With the City of the Saved anthologies being added to the site I thought I’d give y’all a little guide to the setting and its associated series! Despite being around three spinoff layers deep, it’s a lovely little corner of the franchise that I want more people to know about 
What is the City of the Saved?
The basic concept of the City of the Saved is simple yet full of endless potential – it’s a galaxy-sized city housing every human who ever lived, from Australopithecus all the way to posthumanity. Essentially, it’s the afterlife. The City contains a wide range of Districts housing different cultures, some unique to the City and some based on specific cultures, regions, or time periods from back in the Universe.
Nobody can die or get hurt in the City, and the government does what it can to allow its Citizens free movement between different Districts. But as you might be able to guess, when a place contains every human from every culture ever – and excludes those without any human ancestry – things do start to get complicated…
How do I get into the City of the Saved series?
The City of the Saved was first introduced in the Book of the War, an encyclopedia of lore introducing readers to the world of Faction Paradox. The Book of the War contains entries detailing the City and an attempted attack on it by the Celestis – those entries are a good primer, but not necessary to understand the rest of the series.
After that came Of the City of the Saved, the second Faction Paradox novel, written by Philip Purser-Hallard. This is pretty much the baseline for the later spinoff series, and should be read in order to properly understand most of what comes after. The book follows the City as an impossible murder appears to have taken place, while trouble brews in one of its more obscure Districts.
The novel is pretty much entirely readable standalone! You don’t have to be a Faction Paradox fanatic to enjoy it. While it does incorporate concepts from the Book of the War such as posthumanity and Compassion, the book itself gives you enough context to get the gist. It’s also still pretty easy to get one’s hands on, something which can’t be said of most of the early Faction books these days.
The conclusion of the City of the Saved novel is pretty open-ended, and was followed up on in the Faction Paradox short story A Hundred Words from a Civil War. This is a brilliant story collaboratively written by many different authors, and I can’t recommend it enough to fans of the novel. Once again, you don’t have to know about Faction Paradox to understand this, though there are some easter eggs here and there.
But finally, the meat of the spinoff: the anthology series! These are anthologies of short stories set in the City of the Saved, mostly edited by Purser-Hallard himself. They mostly take place before the novel, but there’s a few that take place after – notably the story God Encompasses which directly follows up A Hundred Words from a Civil War.
Conclusion
That’s all folks!! I just wanna spread the word about this obscure little corner of the Whoniverse. There’s boundless potential in the premise alone, and the anthology series is lovely as we see each author give their own distinct take on what might happen in a City full of everyone, ever. I hope this post can help more people learn about it 