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I absolutely loved Newtons Sleep. Certainly the strongest Faction Paradox novel to date, and probably the best ER-related book I've read since the Telos novellas ended.

I've a terrible habit, when I read books, of jumping backwards and forwards among the text trying to tie the bits together, rather than experiencing it linearly. This was a perfect book for that. The complexity of the plot and of the storytelling, and the deftness with which the story ties in with the War background and BotW in particular, were incredibly clever -- but still, I think the book would have been satisfying to read even without that background. The characters are brilliantly drawn (especially Silver, Behn and Greenaway), the historical worldbuilding is so convincing you can taste it, and the twisty-turny politics, both Above and Below, are compelling without being overly confusing.

(Even so, I was almost at the end before I realised that "life-gifts" referred to "biodata". It's a calque -- a word-coinage formed by direct translation. "βιος" = "life" in Greek, "datum" = "gift" in Latin.)

I enjoyed the characterisation of Newton / Jeova, too. (It even made more sense of the
recent Evil Renegade audio where he works out the entire future history of Britain, plus the fact that the Renegade is an extraterrestrial time-traveller, from looking at a pocketful of coins.) It was a bit of a shame that Daniel couldn't have used the original Nicholas Hawksmoor as well, rather than inventing Nick Plainsong as an analogue, but I guess that would have stretched the limits of history a little far.

The Faction are simply brilliant in this. Mother Sphinx especially is a wonderful creation, and the sequence where she escapes Plainsong's hex with Greenaway's help was marvellous... but the whole depiction of their methods, approaches and character was spot-on throughout. I found the story of Aki very poignant, as well.

What else...? The parallels between Charles I and the Imperator, and Cromwell and the War King, were clever, as was Larissa's entire plot-thread, from her backstory to her non-linear appearances post-metamorphosis. (I liked the fact that Aphra never quite worked it out, as well -- she's not stupid, but her thinking is naturally limited by her time-bound state.)

I'm going to leave it a while before rereading this, I think, but reread it I certainly shall. Although I caught a lot of the depth and meaning this time round, I'm sure there are layers buried deeper which I didn't see.

If Random Static can keep this standard up with future releases -- and there's no reason at this stage to think they can't -- then they're worthy successors to Mad Norwegian, and able caretakers for the Faction range.