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Keeping it Real: Quantum Gravity Book One
by Justina Robson
(Gollancz, £10.99, 279 pages, trade paperback, also available
in hardback priced £18.99, 18 May 2006. Gollancz, £6.99,
279 pages, paperback, November 2006.)
Review by Jakob Schmidt
Lila
Black is the newest in government cyborg technology: a heavily armed
fighting machine resurrected from a near-dead human body. She's also
a young woman who has just recently lost all contact with her friends
and family, since she's officially dead. When she is assigned to protect
the dissident elven rock star Zal from the murderous political intrigues
of his home dimension, she has to face some further personal issues;
it's not that she considers herself racist -- she just doesn't like
elves. However, she discovers that Zal is not your run-of-the-mill Tolkien
derivative. But just when the slightly perverse attraction between Lila
and Zal starts to unfold, complications arise, and Lila has to team
up with an unlikely ally and penetrate deep into the elven realms to
rescue Zal from certain death -- or something worse...
Keeping it Real takes place in a near future irrevocably altered
by a quantum accident which opened up gates to foreign dimensions populated
by demons, elves and elemental spirits. Naturally, magic has made a
comeback. Diplomatic relations with the non-human realms are guarded,
but generally friendly. Overall, it's a cyberpunk-fantasy mix that is
slightly reminiscent of the Shadowrun role playing game setting,
but nevertheless original enough to make you want to figure out how
exactly this world works. The whole set-up already suggests that Keeping
it Real is a radical departure from Robson's previous work. While
I enjoyed this novel, I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about it as about
her other novels. This is most definitely not a high-concept science
fiction novel, not even a cleverly disguised one. You can trust the
cover design and the author's own statement, which both suggest that
this is a fast, action-packed fun romp, written in Robson's breaks from
working on the emotionally and intellectually challenging Living
Next Door to the God of Love (the latter fact is also evident in
the number of motifs these two very different novels share).
However, Keeping it Real still shows a lot of Robson's qualities
-- well-written characters, witty dialogue and, in this case, tons of
popcultural references. Characterisation focuses on Lila Black, who
finds out that being turned into a cyborg super heroine doesn't free
you from all that personal stuff people have to deal with about the
age of twenty. In fact, it aggravates a lot of it. When Lila starts
to think about her body, most of the time she is afraid that other people
must find it monstrous (even though Zal makes no secret of actually
being attracted by that monstrousness). Robson cleverly links the fun
and sex-appeal of heavily armed cyborg existence to the inevitable moments
of identity crisis and thereby constructs Lila's internal conflict around
the well-known fact that sex is deeply scary -- even (and especially)
if you are the very paragon of the phallic woman. Incidentally, Keeping
it Real is also the first cyberpunk novel I have read that considers
the sheer weight of extensive prosthetics and how it must feel when
the servos quit working... So there actually is some serious character
drama going on, even though it goes on in a metaphorical, Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer
type of way (I actually found out that activating the Buffy-sections
of my brain made the book much more enjoyable).
However, I still have a few gripes with Keeping it Real besides
its lack of complexity. One is that towards the end, the fast-paced
narrative gets muddled by a lot of elven intrigue, which is difficult
to follow and which didn't engage my interest enough to really try.
This makes the big showdown feel rather arbitrary. My second gripe is
that most of the book takes place in the elven realm, with exclusively
elven protagonists besides Lila Black. Even though Robson both tries
to present the elves as alien and dangerous and as very individual characters,
I still felt that they couldn't escape the wide range of elven clichés.
But that may be due to my general dislike of elves (which would probably
make me a racist in the world of the novel...)
Anyway, Keeping it Real is worth reading, and I'm definitely
looking forward to the next volume of the series -- but not as much
as I'm looking forward to another Robson novel in the vein of her previous
work.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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