Novel 6 (unproduced novel)

✅ "Novel #6" was Lars Pearson's term for Mad Norwegian Press's planned sixth Faction Paradox novel, which was intended to follow Kelly Hale's Erasing Sherlock.

Series creator Lawrence Miles planned Novel #6 with Pearson to reward faithful readers of the series by radically altering the shape of the War in Heaven. By Pearson's description, it was to be "(for lack of a better term) epic", a "cornerstone book", and "world-shattering / (insert cataclysmic term to taste)". Another author was meant to write it for release in 2006, although due to the amount of planning involved, the official announcement was delayed until late 2005.

Pearson described the book as "the Star Wars of the Faction universe." While writing The True History of Faction Paradox two years later, Miles wrote, "In my head, the Faction series is what I think Star Wars is like: a piece of visceral, dynamic art, in which scale, tone and motion are all that matter, and the sci-fi setting is almost irrelevant.

Yet in practice, it always ends up closer to what sci-fi fans think Star Wars is like: an adolescent wank-fantasy in which space-outlaws are "cool" and Revenge of the Sith isn't as good as a shitty spin-off novel about Boba Fett climbing out of the Sarlacc before having hi-tech bounty-hunting adventures with the third monster on the left from Jabba's palace.

Every time I come back to Faction Paradox, I tell myself that I'm going to make a fresh start and do it "properly", and every time I'm thwarted by the fact that the whole project was mired in geekery from the very start."

- Lawrence Miles

Following the return of Doctor Who to television in 2005, sales of Faction Paradox books declined as readers became "more and more focused on the new Doctor Who series", which did not "leave much room for the spin-off ranges." As a result, Erasing Sherlock was the final Faction Paradox novel released by Mad Norwegian Press, and while the series continued with Newtons Sleep at Random Static Ltd over a year later, "Novel #6" was never released.