Justina Robson, Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity trilogy, Book 1) (Pyr Books, 2007)
Justina Robson is a journeyman writer (Natural History, Mappa Mundi) known for big ideas in her novels. She is considered a hard science fiction writer in her native Britain. However, her newest novel, Keeping It Real, does not impress one with her ability to handle the big ideas in which she frames her story; nor does it indicate any real understanding of hard science. Using terms like "quantum," "unstable carbon" and "cyborg" does not make a writer competent in explaining them any more than writing about elves, demons and magic makes one a sorcerer.
Robson postulates a post-apocalyptic world, in which a "quantum bomb" (never convincingly defined or described) went off in 2015 in a supercollider. (Do supercolliders explode? News to me.) The aftermath left Earth permanently connected to at least five other parallel universes, in which dwell all the creatures of myth and legend. Now there is continuous traffic between them, and Earth -- which now inexplicably calls itself Otopia -- has gotten more or less used to all manner of fey and other eldritch tourists.
Alfheim is the home of the classical elves and all their glittery kin. They don't approve very much of Otopians, seeing them as loud and barbaric in comparison to the ancient, aloof, constrained culture of Vulcan -- whoops, Alfheim. Nonetheless, there is a rogue elf loose on Otopia, singing lead for a rock band and making vulgar amounts of money and fans. The embarrassment of this situation has led certain elvish fundamentalists to declare a sort of fatwah against Zal and the No Shows. The government of Otopia assigns a special agent to guard him from blatant death threats -- Lila Black, who has been not only traumatized by prior encounters with elves but only recently surgically converted to a cyborg in order to survive that last, fatal assignment. Lila's surgical scars are still livid, her artifical flesh at odds with what remains of her real body, and the fail-safes for her internal weapons are faulty: She goes into death-machine overload without warning.
While this sounds like a farce, it is a deadly serious story. Both Zal and Lila are damaged people, badly hurt by life and those who should have been closest to them. Both are in self-imposed exile from their homes -- Zal because he finds Alfheim restrictive and enervating, Lila because she doesn't want her human family to know what has become of her. (And what a vote of confidence for anyone with a prosthesis that is.) Both have unknown depths of power and destiny, which are reinforced by the inexplicable attraction between them. They end up in Alfheim, taking turns saving one another from various elvish dangers while trying to prevent Alfheim from tapping into a quantum black hole left over from the original quantum bomb, and thus blowing a fatal hole in the multiverse.
And this is only the first volume.
Keeping It Real is not badly written. Nor is it cribbed from anyone, which does make it technically original. However, it's not especially well-written either; there is no deft characterization or high prose to reward the reader for slogging through it. It is a string of highly polished clichés on a thread of plastic, and really rather boring.
It's emphatically not Robson's fault, but as a reader I am just tired of elvish rockers, cyborgs, fey/mortal miscengenation and bad science . . . all of which figure prominently in this. She doesn't bring enough originality to characters or plot to engage the reader's interest beyond the overused tropes of her framework, and soon one doesn't care whether or not the elf hero dies, the cyborg heroine gets control of her internal weaponry or the multiverse is destroyed: as long as it all ends soon.
