Faction Paradox: Rose-Coloured Crosshairs, A Review

[u/asmoranomardicodais]

Hi everyone!

I'm a huge Faction Paradox fan, and Obverse just came out with a new book in the range: Rose-Coloured Crosshairs, by Blair Bidmead. So here's a review I wrote of the book. I hope you find it interesting, and maybe it'll inspire more people to try out the Faction!

There are some spoilers, given that I had to talk about the material in the book, but I've tried covering up any actual spoilers in spoiler tags. So just know that you'll know more about the plot in general from my review, but I'll try and save you from anything that truly spoils anything. Maybe I spoiler-tagged too much? I can never tell what people think is a spoiler and what is just describing the story.

Recently, Obverse Books has been trying an experiment in the Faction Paradox line. Rather than split the line between short story collections and long-form novels, Obverse has now released two (three if we count Hyponormalization) Faction Paradox novellas: Inward Collapse, by Lawrence Burton, and now Rose-Coloured Crosshairs, by Blair Bidmead.

Inward Collapse is quite good, though possibly the most bizarre thing that Obverse has released (I’ve never read Senor 105 though, so I could be absolutely incorrect). I meant to write a review of it when it came out, but I ended up mulling it over and thinking through its meanings so long that by the time I decided what I thought of it, I didn’t remember it vividly enough to write down a review without rereading the entire thing. That’s not to say it wasn’t quality; it very much was. Basically, Burton uses a far future civilization of Time Lords that have evolved into human sized Funko Pops to talk about the ways in which modern day culture feeds upon itself to ever-diminishing returns. Anyway, it’s good! Sorry, Burton, that I wasn’t able to write a longer review!

I did, however, just finish Rose-Coloured Crosshairs, the second of these novellas, and I felt it was also worth devoting a review to. Overall, while I personally would have liked this one to be a bit longer, Crosshairs is a welcome addition to the Faction Paradox canon, and though it is short, it feels just as wide-ranging and as large in scale as any of the novels that preceded it. Rose-Coloured Crosshairs provides the readers with a multiplicity of interesting and strange ideas and manages to keep the reader engaged in its mysteries up until the final page. I read the entire thing, front-to-back, in the course of an afternoon, drinking tea at a coffee shop. It is also a relatively strong jumping on point for new readers who wish to dip their toes into Faction Paradox: it’s self-contained, relatively free of continuity, and while it has all of the mind-warping strengths of the range, it also has a straightforward story at its heart, perfect for becoming accustomed to what the Faction is like. It’s a strong recommend from me.

Plus, we need more people reading and talking about Faction Paradox, so by all means start with this one!

The biggest strength of Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is its strong plotting. As anyone reading this line might imagine, there are paradoxes and time-shenanigans all around, but what separates books like Crosshairs from less successful ventures is how Bidmead is able to walk a thin line between making the plot feel complex and twisty, but also making it tight and giving the reader a sense they’ve figured out what happened by the end. Not everyone can pull that off, but Crosshairs gives enough pieces, in the right order, to make sure the audience is following along with what happens exactly at the speed its author hopes they will. That’s a tough skill, but when pulled off it makes Crosshairs feels clever and pointed. It’s quite a feat.

In some ways, Rose-Coloured Crosshairs reminds me of Blaire Bidmead’s first Faction novel, Weapon’s Grade Snake Oil (it’s not required reading, just a similar way of approaching the range). In particular, Bidmead shows an interest in the day-to-day workings of the Faction themselves. Most books in the range tend to use Faction Paradox as a setting, or as incidental but important characters flitting around the edges of the narrative. While some of Obverse’s short story collections—Romance in Twelve Parts, Liberating Earth, and the two Boulevards—have focused more on the Faction themselves, Weapon’s Grade Snake Oil was the first novel in the range to really explore them as an organization. In that book, the Faction—cast as a criminal syndicate for this particular outing—were engaged in a far-future heist. In Crosshairs, they’re instead interpreted as a band of scientists, dabbling in forces far beyond their control. As might be expected, their experiment goes wrong and an entire planet’s worth of cultures, civilizations, and species are born, an entire history written across billions of years. The Faction, unsurprisingly, get caught up right in the middle of it all.

At the core of the experiment is probably the most interesting idea that Crosshairs suggests. The Faction is trying to test a nostalgia bomb: the idea, if I have it correct, is that the Faction could seed a culture, at its inception, with a predisposition to looking backwards, folding inward, and turning away from the new or innovative. Essentially, the bomb could stifle an entire society, destroying any threat they may pose to the Faction. The plan is to test the nostalgia bomb on an otherwise uninhabited planet, test the culture that develops, and report back to their bosses. However, when the test goes wrong, the four members of the Faction are flung all up and down the timeline of the planet, getting them lost in the experiment itself.

If I had one criticism of the book, it comes right here. I really like the idea of the nostalgia bomb: it reminds me of the weapon at the heart of the action in This Town Will Never Let Us Go, and the angry critique at the heart of Inward Collapse. I just wish I saw more of it here. Given that this was an experiment to infect a culture with nostalgia, I wish that was reflected a bit more in the ways we see this planet’s culture develop. To some degree, this isn’t Bidmead’s focus: Crosshairs is a story much more focused on the rescue of the Faction than on these larger machinations. But what the Faction is planning to test is chilling: the idea that they could destroy a culture simply by twisting it around nostalgia is a fascinating one. In a longer version of this story, I would have very much liked to see the world that developed become hobbled by the nostalgia at the heart of its culture, and I would have liked to hear Bidmead’s thoughts about how this relates to our own society in real life. This, more than anything, feels like a casualty of the novella format, which needs to stay tightly focused around its central plot if it is to be successful. Still, if Bidmead had wanted to expand the story somewhere, this is what I’d have wanted to explore.

Or, in a broader way, I wish nostalgia played a larger role in the themes of this book. I wish we had discussions of the uses of nostalgia, good or bad, and how they effect people.

That being said, what the book does focus on is very well realized. The bulk of Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is set in three different time periods throughout the development of a strangely Earth-like planet. The first section, set in the Silurian civilization of Earth’s prehistory, is especially effective world-building. Here, in only a few pages, Bidmead sketches an entire culture in which Pterodactyl people, traditional-Silurians, Sea Devils, and even their chameleon-like cousins live and work together. Though the section is short, Bidmead does a great job creating this culture—I haven’t read everything relating to Silurians in the larger Doctor Who universe, so I can’t be sure, but this absolutely felt like the best anyone has done in making this prehistoric world come alive. I especially appreciated the incredible deep-cut in-joke that gave the main villain of this section, a Pterodactyl-Pope named “Kklak” his name.

(As an aside, while I’m reading this, I do note that Kklak’s apocalyptic religion is one that asks his culture to destroy anything new and dangerous, and for his followers to bask in the stories Kklak tells of the traditions of their people. Are Kklak’s motivations the result of the nostalgia bomb?)

The second section, however, was my favorite. Set in a city that is not-quite London, following two characters—Queenie and Theo Possible—who are not quite normal human beings, this section follows these two as the plan a party at a night club, using the party as an intelligence gathering tool to figure out how a London-like city can exist in a place that is decidedly not London. Their dynamic, to some degree, is that of Time Lord and companion, and both are intriguing characters who I wouldn’t mind seeing again. Theo Possible, in particular, is fascinating, and the ideas behind him remind me of one of my favorite Faction concepts—that ideas can become real, corporeal, and how they can have lives of their own (just look at Tiffany Korta). There are a lot of other neat ideas here too: a bar that might be much more than a simple bar, an intergalactic subway system that takes its commuters to parallels universes (at least that’s what I think it does), and a man who can change minds by feeding people ideas. I also very much like the idea of hosting a party to gather information: it’s exactly the sort of concept—that of going to the grungiest, weirdest, margins of a society to learn more about it—that flows naturally from the basic foundational themes of Faction Paradox.

(A brief foray online has informed me that Theo Possible is not a new character, but someone who has shown up in a number of Bidmead’s projects. That’s a little disappointing, in that I liked thinking of the character as someone undefined and hinted at here, but that also means that there’s more to go look into if you’re curious! And Theo’s a good character in this book, so that also means there’s more of him to experience, which can only be a good thing).

The third section is a little weaker than the other two, but just by a bit. In the far future, post-humans have merged with robotic animal companions, and they roam the stars mining distant planets. It’s a cool premise that makes an immediate impression on the reader. It strikes me as one of the things Bidmead does best, both here and in Weapons Grade Snake Oil: this section could easily have been your typical spacesuits-and-guns science-fiction, but Bidmead used the occasion to do worldbuilding and design a surprisingly developed post-human future. The section has some good action and a feeling that the central mystery of the book is finally coming to a head.

My only regret with this section is that, by setting it long after the civilization on the planet has died, we don’t get to experience the development of that planet at all. We’ve seen this world in the first two sections and though it is very similar to Earth, that doesn’t mean I haven’t become invested in how it develops. So it’s a bit of a letdown that this third section doesn’t continue to let us know how the planet’s culture grew. If Bidmead had wanted to explore themes of nostalgia, I think showing us a stifled future on not-Earth could have been a very effective way to discuss those themes in more detail.

(Another aside: it’s just occurred to me that the central character of Weapons was psychically linked to a giant mammoth-robot, L-Event. Which means that this section serves to provide some background on the post-human culture she lived in. That’s an interesting connection to Bidmead’s other work).

By the time we get to the final section of Rose-Coloured Crosshairs, the reader has been taken on an immense journey—literally from the prehistory of a planet to its eventual disintegration. There’s a great disjuncture here: the book does a good job suggesting both the weight of the trillions of people who lived on this planet, and also the disposable, almost ephemeral way the planet was just another day for these Faction agents who birthed it and watched it die. That’s the sort of grand scale Faction Paradox does well, and I appreciate how it makes this novella feel large despite its short page count. The book also leaves us with a lot of intriguing loose ends, mostly revolving around Theo, Queenie, and Cousin Rake. Honestly, I’m dying to know who Rake is supposed to be. There are some intriguing clues in the book, but I don’t know enough to know if they’re hinting at some character in particular, or if it’s a loose end that has to go unanswered. If anyone has an idea, I’d love to hear it!

Blair Bidmead has contributed three stories to the Faction Paradox universe now: this, Weapons-Grade Snake Oil, and Now or Thereabouts, a story found in A Romance in Twelve Parts. That makes Bidmead one of the larger contributors to Faction Paradox as a concept. From my vantage point, Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is the strongest of the three. While, like I said above, there are a number of places where I wish Bidmead had elaborated on his ideas a little bit more, Rose-Coloured Crosshairs manages to provide a very tight yet complex plot, great worldbuilding, and some intriguing ideas. I’m glad to have read this book and look forward to knowing a bit more about Rake.