Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

I've long thought Justina Robson to be one of the smartest novelists around and nothing in Going Under, the most recent novel in her Quantum Gravity series, gives me any cause to change my opinion. Here are a few quick thoughts.

With Lila has been honeymooning in Daemonia with her new husbands, Zal Ahriman and Teazle Sikarza, Otopia has been overrun by moths, a mysterious and damaging form of fey, thanks largely to the actions of Malachi, Lila's faery colleague from the Agency. When Malachi asks for her help, Lila picks up her husbands and her impish familiar, Thingamajig, and returns home, where she finds that her sister has turned their family home into a sanctuary for persecuted faeries.

When the concentrated faery mojo in sister's improvised dosshouse triggers a transition, Lila and Zal find themselves transported into one of the deepest layers of the faery dimension, a static ice-bound hell ruled over by Jack, a faery who is both Giantkiller and Fisher King. Calling in old favours, Malachi and Teazle set off in pursuit, voluntarily trapping themselves in Jack's dimension in the hope that Lila, ably assisted by her friends, will be able to settle the dark faery's hash, allowing them all to escape.

I really loved Going Under, which I thought took many of the elements set up in the previous books in Robson's Quantum Bomb series and pushed them in new directions. I liked the way Lila's previous concerns, about the effects of her cyborg transformation on her humanity and her worries about being a pawn in someone else's gothic game of chess, where breezily shifted into deeper questions about where the technology used to transform her had come from and the extend to which she was passing from being trans-human to being post-human.

I also very much enjoyed, once I noticed, the little Carterian touches. The chaotic indulgence of Daemonia reminded me of The City in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, as did Otopia's Ministry of Extraordinary Investigations — surely a wannabe counter-part to the Ministry of Determination in Doctor Hoffman. I also thought I noticed touches of The Tiger's Bride in Robson's description of Malachi's partial return to his more primitive, feline roots on his return to faery, while Moguskal reminded me of everyone from Carter's wolves to Carey's Fenris. But I particularly liked the way that the traditional fairy-tale elements were interwoven with the story of Lila and her friends in a way that made the story feel authentic — for all that the story contains a cyborg, it still feel like it could have come from a particularly dark folk tale merger of Chrétien de Troyes and the various traditions about the death of the old year and the birth of the new.

Wonderful stuff.