Edited by Lawrence Miles.
The Great Houses: Immovable. Implacable. Unchanging. Old enough to pass themselves off as immortal, arrogant enough to claim ultimate authority over the Spiral
Politic.
The Enemy: Not so much an army as a hostile new kind of
history. So ambitious it can re-write worlds, so complex that even
calling it by its name seems to underestimate it.
Faction Paradox: Renegades, ritualists, saboteurs and
subterfugers, the criminal-cult to end all criminal-cults, happy to be
caught in the crossfire and ready to take whatever's needed from the
wreckage... assuming the other powers leave behind a universe that's
habitable.
The War: A fifty-year-old dispute over the two most valuable territories in existence: "cause" and "effect."
Marking the first five decades of the conflict, The Book of the War is an A to Z of a self-contained continuum and a complete guide to the
Spiral Politic, from the beginning of recordable time to the fall of
humanity. Part story, part history and part puzzle-box, this is a
chronicle of protocol and paranoia in a War where the historians win as
many battles as the soldiers and the greatest victory of all is to hold
on to your own past...