Rose-Coloured Crosshairs

★★★☆☆ – “Hey, I had a good time tonight.”

A theme park ride of ideas.

Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is, in a sense, the Platonic idea of a Faction Paradox novel(la). When I say that, I don’t mean the Platonic ideal, mind – that being perfect, absolute, and eternal – but the Platonic idea: The most essential form; an embodiment that zeroes in on what “a Faction Paradox novel” is, free of extraneous features. And when I say “in a sense”, I do mean a specific sense: It manifests what I had heard Faction Paradox was like before I got into it. Quote Elizabeth Sandifer, in her essay on A Romance in Twelve Parts, Obverse Books’s first Faction Paradox publication:

[Faction Paradox] is a series and a mythology defined by setup and by the generation of ideas, as opposed to by their deep exploration and resolution.

Never has this been truer than in this book. Rose-Coloured Crosshairs is a guided tour of ideas; a safari of titillating notions; a theme park ride with concepts in place of animatronic characters. It never stops to explore these concepts in any depth, but they certainly get to strike their cool poses and put on their pyrotechnic displays as you ride past. Notably, the premise to which “rose-coloured crosshairs” refers –  a device placed on a planet in life’s infancy, which (over the course of the planet’s whole remaining multi-billion-year history!) brainwashes people into remembering a false past and “progress [thus] becomes impossible, as [nostalgia denies] any possibility of change” – smacks loudly of a message; of a point the author wants to make… but that point is never made, as the effects of the device never enter the story.

It’s difficult to be too disappointed by the lack of depth, however, because Rose-Coloured Crosshairs makes a good bid at compensating with quantity. I found myself lost and quite honestly bored for the first third of the book, which consists largely of meticulous, dry worldbuilding descriptions (as if out of a sourcebook for a tabletop role-playing game) and slightly too inscrutable exchanges between unfamiliar characters. Barring some hitches in the pacing, however – Bidmead likes frontloaded descriptions (though at least I always had a vivid image of the scene) – the rest of the book flew by: The Macy’s parade of ideas gets into the swing of it, and I’m sure I audibly let out an “ooh” and/or “ahh” on at least a few occasions.

Some of the concepts are a bit too fuzzily defined for my tastes (“vibes-based”, as they say, or sometimes “things just kind of happen”), but again, it’s not a great loss if a given idea doesn’t speak to you, since you’ll be on to the next but a few pages down the line. Unfortunately, the central plot of the book is characterized by this fuzziness as well; a general feeling of “what just happened and why?” In the end, I’m left feeling more as if I’ve read a single-author anthology than a novel(…la), but the inescapable fact of the matter is, I like an anthology. Do you?