Серия книг «Faction Paradox» — 12 книг

The Year of the Metal Rat has brought with it greed and self-preservation. The Everlasting Empire is dying, eaten up from within, and the young upstarts Britain and Russia are circling like carrion-birds, for crows of every nation are equally black. The peasant-sect of the Righteous Harmonious Fists attacks all foreign devils. In the capital, the ancient heart of the Empire, the Europeans are besieged by the Dragon Empress’ army and the blood of a thousand Christian converts runs in the gutters.

When there is War in Heaven, there is War in the Land. A dagger can be concealed in a smile and this House of Paradox smiles often. Its servant here carries grief like dead petals in her hands and wakes the ancient spirits.

Their anger makes the sky weep blood, and we shall all pay dearly for her trespass.

The Year of the Metal Rat has brought with it greed and self-preservation. The Everlasting Empire is dying, eaten up from within, and the young upstarts Britain and Russia are…

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...

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…

From up here you can see it all, hear it all, taste most of it and feel the rest when the electric lights and the satellite signals prickle against your skin. The town, from midnight to six, marked out in headlights and the flash-fire of a culture in War-time. Séance-messages written in the patterns of the road signs, and ghost-transmissions scrambled into the background noise of the traffic. Animal scent-signals from the fried food stands. All describing something, buried under the tarmac and the street-geometry.

Down there, a girl in a fake-bone mask is working on a ritual to bring it to the surface. A popular performing artiste with a navel stud and serious identity problems is finding herself stalked — literally — by her own image. An ambulance crewman is about to find his own way of getting involved in the War.

And bringing them all together, in one neat little urban mythology, there's Faction Paradox - part cult, part subculture, part pop phenomenon, and part criminal syndicate, either watching-without-being-seen or simply not existing at all (at least until someone invents it). Assuming they're not wholly imaginary, the archons of the Faction seem like the only ones who know what this town really is - what every town really is — and what's bound to happen when it wakes up.

From up here you can see it all, hear it all, taste most of it and feel the rest when the electric lights and the satellite signals prickle against your skin. The town, from…

For Humanity, the War is over...

We all remember Resurrection Day. Even now, three centuries later, we cannot forget that awakening: our bewilderment, our terror and our joy. Each of us had experienced death, imagining ourselves bound for oblivion, Heaven or Nirvana, according to taste. Instead, we found, each member of the many human species - from tool-wielding australopithecines to posthuman philosopher-gods - had been harvested, gathered here by the Founders’ unfathomable technologies.

Reborn in our countless immortal bodies, we were given the freedom of the City of the Saved. A single conurbation as broad as a spiral galaxy, she has been our sanctuary from the ravages of the War. That monstrous conflict between inhuman cultures cannot touch us here: we live our afterlives beyond the end of time, in perfect safety.

We may be certain, therefore, that these rumours of a murder (the brutal stabbing of a City Councillor, no less!) are nothing more than lurid fabrications. The supposition that the murder weapon is missing, or that it could have been - as hysterical conjecture has claimed - a "potent weapon," capable of injuring a Citizen within the haven of the City, is equally absurd. The idea that a guerrilla war has already begun in one of our less harmonious enclaves need not be dignified with refutation.

Please go about your business, Citizens, as normal. We are perfectly safe, here in the City. Humanity has never been safer.

Of the City of the Saved... is not a novel of violence and political intrigue, set against the backdrop of humanity’s last resting-place. There is no evidence that it is the second in the series of original Faction Paradox novels.

For Humanity, the War is over...

We all remember Resurrection Day. Even now, three centuries later, we cannot forget that awakening: our bewilderment, our terror and our joy.…

Marcus Americanius Scriptor’s memoirs of the war between every parallel universe where Rome never fell and every parallel universe where Hitler won the Second World War have long been regarded as the definitive account of that turbulent time.

Scriptor’s life story, from his early life among the housesteads of an obscure province to his role in the ultimate confrontation with Nazism, was intimately connected with the major political and social developments of his time. His highly personal record of events was praised even in his own lifetime for its honesty and intimacy, as well as for capturing the scale of a war that consumed thousands of worlds.

This exciting new translation of a classic work of military history is accessible to new readers and existing students of the War alike.

Marcus Americanius Scriptor’s memoirs of the war between every parallel universe where Rome never fell and every parallel universe where Hitler won the Second World War have long…

Seeking: Maid of all Work. Master of Arts required.

She thought she was there to observe and document the methods of the twenty-five-year-old Sherlock Holmes before he gained notoriety--

'Rooftop Robber Strikes Again!'

A barely noticed automaton; quiet, efficient, and unobtrusive--

'The partially clad body of a young girl was found Sunday morning at the London Dock.'

A remarkable opportunity for research in the field--

'Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera, Perola, premieres at the Savoy Theatre.'

Bestowed upon her by a benefactor who has sold his soul--

'American Oil Tycoon, Henry Barstow, has begun annulment proceedings on behalf of his daughter Lady Henrietta Holbrook. Lord Merrill Holbrook's whereabouts still unknown.'

For a technology that only works if the devil he sold it to is sufficiently entertained.

'Dr Grimsley Roylott of Stoke Moran arrested in connection with suspicious deaths of his stepdaughters, Julia and Helen Stoner.'

The life of Sherlock Holmes is being written by another hand--

'Woman held captive for forty days, rescued. White slave gang suspected.'

And maid must become master if she wants to survive--

'Krakatoa explodes with a force of 1,300 megatons. Thousands perish.'

Seeking: Maid of all Work. Master of Arts required.

She thought she was there to observe and document the methods of the twenty-five-year-old Sherlock Holmes before he gained…

Don't tell her what it was like. Don't tell her how you had to dig your way out through heavy layers of clay to reach the fresh air, because that would distress her. Don't tell her about the box, because that would confuse her.

And don't tell her about the light, because that was sacred.

Lately cannonballs have flown their arcs, leaving the crystal sky unbroken, while on Earth their traces are all too visible. Yet though Heaven has never seemed so far away, the divine is terribly closer. War on Earth presages War in Heaven; the struggle between the holy houses of Christ and their eternal Adversary has erupted among the living.

These are the signs of the last days: in 1651, a dead angel is found in a tree in Lincolnshire and a nymph rises from the waters of Kent; in 1642, a dying man is miraculously healed in the grave; in 1665, uncanny skull-masked doctors descend upon a plague house; in 1683, the French secret service unveil mirrors that show the futures; in 1671, Aphra Behn - she-spy and poetesse - infiltrates a gathering of alchemists; in 1649, the English kill their king, and history begins...

Don't tell her what it was like. Don't tell her how you had to dig your way out through heavy layers of clay to reach the fresh air, because that would distress her. Don't tell…

'What's that? Did I hear you ask what romance has to do with anything, little Cousin? You do surprise me. Why Romance is Story itself, nothing less than that. Romance is the tale with which a cunning man winkles out a widow's secrets and an honest one breaks his beloved's heart. Romance locks us away and sets us free, brings us great pleasure and also great pain, is the thread which binds all other stories together. Dear me, little Cousin, I expected better of you...'

— Godfather Valentine, Dresden, 1928

'What's that? Did I hear you ask what romance has to do with anything, little Cousin? You do surprise me. Why Romance is Story itself, nothing less than that. Romance is the tale…

The second volume of Faction Paradox short stories, edited by British Fantasy Society Award nominee Jay Eales.

You will make war with the beast of the city, and the people will be grateful, and in this way will your fame be fortified.

Every fifty-two years, the God Xiuhtecuhtli – incarnate for the purpose as a young Mexica male – would give himself in sacrifice in order that the universe should be renewed and the passage of time would continue as it had done before. Those born to other cultures and other eras might be forgiven for their failure to appreciate this great and selfless act.

It was therefore strange that such a profound understanding should arise in one so far removed from the heart of this world, both veteran and victim of the terrible, endless war in heaven, a man the Mexica knew briefly as Coahualxiu bearing a death wish the size of creation…

You will make war with the beast of the city, and the people will be grateful, and in this way will your fame be fortified.

Every fifty-two years, the God Xiuhtecuhtli –…

“The Tribunal Decision in the matter of the Great Houses vs. Scarratt is as follows.

That the orders lawfully issued to the said Scarratt were deliberately ignored, as recorded in Scarratt’s own thoughts as recorded through the media first of the recording circuits of his timeship and then of the biodata retrieved from exhibit A.”

“The Tribunal Decision in the matter of the Great Houses vs. Scarratt is as follows.

That the orders lawfully issued to the said Scarratt were deliberately ignored, as recorded…

'All right, let's start with the basics. The world ended on the twelfth of October, Nineteen Seventy...' I don't know why I'm writing this. It's not like anybody's going to read it. At least, nobody who cares about the fact that I'm a desparate, dying, 23-year-old human being who's just had the whole of history taken away from her. To whoever's out there, to whatever's left, this is the way things were, just before the end. This is the story about the last days of London, about murder and love and waking up in the ruins, about all the people buried in the wreckage... I'm lying, obviously. This is my story. This is what I was doing, when October the twelfth came. Because, let's face it, I'm the only one who really matters. I'm the only one who got out alive.

'All right, let's start with the basics. The world ended on the twelfth of October, Nineteen Seventy...' I don't know why I'm writing this. It's not like anybody's going to read…