The Book of the War (novel)

Synopsis
The Great Houses

Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral Politic.

The Enemy

Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.

Faction Paradox

Renegades, ritualists, saboteurs and subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the wreckage... assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's habitable.

The War

A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect."

Marking the first five decades of the conflict, THE BOOK OF THE WAR is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold on to your own past...

Content
Although purporting to be an encyclopedia of the first fifty years of the War in Heaven, The Book of the War offers mostly original information rather than summaries of established events. It should then be understood as a work of fiction in its own right, something somewhere between an anthology and a collaborative novel.

Its narrator is unreliable, at times unaware of details from other sources which might cast a different light on the events related, and so information offered as 'fact' in the book should not be uncritically accepted as such. Despite this, and despite the Doctor's actions in The Ancestor Cell preventing many of the events it describes from ever occurring, The Book of the War offers the closest and most detailed look so far at a Time War in progress.