Newtons Sleep (novel)

Newtons Sleep was the seventh novel in the Faction Paradox series and the only one published by Random Static. An ebook of the novel was later released on the Random Static website for free.

Publisher's summary
''Don't tell her what it was like. Don't tell her how you had to dig your way out through heavy layers of clay to reach the fresh air, because that would distress her. Don't tell her about the box, because that would confuse her.''

And don't tell her about the light, because that was sacred.

Lately cannonballs have flown their arcs, leaving the crystal sky unbroken, while on Earth their traces are all too visible. Yet though Heaven has never seemed so far away, the divine is terribly closer. War on Earth presages War in Heaven; the struggle between the holy houses of Christ and their eternal Adversary has erupted among the living.

These are the signs of the last days: in 1651, a dead angel is found in a tree in Lincolnshire and a nymph rises from the waters of Kent; in 1642, a dying man is miraculously healed in the grave; in 1665, uncanny skull-masked doctors descend upon a plague house; in 1683, the French secret service unveil mirrors that show the futures; in 1671, Aphra Behn -- she-spy and poetesse -- infiltrates a gathering of alchemists; in 1649, the English kill their king, and history begins...

Plot
to be added

Characters

 * Nate Silver
 * Aphra Behn
 * Alice Lynch/Mistress Piper/Cousin Greenaway
 * Cousin Suppression
 * Cousin Amphigory
 * Cousin Hateman
 * Mother Sphinx
 * Erasmus
 * Larissa
 * Jeova Unus Sanctus
 * Mademoiselle Machine

Worldbuilding

 * The first babel attempts to prime humanity for the War in Heaven.
 * Erasmus and the other pilots are posthumans who use praxis to reach their past and ensure it isn't altered.
 * Biodata is translated as "life-gifts" — a calque.
 * Larissa is The Little Book of Absolute Power.
 * Charles II is mentioned.

Continuity

 * Chatelaine Thessalia, The Little Book of Absolute Power, and the first babel appear. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
 * The Faction has been devastated by the Second Wave. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
 * Erasmus and his friends are from the Pilots' Coterie. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
 * Father-Mother Olympia mentions that Mathara took on a protégé originating from the London area. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)
 * The boy later known as Yellow Dog of the Thirty-One Cuts claims to have seen meetings of wild things who hid sharp teeth and claws in their dark robes in the caverns beneath House Ixion. (PROSE: The Return of the King)