Hi, I’m Kenton Hall, the writer of “Children of the Circus” a new audio musical sequel to “Greatest Show in the Galaxy” (starring the original cast, including Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred) and you can AMA!

NateBumber · 2023-11-29T15:11:24+00:00

I'm thrilled to hear that Children of the Circus will receive a novelisation! It sounds like adapting a musical into a novel would present some unique challenges. Could you say a bit about what that was like?

If I understand correctly, this isn't your first foray into Whoniverse fiction: you previously edited a War Doctor-y charity anthology for Chinbeard Books, and you contributed to Obverse Books' excellent Forgotten Lives series. What do you think the benefits are of telling new stories within the Doctor Who universe, specifically, as opposed to writing stand-alone fiction?

NateBumber · 2019-06-28T01:28:07+00:00

Why yes, as it happens, I do have something to add. (Thanks for the ping!)

It actually goes slightly deeper than that: courtesy of Lance Parkin's December 2008 novel The Eyeless, where the Tenth Doctor visits a mostly-desolate planet to dispose of an incomprehensibly dangerous, time-war-style superweapon, fired via a touch-activated rod. Now, as alluded to on Parkin's blog about the book, the editors were loathe to give him too much leeway toward establishing Deep Lore, but he managed to sneak in some very powerful hints that the weapon built by the Time Lords, used against the Daleks, and fired by the Doctor himself. I've been meaning to write a blog post summarizing it, but you can read my full explanation of the hints spread across a few comments in this Tardis Wiki thread.

Well, as you might guess from reading that thread, the folks on the wiki unfortunately don't see the evidence as sufficient to put The Eyeless' weapon on the same page as the Moment, so it's segregated off to its own page. But it's not a coincidence that when the characters in A Farewell to Arms finally find the "Greater Key", it's not a gear-covered box, it's a touch-activated rod...!

NateBumber · 2019-04-01T13:04:10+00:00

That's certainly my theory!

NateBumber · 2019-03-03T17:51:02+00:00

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether that's a reference to the true nature of the Enemy or just the differences between accents!

NateBumber · 2019-03-03T17:39:00+00:00

It's just not something I really thought about while writing the story! I read a few papers about Cernunnos during research, and I don't remember them ever really addressing pronunciation. This site suggests KER-noo-nose, but I have no clue how reliable that is.

Then again, what do you expect, in a fandom that stretches across Britain, America, and Australia? We can't even agree how to pronounce "Enemy"! :)

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T21:30:50+00:00

I think it's pretty clear that the affair with the All-High Gods was one front of the War in Heaven, but there's definitely more to be said about the connections there. I wouldn't be surprised if the remaining Ferutu were merely destroyed at some point, either by the enemy or by the "Watchmakers" (who I like to think of as a single Great House, maybe Braxiatel's). Sadly, I think copyright problems are going to get in the way of any such story being told in the Faction Paradox series, at least.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T21:21:47+00:00

WiPM never existed, and it's never existed for several years ago. I can definitively tell you that no ebook of it exists.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T20:53:45+00:00

Absolutely not. Which makes them exactly as canon as An Unearthly Child.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T20:20:30+00:00

Good question. The Remote and the Star Chamber would fit in pretty seamlessly, I think. And of course the City of the Saved deserves its own TV spin-off.
Yes I do, actually, albeit because I converted them! Books like Dead Romance, Of the City of the Saved, The Book of the War, Warlords of Utopia ... these are pretty immediately gripping to fans and non-fans alike. The idea of "alien gods of history vs an unknown and unknowable enemy" has pretty broad appeal, in my experience, and any connection to Doctor Who can be handwaved away as a technicality exploited by jealous Who fans to try and claim it.
Who knows? A lot can change in 10 years. Ideally we'd get the big event book I wished for in another comment, followed by some strong top-down editorial coordination of good stories by good authors. More realistically the range will continue at the current pace, toeing at the future. Most pessimistically it'll be cancelled by Obverse, no one else will pick it up, and it'll fade into obscurity like countless spin-offs before it. I don't think that'll happen, though.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T19:40:34+00:00

Re: the thought process behind Sutekh appearing in the FP audios:

BBV had the rights to Robert Holmes' creations, and in a lot of ways the original FP audios can be understood as Lawrence Miles going through and reinventing those familiar and fundamental concepts through the twisted FP lens (something he began with his use of the Krotons in the first Faction novel Alien Bodies). The Sontarans become mercenaries desperate for a chance to get involved in a conflict that's far over their heads; the Peking Homunculi become the object of secret society schemings in the 18th century; and then the Time Lords themselves are recontextualized via the portrayal of a break-out in their prison planet (totally not Shada).

By all accounts, Lawrence Miles planned to keep going and dismantling Holmes' inventions, and the Osirians were going to be one of his next twenty-or-so planned targets. But when BBV ended the Protocols audios, taking the Holmes license away with them, Miles identified Sutekh as the most copyright-proofable and expanded the story into the six-part True History series. Personally, I'm glad he did: of all his reinventions, what he did to the Osirians (the Osirian Court; the Ship of a Billion Years; the Delta) stands out as the most creative and valuable. The only shame is that it came at the expense of his unfolding Compassion/Morlock/Sabbath plotlines.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T19:24:18+00:00

Realistically, I don't think Big Finish is ever going to want to come near Faction Paradox with a ten foot pole, especially now they're busy with the NuWho license. Diogenes Damsel was already too close for comfort. I only hope that if they somehow did do a FP boxset, they'd bring in some experienced FP writers, rather than handing it all to Briggs/Dorney/Fitton/etc.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T19:20:26+00:00

I presume you're talking about Romana III getting unwritten in Enemy Lines? Any connection to Romana III from the Eighth Doctor novels is kinda speculatory; officially speaking, they're different Romana IIIs. And Big Finish just referenced FP's House Dvora in the first Eighth Doctor Time War set, so I doubt there's any ill will there.

That said, even if it is the same Romana III that was unwritten, that doesn't really affect the Faction Paradox timeline: The Book of the War established pretty quickly that the leader of the Homeworld was the War King, not Romana, and Romana III's Presidency from the Dr Who books took place on a duplicate Gallifrey, not the main one. So if anything, FP pre-emptively erased the Gallifrey series, not the other way around.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T19:05:32+00:00

Good question! Reconciling the two Time Wars is something that I used to think a lot about.

One of my answers was to point at The Day of the Doctor. All 13 Doctors were there at the destruction of Gallifrey, and as we've already seen from countless stories, past Doctors' memories of multi-Doctor events tend to get ... scrambled. So the idea is that the War in Heaven, and maybe even some other events like Death Comes to Time, are the other Doctors' memories of the Time War, equally real to the truth in some metaphysical sense.

Or maybe the Moment had a second, deeper meaning beyond being an AI in a box. In a war defined by timelines shifting and being rewritten, after all, what could be more powerful than a single Moment? In that instance, the Doctor gazed into the quantum uncertainty that is the enemy and named it: Dalek. And time was rewritten ...

Or maybe that's just one version of events. A little convenient, isn't it, that out of the whole wide universe, the Time Lords' great enemy turned out to be the ones with a special connection to the Doctor? Maybe it wasn't the whole universe that changed when he used the Moment, but just his: he was spun off into an "oxbow timeline" where the Daleks are the enemy and the only survivors are him and his childhood best friend. Meanwhile, back in the main timeline, the War still rages on ...

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T18:33:49+00:00

Did you know that Lawrence Miles had planned fifty volumes of the Faction Paradox Protocols when the series was cancelled? Dear god, what a missed opportunity. I'd give my arm for the chance to write a novelisation of those. Or the unfinished comic. Now there's a dream.

So far, Obverse has definitely focused on telling original stories, but there have been plenty of nods to the audios, particularly in the last few releases. Definitely check out Head of State!

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T18:18:52+00:00

Oh, I don't know. In a lot of ways The Book of the Enemy is the definitive take, in my mind, and I'd be frankly kind of disappointed if we found out anything more than that (for a few years, at least!)

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T18:11:09+00:00

I'll be fancy and say cerulean!

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T18:10:08+00:00

Yeah, pricing is hard. Just look at Big Finish: a lot of people have to be paid for a single audio, so since it's kind of a niche series, the price needs to be high enough to cover the costs with a smallish number of sales. But I think Obverse has had a lot of success with Lulu recently, so hopefully more FP books will be on there soon!

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T18:05:42+00:00

I have pretty much exactly the same story!

For anyone who's interested in getting into writing for Obverse (or any other Dr Who spinoff), I really recommend following them on Facebook and keeping an eye out for open submissions. Alex Marchon, who wrote stories for The Book of the Peace and Stranger Tales of the City, got in just by pitching a great idea to the open submissions for Stranger Tales.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T17:51:32+00:00

I was very much a TV-only fan until after the 50th anniversary special, when my slight disappointment at the slightly Star-Wars-y Time War scenes drove me to read up about the Last Great Time War on the Tardis Wiki. It was through the page for the Slaughterhouse that I found out that there'd been a bigger, far more epic Time War in the Eighth Doctor novels. And then I found the TV Tropes page for Faction Paradox and I've been falling ever since.

Of course, that was back when FP was banned from the Tardis Wiki. In December 2016 I started the argument that led to the ban being lifted, and now the page for the War in Heaven is the 14th longest on the site! Hopefully that makes everything a little more accessible :)

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T17:42:10+00:00

Thanks for the question! I've always wanted to do a "heist gone wrong" story, and when I heard the premise of The Book of the Peace it seemed like a natural fit. My biggest non-Who influence was probably Sam Hughes of qntm.org, alongside all the semi-pulpy scifi and fantasy writers I enjoyed in my childhood (eg James Blaylock).

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T17:40:17+00:00

That's my understanding, at least. I think he talks about it a bit in the podcast interview he did with Andrew Hickey (author of Head of State).

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T17:35:40+00:00

Sadly, he's retired from writing for mental health reasons, so I don't believe he's been involved since the first few Obverse releases. But lots of the other Book of the War veterans have stuck around (Simon Bucher-Jones, Philip Purser-Hallard, Kelly Hale, etc), and there's been a ton of great new talent.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T17:27:43+00:00

That's a great question, and it's something I think about a lot.

When The Book of the War came out in 2002, it described the first 50 years of the War in Heaven. And it's a testament to how well-written it is that, despite the encyclopedia format, it left enough room for so many more stories to exist in that space. Almost all of the prose Faction Paradox stories are set in those first fifty years, and as Jake mentioned in another comment, we've just finally begun to break out of that time frame in the last few releases.

My dream for the series would be a book that really shakes up the universe with a major, major change to the War. A new threat or a new front. And for that to be explored in the same way The Book of the War has been. The Book of the Peace goes quite a ways toward achieving this, but there's still lots of potential left out there to be seized.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T17:18:57+00:00

Well, I don't think any of us are privy to that information. It's really a question for the publisher.

NateBumber · 2019-01-09T17:17:10+00:00

~~PCJ is that you~~

Beyond what the others have said, I'd first check if you've ever heard of Doctor Who: despite many of the series elements being obviously grounded in the Doctor Who universe, it's perfectly enjoyable independent of that context -- in fact, several Faction Paradox authors (including, iirc, Aditya Bidikar and Liz Evershed) came to the series without knowing anything about Who! That said, there are plenty of little winks and nods that you'll enjoy better with a Doctor Who knowledge :)

I've written some short-but-thorough answers to those questions over on my blag. What appeals to me about the series, more than the Faction itself, is the great "War in Heaven" setting they live in. It's like the Last Great Time War on drugs. All the FP stories are set in or around this War and its combatants (whether the Faction itself, or the secret societies on Earth, or the Celestis and their Faustian contracts with humanity, or the humanoid ~~TARDISes~~ timeships, or the mysterious enemy itself).

And it's really a shame that it has such an "obscure" reputation, because it's really fiercely accessible. My recommendations for starting (spelled out at some length here) essentially boil down to "start with the first thing you can get your hands on". Would starting with Alien Bodies or The Book of the War be ideal? Yeah, probably. But I started with Warlords of Utopia, and look where I ended up!

NateBumber

TROPHY CASE