Faction Paradox: Warlords of Utopia

The Year of the Metal Rat has brought with it greed and self-preservation. The Everlasting Empire is dying, eaten up from within, and the young upstarts Britain and Russia are circling like carrion-birds, for crows of every nation are equally black. The peasant-sect of the Righteous Harmonious Fists attacks all foreign devils. In the capital, the ancient heart of the Empire, the Europeans are besi...

From up here you can see it all, hear it all, taste most of it and feel the rest when the electric lights and the satellite signals prickle against your skin. The town, from midnight to six, marked out in headlights and the flash-fire of a culture in War-time. Seance-messages written in the patterns of the road signs, and ghost-transmissions scrambled into the background noise of the traffic. Anim...

'What's that? Did I hear you ask what romance has to do with anything, little Cousin? You do surprise me. Why Romance is Story itself, nothing less than that. Romance is the tale with which a cunning man winkles out a widow's secrets and an honest one breaks his beloved's heart. Romance locks us away and sets us free, brings us great pleasure and also great pain, is the thread ...

You will make war with the beast of the city, and the people will be grateful, and in this way will your fame be fortified. Every fifty-two years, the God Xiuhtecuhtli – incarnate for the purpose as a young Mexica male – would give himself in sacrifice in order that the universe should be renewed and the passage of time would continue as it had done before. Those born to other cultures and othe...

The second volume of Faction Paradox short stories, edited by British Fantasy Society Award nominee Jay Eales.

'All right, let's start with the basics. The world ended on the twelfth of October, Nineteen Seventy...' I don't know why I'm writing this. It's not like anybody's going to read it. At least, nobody who cares about the fact that I'm a desparate, dying, 23-year-old human being who's just had the whole of history taken away from her. To whoever's out...

Seeking: Maid of all Work. Master of Arts required. She thought she was there to observe and document the methods of the twenty-five-year-old Sherlock Holmes before he gained notoriety-- 'Rooftop Robber Strikes Again!' A barely noticed automaton; quiet, efficient, and unobtrusive-- 'The partially clad body of a young girl was found Sunday morning at the London Dock.'...

Don't tell her what it was like. Don't tell her how you had to dig your way out through heavy layers of clay to reach the fresh air, because that would distress her. Don't tell her about the box, because that would confuse her. And don't tell her about the light, because that was sacred. Lately cannonballs have flown their arcs, leaving the crystal sky unbroken, while on ...

For Humanity, the War is over... We all remember Resurrection Day. Even now, three centuries later, we cannot forget that awakening: our bewilderment, our terror and our joy. Each of us had experienced death, imagining ourselves bound for oblivion, Heaven or Nirvana, according to taste. Instead, we found, each member of the many human species - from tool-wielding australopithecines to posthuman...

“The Tribunal Decision in the matter of the Great Houses vs. Scarratt is as follows. That the orders lawfully issued to the said Scarratt were deliberately ignored, as recorded in Scarratt’s own thoughts as recorded through the media first of the recording circuits of his timeship and then of the biodata retrieved from exhibit A.”