Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-28349479-20161216221639/@comment-86.4.239.22-20161218114507

Hi. Philip Purser-Hallard here, author of Of the City of the Saved, "A Hundred Words from a Civil War" (in A Romance in TWelve Parts) and "De Umbris Idearum" (in Burning with Optimism's Flames), and editor of four City of the Saved anthologies published to date, with another due early next year.

I couldn't swear to it, but I'm fairly sure that makes me responsible for more Faction Paradox material than anyone else except Lawrence Miles himself. I've also written and edited a bunch of stuff that unambiguously takes place in Doctor Who continuity, for the Bernice Summerfield, Iris Wildthyme and Time Hunter ranges, as well as two Doctor Who short stories for Big Finish.

It's certainly not been my authorial intention that these stories take place in separate continuities, which is why I reuse characters and other elements across these series all the time. Aside from KJ Nemeth and Rex Halidom, who the OP mentions, there's Imogen Tantry, who's introduced in Predating the Predators and subsequently reappears in "De Umbris Idearum" and, as Pope Beatrix II, in "A Hundred Words from a Civil War". "A Hundred Words" also includes descendants of the Quire from Collected Works and the Yesodites from "The Long Midwinter".

In all honesty, my Iris stories have more distance from the Doctor Who universe than the Faction ones: in "Green Mars Blues", for instance, the Ice Warriors appear among a roster of explicitly fictional Martians, but that's because it's well established -- and certainly a fundamental assumption of Iris Wildthyme of Mars -- that Iris exists in a metafictional multiverse of which Doctor Who is only a part.

Nor am I at all convinced that it was ever Lawrence Miles's real intention to separate the Faction and Who universes. The Book of the War works to establish a distinct identity for itself and its successors, of course, but as will be plain to everyone who's read it, the extent to which its subversive reinterpretation of Doctor Who history relies on there being an accepted Doctor Who history for it to subvert. The Magic Bullet Faction audios' treatment of the Osirians is similar -- it treats the public-domain idea of "ancient Egyptian deities as hugely powerful aliens" in a manner which is deeply consistent with that in Pyramids of Mars, though it also builds on it extensively. (The BBV Faction audios deal with the Peking Homunculus in much the same way, though their presentation of the Sontarans is more conventional.)

Essentially, the Faction material constantly questions Doctor Who orthodoxy, but this strand of its ethos only exists in the context of that orthodoxy. To treat Faction Paradox as an entity in its own right is nonsensical (which I suspect is why the Faction wiki has never thrived), and to exclude it from the Doctor Who expanded universe can only be a defensive political statement based on not wanting that orthodoxy challenged.