I’m really excited to be able to say I’m going to be part of a new Faction Paradox collection next year! It’s a series of stories from Obverse Books about a strange prison built out of roads and nightmares, where the Faction sends their initiates when they go very bad indeed.
It is quite hard to explain to the uninitiated – in both senses of the word – what Faction Paradox is, exactly. They are a group of time-travelling cultists who like to offend the idea that history should match up in a neat and tidy way, and maybe also the idea that fiction is neatly separate from fact. They are bystanders in an enormous war between intelligences a human mind can’t understand and something we’d understand even less, and exist in a universe where history is always changing, and usually weaponised.
One of the hallmarks of the Faction are their strange bone masks, always made out of the skull of a creature that never existed. So to celebrate getting to put a story of them into existence I hastily designed my own: this skull of a book full of stories that never were. In its life, the book skull was always telling tales that have never existed. But of course it never existed either, so maybe it didn’t. And maybe it did. The Faction is built on a big web of contradictions. All we have to go on are these stories that endure like bones.
Robert Shepherd: Writer 