a subplot in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, the War involves several characters and concepts evolved from the original Doctor Who set-up. In several cases, the Faction Paradox series still features these groups, albeit with names changed for reasons both literary (most of the groups or items mentioned are described from different perspectives) and legal (the Faction and the Enemy are Miles's creations, but other elements are not – thus the Great Houses are the Faction Paradox range's equivalent to Doctor Who's Time Lords). Faction Paradox themselves are not the enemy in this War, and play a neutral part, willing to act against both sides in their own interests. Miles has described them as "a ritualistic time-travelling guerrilla organisation".
The semi-mythical founder of Faction Paradox is Grandfather Paradox, named after the grandfather paradox of time travel theory. Originally a member of the Great Houses himself, the Grandfather created a new group after he became frustrated with the ways of the Great Houses. Faction Paradox therefore takes a good deal of pleasure in irritating the Great Houses, and many of their traditions and rituals are aligned in direct opposition to the way the Great Houses do things. Their time machines are bigger on the inside, in much the same way as TARDISes are, and the familial titles its members use (e.g. "Father", "Cousin") reference family units which the Great Houses lost when they became sterile.
Faction Paradox also take a perverse pride in causing time paradoxes (something that is against the laws of the Great Houses) and achieving impossible or absurd effects for their own sake. For instance, they typically wear ritual skull masks which are in fact the skulls of vampirised members of the Great Houses who, in the Great Houses' version of history, never existed. Their stronghold on Earth exists in a version of London, within what they call "The Eleven-Day Empire", bought from the British government in 1752. In that year, the British Empire first adopted the Gregorian calendar, and in so doing had to correct their dating scheme by 11 days (2 September 1752 being followed by 14 September 1752). Faction Paradox claimed the missing 11 days as their base (building on the illogicity that only the numbering scheme changed and no days were actually "missing").
One method of recruitment utilised by the Faction involves infecting others with the Paradox biodata virus, which warps the mind of the infected subject to share the Faction's perspective. A key storyline in the Eighth Doctor's adventures at this time involves the Faction manipulating the Doctor into changing his own history so that the Third Doctor not only regenerates "ahead of schedule" on the planet Dust, but also in a manner that allows him to be infected by a Paradox virus while his system is weakened by his regeneration. While the virus would still be too weak to affect the Doctor immediately, it would gain greater influence on him until the time of his eighth incarnation, at which point the Doctor would be converted to a Faction agent. Fortunately, the TARDIS was aware of this divergence from the timeline and took the infected timeline into itself, thus essentially preserving the timeline where the Doctor wasn't infected even as the timeline where the Doctor becomes a Faction agent still had the potential to exist.
After a brief mention of Grandfather Paradox in the Virgin New Adventures novel Christmas on a Rational Planet, Faction Paradox and the War in Heaven made their debut in BBC Books' Eighth Doctor novels.
The most relevant books to the Faction Paradox universe are:
Several other Doctor Who novels featured or referenced Faction Paradox, most notably The Ancestor Cell (written by Stephen Cole and Peter Anghelides in 2000), The Quantum Archangel (written by Craig Hinton in 2001), and The Gallifrey Chronicles (written by Lance Parkin in 2005), but were contradicted or otherwise ignored in the Faction Paradox series.