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Faction Paradox #3
Faction Paradox: Warlords of Utopia
Rome never fell. Hitler won. Now they are at war. 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 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. This is the third original Faction Paradox novel.
192 pages, Paperback
First published November 12, 2004
2 people are currently reading
100 people want to read
About the author
Lance Parkin
84 books96 followersLance Parkin is an author who has written professional Doctor Who fiction since the 1990s. He is one of the few authors to write for both the 1963 and 2005 version of the programme — though much of his fiction has actually been based on the 1996 iteration. Indeed, he was notably the first author to write original prose for the Eighth Doctor in The Dying Days. He was also the author chosen to deliver the nominal 35th anniversary story, The Infinity Doctors, and the final volume in the Eighth Doctor Adventures range, The Gallifrey Chronicles. More recently, he has written for the Tenth Doctor in The Eyeless.
He is further notable for his work with Big Finish Productions, where he is arguably most known for writing the Sixth Doctor adventure, Davros.
Outside of Doctor Who, he has written things like Warlords of Utopia and (with Mark Jones) Dark Matter, a guide to the author Philip Pullman.
He is further notable for his work with Big Finish Productions, where he is arguably most known for writing the Sixth Doctor adventure, Davros.
Outside of Doctor Who, he has written things like Warlords of Utopia and (with Mark Jones) Dark Matter, a guide to the author Philip Pullman.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 12, 2017
Extraordinarily badly researched German, an entire book about Nazis with only a handful mentions of Jews, happy problem-free not-traumatic-whatsoever institutionalised paedophelia...
Yeah, this book has its Issues, and plot holes large enough to march several armies straight through, but it's still a fun read. The prose flows very well and the world-building is interesting. The Latin puns are super cheesy but they mostly work. And even though the endless Monty Python references get a bit extra, they still made me giggle.
I think aside from the plot holes, the biggest issue for me was all the sudden swerves in scope. One moment, the discovery of a single world is the main conflict — the next moment, worlds are invading each other in whatever capacity they like, before the narrative shifts back to single-world problems again and so on. Sometimes the narrative focuses on very personal, small-scale experiences, before suddenly announcing that years have passed and skipping straight over all the good bits. And Hitler himself (here called "Fuhrer" instead of "Führer" for no discernable reason) appears only in a select few scenes and never feels like a true threat.
Angela, the narrator's wife / ultimate Heinlein fantasy, is one of the most gratuitous wish-fulfillment characters I've ever seen in fiction. I would pay good money to read a version of the story from her point of view, just to understand the ridiculous choices she makes along the way. One iteration of her marries narrator Marcus when she's still a child and is happy to be his stay-at-home wife for years and years. The other version meets him in an alternate world when she's 22 years old and working as a 1940's nurse, at which point she takes him home on their first date, lets him orgasm inside her, learns that he fucked her 12-year-old self in another world, gets mildly annoyed at the idea, never mentions this to him in any capacity, decides to spend her life with him like a day later, and never utters even so much as a word about the friends and family she left behind in war-torn London. For most of the plot she comes across as a walking prop, and even though she builds up her own life in the second half, her achievements are little more than an afterthought.
It's the kind of book in which the main character lives in a clockpunk world but doesn't know what a clock is. In which the writer can't spell "Friedrich" and hasn't researched even the 101 basics of German. In which a Faction Paradox Cousin is called "Cousin Cousin" in Latin. It rides comfortably on its high concepts and beautiful narration style, and has some genuinely awesome bits, but it could have been so much more.
Yeah, this book has its Issues, and plot holes large enough to march several armies straight through, but it's still a fun read. The prose flows very well and the world-building is interesting. The Latin puns are super cheesy but they mostly work. And even though the endless Monty Python references get a bit extra, they still made me giggle.
I think aside from the plot holes, the biggest issue for me was all the sudden swerves in scope. One moment, the discovery of a single world is the main conflict — the next moment, worlds are invading each other in whatever capacity they like, before the narrative shifts back to single-world problems again and so on. Sometimes the narrative focuses on very personal, small-scale experiences, before suddenly announcing that years have passed and skipping straight over all the good bits. And Hitler himself (here called "Fuhrer" instead of "Führer" for no discernable reason) appears only in a select few scenes and never feels like a true threat.
Angela, the narrator's wife / ultimate Heinlein fantasy, is one of the most gratuitous wish-fulfillment characters I've ever seen in fiction. I would pay good money to read a version of the story from her point of view, just to understand the ridiculous choices she makes along the way. One iteration of her marries narrator Marcus when she's still a child and is happy to be his stay-at-home wife for years and years. The other version meets him in an alternate world when she's 22 years old and working as a 1940's nurse, at which point she takes him home on their first date, lets him orgasm inside her, learns that he fucked her 12-year-old self in another world, gets mildly annoyed at the idea, never mentions this to him in any capacity, decides to spend her life with him like a day later, and never utters even so much as a word about the friends and family she left behind in war-torn London. For most of the plot she comes across as a walking prop, and even though she builds up her own life in the second half, her achievements are little more than an afterthought.
It's the kind of book in which the main character lives in a clockpunk world but doesn't know what a clock is. In which the writer can't spell "Friedrich" and hasn't researched even the 101 basics of German. In which a Faction Paradox Cousin is called "Cousin Cousin" in Latin. It rides comfortably on its high concepts and beautiful narration style, and has some genuinely awesome bits, but it could have been so much more.
December 25, 2023
Absolutely fascinating concept, and a fun, intriguing novel with a fantastically unreliable narrator.
Marcus Americanius Scriptor: just your average upper class, rich Roman dude, living his life, becoming a historian and a researcher, gets married to his wife in the Roman tradition......... until one day he discovers something that completely breaks down his perception of reality.
This novel is staged as a kind of retrospective, personal journal by the main character, and that involves seeing the world entirely from his extremely biased perspective as an ancient Roman Upperclass Cis Male, so that when those not well-read on Roman culture (aka me, reading this book, and watching a bunch of documentaries on life in rome afterwards and going 'oooooooooh' ) get to certain parts of the novel, it comes as a complete shock and makes you go back to read the relevant passages and realize how obvious it was.
Honestly, this book really is not a complete reading experience without the bonus Prologue, now only available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/200408042...
If there's one thing scifi fans know, it's that Time Travel shows always avoid giving any kind of answer to the question of "if they can travel in time and change the past for the better, why don't they go back and prevent these atrocities in human history?"
Well, Warlords of Utopia does NOT dodge that question.
Nor do they lock Hitler in a closet as a cheap gag and completely ignore the backdrop of having an episode set in Nazi Germany except for cheap shock value(*cough cough Steven Moffat's "let's kill hitler" episode of Doctor Who cough cough*) and the answer, wholeheartedly, is "Oh, we are definitely going back and killing Hitler. In fact, we're going to do it *multiple times*."
He even is singled out in the City of the Saved (see the Prologue) , and also answering the question of "if there is an afterlife shared by all of humanity, what happens to one of the worst men in human history?"
A fun, interesting read, an interesting narrative character who is incredibly flawed made even more so by the fact he cannot see it, and invites dozens of questions and speculations about *what on earth the Great Houses are doing*
Marcus Americanius Scriptor: just your average upper class, rich Roman dude, living his life, becoming a historian and a researcher, gets married to his wife in the Roman tradition......... until one day he discovers something that completely breaks down his perception of reality.
This novel is staged as a kind of retrospective, personal journal by the main character, and that involves seeing the world entirely from his extremely biased perspective as an ancient Roman Upperclass Cis Male, so that when those not well-read on Roman culture (aka me, reading this book, and watching a bunch of documentaries on life in rome afterwards and going 'oooooooooh' ) get to certain parts of the novel, it comes as a complete shock and makes you go back to read the relevant passages and realize how obvious it was.
Honestly, this book really is not a complete reading experience without the bonus Prologue, now only available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/200408042...
If there's one thing scifi fans know, it's that Time Travel shows always avoid giving any kind of answer to the question of "if they can travel in time and change the past for the better, why don't they go back and prevent these atrocities in human history?"
Well, Warlords of Utopia does NOT dodge that question.
Nor do they lock Hitler in a closet as a cheap gag and completely ignore the backdrop of having an episode set in Nazi Germany except for cheap shock value(*cough cough Steven Moffat's "let's kill hitler" episode of Doctor Who cough cough*) and the answer, wholeheartedly, is "Oh, we are definitely going back and killing Hitler. In fact, we're going to do it *multiple times*."
He even is singled out in the City of the Saved (see the Prologue) , and also answering the question of "if there is an afterlife shared by all of humanity, what happens to one of the worst men in human history?"
A fun, interesting read, an interesting narrative character who is incredibly flawed made even more so by the fact he cannot see it, and invites dozens of questions and speculations about *what on earth the Great Houses are doing*
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 1, 2024
no character development, no emotional hook - the book relies on the concept alone to get all the way through. and luckily the concept is good enough for it to kinda work. not having any other substance is a wasted chance at being a best of all time, but i still really liked it and it was worth a read during my fever-fueled covid brainfog
June 8, 2025
These books are all SUCH difficult reads. This one was the best of the three, but it felt like only a Faction -adjacent side story.
March 18, 2014
Third-ish of the Faction Paradox novels. This one is by Lance Parkin, who has established credit in the more-canonical Doctor Who line (New Adventures, the BBC line, and Big Finish scripts). So I had some hopes for it.
The good news is, it works better than _...City of the Saved_. It moves along pretty well and it doesn't rely on you being a Who fan. The bad news is, it's more or less a pulp SF novel of the Golden Age: lots of scenery, lots of events, no characters to speak of.
Marcus Americanius Scriptor is born into an alternate Roman Empire, two millennia young and still going strong. The entire Earth is Roman, peaceful, and prosperous (though the historically Roman form of slavery continues). Marcus is settling down to a life as a literary dilettante when he comes across an anomaly: a bracelet dropped by an old man who materialized in the Forum one fine day. Marcus grabs the man as he attempts to dematerialize again, and... zap. Welcome to a *different* alternate Roman Empire.
We follow our protagonist (viewpoint person, anyhow) as he starts setting up a timeline-spanning meta-Empire of Rome -- on behalf of his own world, which is of course the *best* Rome. This goes great, until he runs into a timeline-spanning meta-Third-Reich. And then there's some trouble.
As a high concept, this is terrific stuff. As a novel, it's not much of one. Lots of events, as I said, but Marcus might as well be a faceless passive voice. The closest he gets to coming alive is in his (first) experience of London's fall, dodging the Blitz, where he meets a doppelganger of his Celtic wife. This storyline is rapidly handwaved away in an unconvincing three-way, and Marcus goes back to didactically narrating war history. He loves Rome, and that's about all there is to him. He's got some historically appropriate blind spots (see slavery) but the story doesn't do anything with them.
The Nazis consolidate with the aid of another timeline traveller; a Roman homeworld is invaded; the Romans consolidate back with the aid of *yet another* timeline traveller; they kick some Nazi ass. Time-travelling gods show up and Marcus manages to make them hesitate, if not blink. That's pretty much it. Marcus writes his memoir. The end.
We get rather a lot of clever references. We get the requisite hints of canon and Paradox lore. (The original traveller is described as the eighth of thirteen fugitives. And then there's the War, unseen but far vaster than the petty struggle between thousands of Roman timelines and thousands of Nazi ones.) It's fun, but it can't make the book. The author goes big, but he doesn't manage to make it weigh much.
The good news is, it works better than _...City of the Saved_. It moves along pretty well and it doesn't rely on you being a Who fan. The bad news is, it's more or less a pulp SF novel of the Golden Age: lots of scenery, lots of events, no characters to speak of.
Marcus Americanius Scriptor is born into an alternate Roman Empire, two millennia young and still going strong. The entire Earth is Roman, peaceful, and prosperous (though the historically Roman form of slavery continues). Marcus is settling down to a life as a literary dilettante when he comes across an anomaly: a bracelet dropped by an old man who materialized in the Forum one fine day. Marcus grabs the man as he attempts to dematerialize again, and... zap. Welcome to a *different* alternate Roman Empire.
We follow our protagonist (viewpoint person, anyhow) as he starts setting up a timeline-spanning meta-Empire of Rome -- on behalf of his own world, which is of course the *best* Rome. This goes great, until he runs into a timeline-spanning meta-Third-Reich. And then there's some trouble.
As a high concept, this is terrific stuff. As a novel, it's not much of one. Lots of events, as I said, but Marcus might as well be a faceless passive voice. The closest he gets to coming alive is in his (first) experience of London's fall, dodging the Blitz, where he meets a doppelganger of his Celtic wife. This storyline is rapidly handwaved away in an unconvincing three-way, and Marcus goes back to didactically narrating war history. He loves Rome, and that's about all there is to him. He's got some historically appropriate blind spots (see slavery) but the story doesn't do anything with them.
The Nazis consolidate with the aid of another timeline traveller; a Roman homeworld is invaded; the Romans consolidate back with the aid of *yet another* timeline traveller; they kick some Nazi ass. Time-travelling gods show up and Marcus manages to make them hesitate, if not blink. That's pretty much it. Marcus writes his memoir. The end.
We get rather a lot of clever references. We get the requisite hints of canon and Paradox lore. (The original traveller is described as the eighth of thirteen fugitives. And then there's the War, unseen but far vaster than the petty struggle between thousands of Roman timelines and thousands of Nazi ones.) It's fun, but it can't make the book. The author goes big, but he doesn't manage to make it weigh much.
April 12, 2011
An alliance of alternate Roman worlds battle an alliance of Nazi worlds – how cool is that?
I really wanted to like this book.
It begins well enough, with Marcus Americanius Scriptor's first-person account of life on "Roma I", a world where everything has happened in the most optimal way for the Romans; they now control the entire world and have done so for centuries. This is well written and well conceived, with plenty of details - you really get a feel for this world, alien and familiar at the same time.
However…
Once the narrator begins finding first alternate Romes, then a vast array of Nazi worlds, the story becomes more and more unlikely. I'm not talking about the existence of alternate worlds here; that is a given. No, I'm talking about cute stuff and improbable occurences – there is no conflict at all between any of the Romes and they all accept Roma I as "first among equals" without as much as a little teeny-weeny intrigue; the existence of counterparts to people from our timeline 1500 years after the divergence point, just with Roman names; a hero who almost immediately on his first visit to a Nazi world meets an exact counterpart of his wife. And naturally he proceeds to bring her to his home world. And naturally both wives get along splendidly, to the extent that three days (or nights) later they begin a ménage-à-trois.
Battle scenes where Romans with swords keep defeating Nazis armed with guns. Because the sword is such a superior weapon. Really!
Lots of stuff like that.
Too bad.
I really wanted to like this book.
It begins well enough, with Marcus Americanius Scriptor's first-person account of life on "Roma I", a world where everything has happened in the most optimal way for the Romans; they now control the entire world and have done so for centuries. This is well written and well conceived, with plenty of details - you really get a feel for this world, alien and familiar at the same time.
However…
Once the narrator begins finding first alternate Romes, then a vast array of Nazi worlds, the story becomes more and more unlikely. I'm not talking about the existence of alternate worlds here; that is a given. No, I'm talking about cute stuff and improbable occurences – there is no conflict at all between any of the Romes and they all accept Roma I as "first among equals" without as much as a little teeny-weeny intrigue; the existence of counterparts to people from our timeline 1500 years after the divergence point, just with Roman names; a hero who almost immediately on his first visit to a Nazi world meets an exact counterpart of his wife. And naturally he proceeds to bring her to his home world. And naturally both wives get along splendidly, to the extent that three days (or nights) later they begin a ménage-à-trois.
Battle scenes where Romans with swords keep defeating Nazis armed with guns. Because the sword is such a superior weapon. Really!
Lots of stuff like that.
Too bad.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 21, 2011
Simply outstanding. Parkin takes a seemingly over the top concept and crafts a character driven first person narrative that makes the idea of a pan-dimensional Roman Empire fighting a pan-dimensional Nazi regime at turns epic, intriguing, and even sensible.
This story is set in a broader universe, elements of which are indirectly important to the plot of the novel; that noted, there is no need to have read any other books in the series to enjoy this one. Highest recommendation.
This story is set in a broader universe, elements of which are indirectly important to the plot of the novel; that noted, there is no need to have read any other books in the series to enjoy this one. Highest recommendation.
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July 28, 2011Good overall, with an interesting premise and fascinating parallel worlds. However, it was too rushed with much of the action glossed over leaving a lot of the tension diminished. The worlds in which the Nazis triumphed were utterly depressing.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews