The great thing about Doctor Who is how expansive its scope is. It can take you anywhere, show you anything, and let you meet all manner of folk. But that capacity naturally isn’t confined solely to Doctor Who; indeed, The City of the Saved has a similar breadth.
This is a spin-off from Faction Paradox, the time-travelling cult created by Lawrence Miles for the 1990s Eighth Doctor Adventures novels. Set up in 2012 by Obverse Books, The City of the Saved envisions an afterlife populated by everyone in human history, and takes place at the end of our universe, but before the next…
And now, Obverse brings us a new instalment of short stories – the sixth anthology, in fact, and the first to be edited by Liz Evershed, and so the first not edited by City creator, Phil Purser-Hallard. Here’s the synopsis for Stranger Tales of the City:
‘The City is full of strangers and these are their tales.’
The knights hospitaller have just woken to a second life in a City the size of a galaxy.
Two strangers from a far-distant future are flung together on Resurrection Day.
A window-seller visits a claustrophobic suburb and finds it full of mystery.
A Remake gunslinger seeks a new role from the one he was always meant to play…
In this, the sixth anthology in the City of the Saved series, we meet a host of human and not-so-human characters getting to grips with life in the afterlife:
- Alien adoptees with no previous experience of human cultures;
- Citizens permanently missing and not merely misplaced;
- Priestesses of long-forgotten religions;
- Posthumans with their own baffling version of the Civil Tongue;
- A viral strain of humankind that has never known community…
Editor, Elizabeth Evershed was born in Norfolk, bred in South East London, and now lives in the old borough of Southwark. Liz has written a comic fantasy novel, and contributed to numerous previous Faction Paradox books.
Stranger Tales of the City, with a cover by The Black Archive‘s Blair Bidmead, is available now, priced £10.95.
