Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-28349479-20161216221639/@comment-5465689-20161218133804

OK, thought I'd pitch in here. My FP credentials aren't as great as Philip Purser-Hallard's, but I *have* written one Faction Paradox novel (Head of State) and one short story (The Adventure of the Piltdown Prelate, in Tales of the Great Detectives), so if my authorial intent makes a difference, take that into account. I am *also* active in the Tumblr FP fandom, which NateBumber cited above.

And finally, I'm someone who *has* edited the FP wikia, which those who disagree with the "separate canons" thing are being accused of not doing. And I did so not because I agree with the canon policy, but because that wiki is *so* bad that I couldn't let it stand as a resource for others, so I updated a handful of pages.

I note that there is so little activity on that wiki that the page I added two years ago for my own novel still shows on the "new pages" list. The fact that I am ranked sixth in contributions on that Wikia despite not actually thinking it should exist in its current form should really speak for itself.

The front page of that Wikia still says " the odd novel or short story does occasionally surface, as most recently happened in 2011." Since 2011 Burning With Optimism's Flames, Against Nature, The Brakespeare Voyage, Tales Of The City, More Tales Of The City, Head Of State, Tales of the Great Detectives, Furthest Tales of the City, Liberating Earth, and Weapons-Grade Snake Oil have all come out. No-one except admins is allowed to change that page. The admins have shown no interest in doing so.

The reason for the lack of activity is that there is no sensible way to write encyclopaedically about the various FP works without referencing their "DWU" appearances.

Before I ever wrote a word of FP material, I wrote a blog post arguing -- vociferously -- against this split in canon policies ( https://andrewhickey.info/2012/09/07/i-blame-ronald-knox/ ). To quote from that:

"It may seem like I’m getting overly annoyed at what is, after all, a few geeks doing geek things, but it’s not the separation of these two wikis that annoys me in itself. Rather it’s that this is a symptom of a larger problem, a basic illiteracy which is spreading.

For example, there was a character called Chris Cwej in some of the Doctor Who books. He also appears in the book Dead Romance, which was originally published in the Bernice Summerfield series (counted as canon on the Doctor Who wiki) before being republished as a prequel to the Faction Paradox series. He then appears in The Book Of The War (a Faction Paradox book), where he’s cloned into a whole subspecies called the Cwejen. One of the Cwejen then appears in a Bernice Summerfield audio drama.

Makes sense, right? Simple enough.

Except that because of this enforced split, these people are insisting that one should instead read it as “there was a character called Chris Cwej in some of the Doctor Who books. Later a clone of him called a Cwejen appeared from nowhere” or “a character called Chris Cwej didn’t do very much, and he was cloned, and the clones did nothing of importance either”. The Chris Cwej in “the DWU” has to be different from the Chris Cwej in “the FPU”. The same goes for the Sontarans, Iris Wildthyme, the Peking Homunculus, Sutekh, even Faction Paradox themselves. Totally different, unconnected characters, in two different ‘franchises’.

The need for rules, for consistency, and for a ‘canon’ has overruled all intelligent reading of the texts, any engagement with them. Not only the author’s intention (and it’s *clearly* the intention that, say, the Sontarans in The Faction Paradox Protocols are the same species as in The Invasion Of Time — there’s a clear intertextuality going on there) but also any kind of sensible reading of the text at all. It’s like trying to read The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen while pretending that the Alan Quartermain or Mr Hyde in it are totally different to the ones who appear in Victorian fiction.

And this is a very, very dangerous idea. Texts should be read with as much context as possible, not as little. While authorial intention isn’t everything, it is *something*, and all works have inspirations from other texts.

Trying to look at texts completely in isolation from their context — and trying to pretend that it’s because of some great authority, even when no authority has spoken — is the mindset of fundamentalism. For anyone who doubts the importance of what I’m talking about, take a look at the way American politics is being distorted by people who insist on ‘literal’ readings of the Bible without paying attention to things like authorial voice or metaphor, without differentiating between recountings of myths and attempts at accurate history, within that very complex, difficult book.

There is a direct link between the mindset that says “Mary Christmas, Santa’s ex-wife who left him because she thought he had an affair with Iris Wildthyme, is ‘canon’, but the Iris Wildthyme who she thought was having an affair isn’t the same one who tried to visit the City Of The Saved. That would just be silly”, and the mindset that uses Scofield Reference Bibles to link completely unlinked pieces of text, written thousands of years apart by different people, into an incoherent but ‘literal’ whole."

That quote from Lawrence Miles that people reference as a claim that FP is not "the Doctor Who universe" is, by any sensible reading, a claim that *Alien Bodies and Interference* are not the Doctor Who universe.

My own Head of State explicitly takes place in the same world as Philip Purser-Hallard's Bernice Summerfield story "Predating the Predators" and references events in that story. It is absolutely my intention that, to the extent that there is a "Doctor Who universe", both my FP works take place in it (as will any future FP works I do). As far as I'm aware (and I've talked with the majority of them), that's true of everyone who's written for the FP range, and I know it's true of at least two of the publishers (I don't know about Random Static, but both Lars Pearson and Stuart Douglas have said similar things).

The split in "canons" has no justification in authorial intent, no justification in the texts, and does real damage to the possibility of the FP wikia ever making sense.

And nobody in the FP fandom as it exists thinks of the two as separate. The *only* people who think of them as separate are a handful of admins who are apparently more interested in taking sides in a nearly-twenty-year-old fandom dispute than in what makes sense.

There are only two solutions that can possibly ever make sense here:

1) By far my preferred solution -- bring the FP material back into TARDIS wikia, because it's clearly, obviously, relevant here, and would be here were it not for an unjustified decision to exclude it.

2) Much less preferable -- get rid of the "sister wikis" nonsense and stop holding the FP Wikia to a "canon" policy that makes it impossible to talk sensibly about the books and audios. Make the FP Wikia as independent as you claim the "two" "universes" to be, and allow FP fandom to do what it likes.

But the present situation is nothing more or less than TARDIS Wikia admins domain-squatting the FP Wikia, preventing even the possibility of anyone doing anything useful with it (whether the will to do that exists or not, I don't know, but it's not even a possibility at the moment), and in the process misrepresenting the work of dozens of authors, including myself, because someone decided a decade or more ago that Lawrence Miles is smelly and we don't want to be his friend anyway. It's childish and nonsensical.