Product Description
“There’s a treat in store for you all, as the new Justina Robson is out. Lila Black is a spy, and a bodyguard, and every so often she breaks into the sheer joy of the toys she carries within her. It’s good to see that almost naïve geek love you see among born techies translated into a character so beautifully. The only truly bad thing about this book is that it isn’t stand-alone and now I’ve got to wait until she’s finished writing the next one, wanting much, much more.” –Starburst (Five Star review)
The Quantum Bomb of 2015 changed everything. The fabric that kept the universe’s different dimensions apart was torn and now, six years later, the people of earth exist in uneasy company with the inhabitants of, amongst others, the elfin, elemental, and demonic realms. Magic is real and can be even more dangerous than technology. Elves are exotic, erotic, dangerous, and really bored with the constant Lord of the Rings references. Elementals are a law unto themselves and demons are best left well to themselves.
Special agent Lila Black used to be pretty, but now she’s not so sure. Her body is more than half restless carbon and metal alloy machinery, a machine she’s barely in control of. It goes into combat mode, enough weapons for a small army springing from within itself, at the merest provocation. As for her heart, well, ever since being drawn into a game by the elfin rockstar Zal (lead singer of the No Shows), who she’s been assigned to protect, she’s not even sure she can trust that any more either.
Joe Sherry @ 8:39 am
While Keeping It Real by Justina Robson is her fifth published novel, she shows off the full strength of her imagination here and announces to those who may not have heard already that she is a major talent and that she will write a blend of science fiction and fantasy that demands to be read.
How is that as a selling point?
Keeping It Real opens with a not quite a chapter, not quite a prologue telling us what we need to know. In 2015 there was some sort of Quantum Bomb which detonated in Texas and which opened our world to five alternate / parallel worlds where there are elves, fairies, demons, the dead, and elementals. The other races insist they have known about us all the while.
The novel takes place in 2021 and we need to know that this is the state of being because this is not what the novel is about nor is it the story Robson is telling. But it is the setting.
Lila Black is possibly less than half human. The other half is machine. At the start of the novel we do not know why or how, only that she is assigned security for a rock band called the No Shows which consists of fairies singing backup and an elf as the lead singer. The No Shows are immensely popular and someone is trying to kill the elf, Zal. Lila, as it turns out, does not entirely trust elves and is barely comfortable in her own skin, such as it is. She is in control of her body and machine, but not entirely. There are glitches.
This is the starting point of Keeping It Real. The rest needs to be discovered to be believed. Robson keeps the novel moving at a reasonably fast clip with action, excitement, elf sex, imperfect cyborg machinery, inept fake [...] attempts, and a heroine who is broken more on the inside than on the outside…and this is the woman who must protect Zal, and elf who barely wishes to be protected.
Keeping It Real is perhaps the most original science fiction or fantasy novel I have read in some time and it is because Robson is able to blend the two genres so seamlessly that it is simply just good storytelling. Robson plays with familiar concepts (elves, cyborgs, different worlds, magic), but in doing so she puts them together in ways we haven’t seen before. The elves here are aware of the stereotypes brought on by countless fantasy novels and Lord of the Rings (the elves crack on lembas bread so that the humans can’t). Remember, this is our world, just altered in our future.
Keeping It Real is the first volume in a proposed trilogy and I cannot wait to see what Robson brings us next.
-Joe Sherry
Marshall Lord @ 8:58 am
This is the first book in the “Quantum Gravity” series. The publication date for the second, “Selling out”, has unfortunately slipped to mid 2007 and I don’t know how I’m going to stand the wait.
The Quantum Gravity series is set in a future where a disaster in 2015, the “Quantum bomb” has removed the barrier between the world inhabited by humans like ourselves, (formerly known as “Earth” and now as “Otopia”) and other realms including those of Elves, Demons, and Faeries. The book starts six years later in 2021.
The heroine and central character is Special Agent Lila Black, who works for the human National Security Agency. (It is never made quite clear whether this is the USA’s agency by that name or a united human body, but the omission doesn’t matter as all the intrigue in the book involves different factions of Elves and other non-humans.)
Lila Black is a brilliant creation: having been severely wounded she has been rebuilt as a cyborg powered by her own miniature nuclear reactor, with rocket jets in her legs, more lethal weaponry than a squadron of main battle tanks, more electronic snooping equipment than a Hawkeye AWACs, and more computing power than IBM. Unsurprisingly the human mind inside this lethal killing machine is worried about to what extent she is still human and self-conscious about what she has become. Dduring the course of the book it becomes clear that she is still capable of everything that is best about being human.
The book is a strange mix of hard science fiction and fantasy, but it works well, and the author manages to include seriously weird events and somehow make them seem completely plausible while you are reading about them.
If you really don’t like books with Elves, fairies etc you probably shouldn’t read this. If you accept the premise that a bridge between worlds has allowed magic and advanced technology to co-exist, the book is internally consistent and good fun.
There is plenty of snappy, cynical humour in the book – anyone under forty reading this who wants to get one of the funniest jokes should look up the lyrics to the old song with the first line “I am the God of Hell-Fire” before reading it, but that was the only joke which most readers won’t easily get.
Anyone who liked Firefly/Serenity, Blakes 7, the novels of Peter Hamilton, or those of Jack Chalker will almost certainly enjoy “Keeping it Real”. (It’s actually better than Chalker but I mention him because there are a lot of transformations.) Anyone else who likes either science fiction or fantasy is also likely to love this book.
S. S. White @ 10:50 am
This book is a helluva lot of fun. And by fun, I don’t mean in a light and fluffy kind of way, though one might expect that from a book focusing on an elf rock star and his cyborg bodyguard chick. And given the various descriptions of this book, I didn’t know what to expect out of it, other than it’d be fun (which it was), weird (which it was), and rather unpredictable (which it was).
Robson has a wonderful talent for humor and for revealing the zaniness of pop culture. Not only is this book littered with pop culture references (LOTR and Toy Story being just two of them), they’re funny and not cliche. The characters, too, are exceedingly well-crafted, and no one gets out of this book unchanged. I’m still puzzling over a few characters’ allegiances, but it’s nothing I’m too upset over, because I’m content with my own interpretations.
I think my only real qualms with this book were certain action scenes that I couldn’t visualize at all what was happening or why. I’d name the scenes, but they take place towards climatic moments of the novel, and I don’t want to give anything away. So I won’t. And because this book is first in a series, I suspect some of my questions will be answered later, so I don’t have a problem with the ending.
Would I recommend this title? Most definitely. But you should probably have an affinity for elves, and you should also appreciate all the snark that goes along with the elf stereotype, because Robson mercilessly makes fun of her elf characters (the LOTR references are constant, and funny). But I think anyone who enjoys modern fantasy/pop fantasy will enjoy this. There’s sex, love, and SF, but the SF shouldn’t scare non-SF readers much. It’s really icing on the cake, and Robson’s characters make the story worth the rough patches.
lb136 @ 12:28 pm
In this kicky and splendidly written blend of sf and fantasy, Justina Robson returns to the form of her brilliant “Natural History.” This time out she invents a world of fascist elves and predatory faeries. Demons also appear, and so do dungeons and dragons.
Unlike in her previous, and far less successful, novel “Living Next Door to the God of Love,” here Ms. Robinson establishes the rules of her world in the introduction, and she sticks to them. Readers who need a refresher course when the plot thickens need only turn back to that introduction, and they’ll be up to speed.
The author sets the scene in her opening paragraphs of that introduction: in 2015 an explosion at a “superconducting supercollider” (gotta love it!) has torn a hole in the fabric of space time, which has in turn opened the paths to other realms. Old Earth, now known as Otopia, is visited by fantasy creatures, and trade routes have been established between the realms.
Lila Black, a semi-cyborg government agent (she’s been rehabbed with cybernetic and mechanical add-ons after a previous caper), is assigned to duty as bodyguard for Zal, an Elf who’s the lead singer of the Rock Band “The No Shows.” His own people are trying to kill him. Our guys want to learn why the elven land (Alfheim) has closed its borders, and use the threats against Zal’s life to bring Lila in.
The action starts quickly and builds to a fine, logical conclusion. Along the way the author has fun (you’ll probably laugh in places) with fantasy conventions–she stretches them to the limits without breaking them–and she has a great time contrasting the flowery speech of the Elves’ leader, Arie, with Lisa’s street-gal patter.
Ms. Robson also has some fun with gender, too. The proactive female bodyguard falls (with the aid of some magic) for the relatively passive male diva (divo?) Their scenes together are hot–great fun.
The book (handsomely designed large-sized paperback on good paper) is billed as “Quantum Gravity, Book 1,” but it’s complete in itself. It won’t leave you hanging from a cliff, but you’ll probably be anxious for the followup, which is to be called “Selling Out.”
Blue Tyson @ 1:01 pm
Cyborging bodyguard girl gets to blow up the odd elf while protecting the only rockstar said pretty boys have managed to produce.
This is basically an urban fantasy, so fans of that sort of thing with the female arse-kicker dealing with (and shagging) the pretty boy supernatural should like this. Or, for basic SF fans, this is very SF light. Just a light adventure romance, really.
Maybe, Kim Harrison meets Shadowrun with a small touch of Ghost in the Shell, for a bit of the manga feel. That is, it is not slow, dull, or overly girlie, so a definite plus from that point of view, and a goodly amount of action, whether, shooting, spells, or whatever.
A big Quantum accident gives access to supernatural realms, Elves, who are scammer scumbag nancy-boy magic types who can’t rock, demons, elementals, and the dead realm, which is necromancer (brave ones) only.
So, of course, the human bodyguard with the tech stuff gets involved in something more complicated, inter and intrarealm politics and espionage with a side dish of assassination.
I’d call this a 3.25 I think.