User:NateBumber/Sandbox/2

Faction Paradox series: History
The War in Heaven and its major players, from the Celestis to the humanoid Type 103 TARDISes to Faction Paradox itself, were first introduced in Lawrence Miles' 1997 Eighth Doctor novel Alien Bodies. At the time, Miles never intended for it to become a large arc, but after he learned that Kate Orman and Jon Blum were planning to include the Faction in their novel Unnatural History, he felt justified to do more with them in his 1999 novel Interference - Book One. However, after Interference received critical reviews, Miles felt he had "lost [his] mandate" and resigned from writing Doctor Who to instead work on a Faction Paradox series.

By the year 2000, BBV Productions had agreed to develop a Faction Paradox Protocols series of audio stories; the first installment, The Eleven Day Empire, was released in October 2001. These audios introduced several concepts that would later become staples of the Faction Paradox range, such as the Faction's shadow-weapons and alternate names like "Great Houses" for the Time Lords or "timeships" for TARDISes. Miles described this as the continuation of the reinvention that he began in Alien Bodies: as he explored more of the mechanics of the War, the War-era Time Lords became less and less like the regular Time Lords until they became something completely different.

This process would not be fully fulfilled until the writing of The Book of the War, a standalone book intended to be a tie-in to the BBV audios. As Miles collected, edited, and synthesized stories from nine other authors into a "guidebook to a series that doesn't exist yet", he reached a point at which he realised that the continuity was taking on its own identity by building on the mythological elements of Doctor Who but nothing else. Miles envisioned the universe as one with the scale and appearance of science fiction, but without any of the props ("warp drives and aliens and space marines") and instead giving the feel of mythology, with faceless-but-aristocratic elementals running history

"Because this isn't really a universe which revolves around good and evil, this is a political universe, and sometimes the Faction's the dynamic force that breaks the two-power deadlock but sometimes it's happy to massacre its victims by the thousand.""

"What I'm getting at is… at the end of the Bible there's a massive, cataclysmic battle between whole armies of angels, demons and God-knows-what-else, all of them suddenly coming out of nowhere and intersecting with the human world for no particular reason. But nobody seriously reads the Book of Revelations and asks whether these things are aliens or time-travellers or space-pixies or things from another dimension, we all just accept them as "angels" because it's part of our mythology. And Faction Paradox doesn't really have that Biblical feel to it, but it's meant to have the same sense of mythology. You can just to take it as read that there are conflicts going on at right-angles to normal human experience, there isn't supposed to be a nuts-and-bolts SF justification for it. The idea of the Faction is that it's an organisation which exists outside of normal history, but it's not supposed to have a definite focus."

- https://web.archive.org/web/20030622092617/http://www.bbvonline.co.uk/fea_faction_paradox_Intvw_LM.htm

Like I keep saying, I've always seen the Time Lords as being elementals rather than aliens anyway, so I suppose the point is that The Book of the War uses the mythological elements from Doctor Who but nothing else. http://web.archive.org/web/20080509161052/http://www.gallifreyone.com/interview.php?id=miles}}

The Book of the War garnered such success that its publisher, Mad Norwegian Press, began a "Faction Paradox" novel series, edited by Lawrence Miles. Despite the name, these novels did not specifically focus on Faction Paradox.

"At some point these Houses engaged in a war with an equally inscrutable enemy, and the war intersected - still intersects - human history like a biblical war in Heaven, impacting on humanity but without direct human involvement. Usually. So that makes Faction Paradox a Prometheus among the Titans, it's a splinter-group halfway between the elite and humanity, which believes in (a) introducing its principles to the "collaterals" caught in the crossfire... that's us, essentially... and (b) interfering in the plans of the Houses whenever possible.

You know how in James Bond movies, the West and East are constantly at each others' throats and SPECTRE is always trying to stir up trouble in the middle? That's the ethic behind Faction Paradox, more or less. The universe is divided between two ridiculously large power-blocs, and the Faction doesn't want anything to do with either of them. It organises itself as if it were a cult-come-criminal-operation-come-terrorist-movement, and throughout the range there's some ambiguity as to whether the agents of Faction Paradox are technically the heroes, the anti-heroes, the sympathetic villains or just murdering sods with scary masks.

Because this isn't really a universe which revolves around good and evil, this is a political universe, and sometimes the Faction's the dynamic force that breaks the two-power deadlock but sometimes it's happy to massacre its victims by the thousand.""

- https://web.archive.org/web/20160305082548/https://www.ninthart.org/display.php?article=739

Due to The Faction Paradox Protocols' popularity, BBV Productions switched their previously anthology-style Audio Adventures in Time & Space range to exclusively focus on Faction Paradox audios starting in September of 2003. However, BBV cancelled its audio line in 2004, ending the series with A Labyrinth of Histories. Looking for a new publisher, Miles was impressed by the actors in Magic Bullet Productions' Kaldor City range and accordingly reached out to Alan Stevens; though the resultant True History of Faction Paradox series was designed as a stand-alone release, it featured the characters Justine, Eliza, and Lolita from the Protocols audios.