Keeping It Real

[sawyl]

Fueled by Waterstones summer three for two offers, I'm currently in a savage reading frenzy, chomping my way through anything I can get my hands on. This week, as well as making my way through the Black Magician novels, I've also found the time to read Keeping It Real by Justina Robson.

In the beginning, the Earth was alone. Then the Q-Bomb said, let there be more, and suddenly there were and always had been five realities: Zoomenon, the world of elements; Alfheim, the world of the elves; Demonia, the world of demons; Otopia, Earth that was; and Thanatopia, the world of the dead. That was five years ago.

Lila Black, uber-spook and cyborg, doesn't like elves, probably because she was tortured and almost killed during a mission to Alfheim a couple of years back. This makes her latest role playing bodyguard to Zal, the only elven rock star in the worlds, a bit of a struggle. The mission to keep Zal alive starts to go bad very quickly and Lila soon finds herself mired in all kinds of trouble, never quite sure who she can trust, who is playing her and what any of this has to do with her mysterious bosses.

Keeping It Real is a fun, fast novel. The casual assurance of the staging — imagine an insane collision between an extreme version of the world of Alan Garner's Weirdstone and William Gibson — and the joy of some of the characters, especially Lila the uncertain cyborg and Zal, at one point described as Alfheim's very own Captain Kurtz, makes the whole thing extremely readable.

Given that Real is described as, "Quantum Gravity Book One", and a number of the plot threads don't entirely resolve, I suspect it's just a matter of time before a sequel comes along — something I'm already looking forward to...