Title: Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity, Book 1) Author: Justina Robson Year: 2007 Publisher: Pyr Reviewer: Jake Beal As I was checking out this book, another keyholder asked to see it, read the back, and started laughing at me. I defended my choice, having read the first few pages, and noted that one cannot tell a book by its cover, and especially not by its back-blurb. Unfortunately, in the case of "Keeping It Real," the other keyholder was right. Not that it's a huge surprise, because Ms. Robson is taking on a very tough task, that badly polluted subgenre of magical cyberpunk. I'd blame the Shadowrun role-playing game, personally, except that I think it's largely responsible for the existence of the subgenre. Like the time-travelling engineer subgenre, magical cyberpunk draws both its appeal and its peril from the juxtaposition of wildly different elements and the friction between them. When an author succeeds, it's a marvellously appealing game of What-If, and when they fail it's just another broken corpse on one of several predictable failure modes. To Ms. Robson's credit, she does not fail in any of the predictable ways. In fact, I'm not sure you can call the book a failure at all, it's just not the novel I'd hoped it would be, and managed to make me distinctively uncomfortable on occasion. I really need to give Ms. Robson applause for creating a credible world, and for not abusing it as she goes (at least not yet---I find the "Book 1" subtitle slightly ominous). In the world of "Keeping It Real," a high-energy physics experiment went wrong (they call it the "Quantum Bomb") and shattered reality some time ago, separating the world into six realms, causing magic to work, and maybe even rewriting all of history. Bingo, a plausible excuse for introducing elves, demons, elementals, and fairies. To Ms. Robson's immediate credit, the story directly involves only two and a half of the six realms, and it's established well in advance which the main ones will be. The others all work into bits of the story, but unobtrusively, in the way that one is aware of Japan's influence on our culture even if you aren't an anime freak or about to go visiting. So first off, there's no "Gulliver's Travels" failure mode, in which everything named must be used. Applause. Nor is her prose a problem. Her writing has a steady workmanly quality, and I was neither jarred by problems nor dazzled by feats of Stephenson-esque wordsmanship. Mark me, this is not a criticism: all I demand of an author in any dimension is that they not screw up enough to jar me as I read. Ms. Robson's prose does an excellent job of simply delivering an experience and getting out of the reader's way. My problem, you see, is it's a romance novel. This is what the other keyholder noticed, she being more adept at spotting the codewords in the back cover blurb than I. And when I say it's a romance novel, I mean that it's a romance novel first and foremost, and the narrative drive of the romance novel warps the story around it. I am convinced that this is the only reason why the main character is as much of a ridiculous superwoman as she is, and why the plot skews out so badly. Enough pussy-footing around. Let's just run it down by the numbers. * Occurrences of deus ex machina: 2 * Percentage of opponents that become sympathetic allies: 75% * Percentage of opponents sexually tied to the main character: 100% * Percentage of opponents the main character actually has sex with: 75% * Number of revelations about the nature of the universe: 4 * Percentage of revelations with sexual implications: 75% * Number of sudden, disturbingly vivid sex scenes: 2 * Number of self-indulgent angstful monologues: too damn many to count Like I said, it's a romance novel. I reviewed one before that turned out OK, but I knew what I was getting into there. When two main characters suddenly screw each other's brains out and toss it off afterwards with "Oh, I guess we're stressed out because we're on a suicide mission" it just did not sit well. It just felt too much like a piece of slash fiction or something. So my final recommendation? Read the book if you like, it's fairly good. Just be sure you realize what you're getting into.