#plume coteries

A Farewell to R.M.S.

This story expands significantly on the brief line in “A Farewell to Arms” about the history of the planet R.M.S.

The Bookkeepers didn’t used to be called Bookkeepers. This is because, as astute readers will note, Huxley had called them the “Plume Coteries”. Named, perhaps, after the majestic multicolored birds they used to ride!

The Great Houses arrived on the planet in a vast cathedral, one of the 91-forms which The Book of the War mentions serving as bulky embassies for the Great Houses. The description “vast cathedral” links back to my earliest piece of published fiction: the poem “A Vast Cathedral” in the fan anthology Shit Trips: Volume 1. (I am forever grateful to that anthology’s editor for giving me my start!) That poem never explicitly connected to the rest of the universe, so I used this Dossier vignette to tie up the loose thread.

Credit for “House Bluewood” goes to my friend Nilso, who offered a list of spectacularly creative Great House names inspired by great TV composers, like House Marigola. Of course, I summarily ignored all those options and picked his simple, nature-sounding “Bluewood” instead. Thanks again Nilso! I imagine House Bluewood to be a counterpart to the House of Redloom, perhaps with a connection to the Lune Forest?

The obtuse description of the Great House representative – a whirring silver creature which cocks its head and speaks in a buzzy voice about its generation unit – and the Bookkeeper’s description of it as a “House Military bitch” and instruction to “sit” – might seem extraneously crude. But I promise there’s a very good reason.

The “agreements” the Houses have made with other powers include the treaty Chris Cwej negotiated with the Daleks in Dead Romance, giving them time technology in exchange for their neutrality in the War. Surely nothing could go wrong there!

The Bookeepers’ field agent deficit is a problem that will be solved sometime soon, perhaps using whatever technology they’re trading for the planet. We hear more about the Houses’ treaties with other powers in the next vignette:

A Prelude to a Prelude

Long before I was invited to the Dossier, I wrote a little story called “A Prelude to Arms” which was published in the fan anthology Shit Trips: Volume 2.5; it’s also been reproduced on this blog. That drabble follows the two characters who provide the italicized commentary in “A Farewell to Arms”, and it ends just before they start watching the reconstruction of the body’s biodata.

As a prelude to that prelude, “A Prelude to a Prelude” takes place during the first four lines of “A Prelude to Arms”, told from the point of view of the she/her technician rather than the he/him.

Primer for the Spiral Politic (Post-War Edition) has never before appeared in a story proper, but it was excerpted on the “back cover” of all the Faction Paradox Protocols audios. Given its encyclopedia-entry-like format, I think it was an early version of the Book of the War concept.

The message-boards are a loving reference to the old Faction Paradox forums and rec.arts.drwho, which I’ve had much fun poring over through the years for insights into the Faction Paradox universe and series history. The Emperor is the Emperor of the Needle.

Originally, this vignette was an imaginary The Book of the War excerpt about the Peace, but the editor was afraid it might mislead readers, so I cut it up and added the context narrative. For posterity’s sake, here’s the full text of the original entry, with the missing part(s) in bold:

THE PEACE [All Sides: Events] The War in Heaven was defined by its lengthy entrenchment phase. Both sides were bunkered-down for decades, continually reinforcing their noospheres and meeting only in minor skirmishes. However, less well-known to the Needleborn are the many attempts to find an end to the War even during this time.          One of the first of these attempts took the form of direct negotiation with enemy representatives on Dronid. These talks came to an abrupt end when the Cataclysm began mere hours later, but they were responsible for paving the way for the Utterlost Accords, which first cemented the concept of “Hot Peace” in House Military ideology. This doctrine was reinforced a few years later by the Venue Accords, which were as high-potential as they were short. Some of the more inventive Remote suspected the Venue Accords to be yet another of the many Peace hoaxes orchestrated by the Faction during the first several decades of the War; of course, the truth has become more obvious in recent years.         There were also many attempts to find a path to the Peace without negotiation. [REDACTED (FOR NOW)] Another experiment, secretively initiated by the more traditional Houses in response to the perceived failures of House Military biodiversification projects, involved a dramatic expansion of the Nine Homeworlds project. All of the newly-created, specially-primed “lesser Homeworlds” were given their own enemies to fight in microscopic models of the greater War. Confined as they were in bottle universes and oxbow timelines, none of the resultant conflicts approached the scope or intensity of the War in Heaven, but they provided “homegrown” inspiration for strategies and technologies that could prove useful against the enemy. (One example, notable in hindsight, involved a race of mechanical invaders who gladly agreed to try their metaphorical hands against a few Homeworlds in exchange for the time technology that would give them a fair shake. The sole Homeworld to escape their assault did so through not military innovation but self-enfeeblement: by returning to organic models of childbirth, then enacting the ritual of the “entrenched last stand” of gallant victimhood, they cried out to the unknown future, “We are the ‘deserving-at-war’, rescue us! Won’t someone think of the children!” Their battle against the invaders ended in an uncomfortable détente.         Like all the others, this experiment ended in failure, discontinued when the number of lost Homeworlds became too distasteful to bear for the same traditional Houses that initially sponsored the project. No; the Peace, when it finally came, was achieved much differently…

[2023 edit: Aristide Twain helped me to fill in the redacted gap above, and the result was published as “The Peace: A Lost Primer” on the Faction Paradox website!]

According to The Book of the War, the “direct negotiation with enemy representatives on Dronid” was conducted by the diplomat whose corpse features prominently in Alien Bodies.

“Hot Peace”, like the Utterlost Accords, comes from Simon Bucher-Jones’ The Book of the Peace connecting material. The Venue Accords were featured in The Book of the War. One of the Faction’s many Peace hoaxes was described in “A Story of the Peace” from A Romance in Twelve Parts, although you can probably think of at least one more.

The House Military biodiversification projects, and the traditional Houses’ corresponding squeamishness, were mentioned in The Book of the War. I was first introduced to oxbow timelines by Weapons Grade Snake Oil, and a Homeworld in a bottle universe featured in Dead Romance, as did the treaty with a race of mechanical invaders; these Invaders were also mentioned in “A Star’s View of Caroline” from Burning with Optimism’s Flames (which I’ve written a little bit about). The “uncomfortable détente” framing came from a Tumblr post by @dajo42.

Simon Bucher-Jones very graciously allowed me to interpolate a sample from one of his blog posts, “Faction Paradox Stands”. Simon wrote it right after watching The Day of the Doctor, and it was attributed to a fictional “The Book of the Peace” long before any such anthology was conceived by Obverse. I thought it was only appropriate that some part of the post made it into the actual release, even if just in the Dossier!

A Shift in Focus

In my mind, the neurosurgeon whose actions punctuate Huxley’s thoughts is a partition of her brain operating one or two of her arms/claws. I thought about adding in that description as a “twist” at the end, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, and I was under a tight deadline :)

The gender of the Shift’s body was never specified in the original story, nor is it specified here. But it’s covered with white tattoos and it was present at a timeship skirmish. This references two prior Faction Paradox stories, both by Lawrence Miles: the comic “Political Animals”, where the Mayakai are shown to have white tattoos, and the audio A Labyrinth of Histories, where we meet Demetra Kine’s faceless and notoriously hard-to-kill posthuman “trackers” in the middle of a timeship battle.

I realized after sending off “A Farewell to Arms” that it wasn’t clear enough that the Shift’s body’s tattoos weren’t physically changing but just “shifting” in meaning through mind of the beholder. I made sure to spell that out here!

“Avus” is Latin for “Grandfather”, a name that was used by both the First Doctor and Grandfather Paradox. The original draft ended with a little line making it clear that the whole story was taken from The Infancy Gospel of Grandfather Paradox, which would have explained the slapdash King James Version imitation in the parts of the story where Avus is sober. This still would have left Avus’ identity ambiguous, since real-life Infancy Gospels are always named after their pseudonymous authors, not their subjects (eg The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is about Jesus’ infancy). But rather late in the game I decided it was still too on-the-nose, and the line was deleted. Simon Bucher-Jones later used the idea of the Infancy Gospel in “Pre-narrative Briefing O”.

The “city of cobweb and ivory” previously appeared (albeit in a less dilapidated form) in Chris Cwej’s vision of the pre-universe in Christmas on a Rational Planet. I chose this setting because it coincides with the first mention in Lawrence Miles’ writing of … well, you can probably guess.

I could have explained that the palaces had gates of horn and ivory, but the “mammoth doors” joke was too good to pass up.

Depending on what you think of Avus’ identity, the “transcendent lock-pick” might be either (1) a prototype sonic screwdriver or (2) a regular lock-pick which gains its transcendence from being held in the Grandfather’s shadow.

The painted warriors are the “men of stone” mentioned in the description of the city in Christmas on a Rational Planet. In this story, they’re the enemy’s angels for the War in Heaven.

Cultures that use “breeding-engines” have included the Great Houses, Faction Paradox, the Remote, and the Osirian Court. The fact that the engine sits in a cradle might go some way to re-mystify the crib in A Good Man Goes to War.

I've always loved pataphors, and before I ever dreamed of writing for Faction Paradox I always thought they'd be well-suited for the praxis scene-shifts mentioned in The Book of the War’s account of the Rivera Manuscript. The editor added in the formatting change in the first pataphor to make it a little clearer what was going on, what with the channel switching and all.

(A delightful upside of being a writer for a fandom like this one is seeing all the fan theories that pop up. For instance, Darth Bumbles on the Obverse Wiki suggests that “Cobweb and Ivory” might be an excerpt from the Saragossa Manuscript mentioned in The Book of the War. That’s certainly not what I intended, but it’s far more interesting than anything I’d thought of!)

I also had the idea that, in the world after This Town Will Never Let Us Go, the Faction Paradox mask would be replace the Guy Fawkes mask for Anonymous; it was a happy coincidence that Jay Eales used the same idea in “The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy”. Regardless of what you think of Avus’ identity, this is probably the first time he hears the name “Faction Paradox” or sees a skull mask.

In the original outline, Avus became a cat, an allusion to the one-armed feline of Jonathan Dennis’ story “Gramps” from A Romance in Twelve Parts.

After escaping Abigail’s house, Avus gets his first peek at Terra Primagenia. The faintness of his connection to the caldera is meant to signal that this planet is near, or even beyond, the frontier in time.

Next we visit a huddled campfire of ritual and bone. According to the completely-unreliable BehindTheName.com, “Aguta” is Inuit for “gatherer of the dead”. I just like the sound of it.

Aguta’s story is a retelling of the anchoring of the thread, with some fairly obvious naming parallels with the story we know from Time’s Crucible, and a connection to Father Abdullah’s theory about the Mal’akh from The Book of the War.

I believe the first public mention of the Plume Coteries was in this Tardis Wiki discussion (see also the words “New Earth” in Linemica's speech). They were further discussed in my short story “The Library: A Comprehensive History” in the fan anthology Shit Trips: Vol. 2. Keep an eye out for more mentions of the Plume Coteries in the future; ditto the “cactus-skinned child”.

Fun fact: Linemica is the first named character to actually appear whose name doesn’t start with “A”. There’s a pattern there.

“Cernunnos” is a name of the Horned God motif in ancient Celtic art. Of course, it looks nothing like a mammoth, so I’ve recast it as a “tusked god” and hoped no one notices. One day I’d love to explore its connections to Herne the Hunter.

A brief digression. When I was sent the pitch info document for The Book Of The Enemy, or, A Briefing For Fourth Wave Observers, there were three conditions, and I quote:

The enemy must (in whatever sense) originate on, or in, or via the agency of Earth.

The enemy must be sufficiently humanoid (or have humanoid agents who can), in mockery wear Great House Regalia.

The enemy are not the bloody Daleks or anything else we can’t get the rights to, for next to nothing.

George III’s woolly mammoth was first mentioned, almost parenthetically, in Lawrence Miles’ short story “Grass”. In the story, the mysterious Frenchwoman Lucia Cailloux kills a herd of mammoths in the Louisiana territory. (In Christmas on a Rational Planet, “caillou” is the word the French Shadow Directory uses for Time Lords.) The mammoth was subsequently mentioned in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and The Book of the War before debuting with a central role in the Faction Paradox comic, where it’s a relic in the 18th century in the same way that the Faction is a relic in the post-War universe.

The mammoth appeared in the first teaser images for the comic as well as on the the cover of the third issue; as the comic was cancelled after two issues, those two images of George III’s mammoth bookended the Faction Paradox comic and, with it, Faction Paradox’s last best shot to break out to a wider audience and rescue itself from its ostentatious obscurity.

These are all facts that anyone could tell you; I’m not going to provide any extra commentary. If I did, I might say that I’m very annoyed no one has ever returned to Daedalus’ war against the universe in The Blue Angel. Or that I’m a big fan of Robert Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth and its particular adaptation of … well, anyway. Back to the story.

“He wondered how, now free of the warrior, he could get back to the Homeworld.” A little nod to the arc of a certain character in Doctor Who.

This temple is the one Avus saw earlier at the end of the avenue. Since he’s out of his praxis-induced stupor, the prose returns to the faux-KJV style, complete with “thou hast”s and all. (I’m pretty sure there’s actually a mistake in the grammar of Cernunnos’ speech; I tried to have it corrected for the final manuscript, but the edit apparently didn’t make it in.)

Depending on what you think of Avus’ identity, “he lashed out like the shadow of a falling guillotine in the streets of a purgatorial city” might be a shadow weapon or simply a descriptive instance of regular old Great Houses psychic powers!

Avus’ final visions include an abbreviated tale of two cities: the “purgatorial city” with its guillotines is revolutionary Paris, and as is made clear, the “busy city” is London in 1774, on the cusp of the British Empire’s own 18th century revolutionary war.

The bestiary is straight out of the Faction Paradox comics. At the time, I expected this to be my one and only contribution to the series, so I really tried to throw it all in there! The presence of a girl named Lucita is a nod to one of the most inexplicable loose ends in the Faction Paradox audios. Still, I tried to leave it just vague enough to accommodate any future contradictions.

Regardless of what you think of Avus’ identity, the loomshed he stumbles out of is probably House Lungbarrow’s, the “elder” that greets him is probably Quences, and the “one Homeworld shall be brought down by [Avus’] will” is probably a reference to The Ancestor Cell.