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Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity 1)
 
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Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity 1) (Paperback)

by Justina Robson (Author)
3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
RRP: £10.99
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Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity 1) + Selling Out: Quantum Gravity Book Two: Quantum Gravity Bk. 2 (GollanczF.) + Going Under: Quantum Gravity Book Three: Quantum Gravity Bk. 3 (Gollancz S.F.)
Price For All Three: £22.77

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Product details

  • Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz (18 May 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0575078626
  • ISBN-13: 978-0575078628
  • Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.4 x 2.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 109,721 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

SFF WORLD
"Justina infuses this yarn with humour, intelligence and, a little surprisingly for such a fun book, depth."


Review
"Justina infuses this yarn with humour, intelligence and, a little surprisingly for such a fun book, depth." (SFF WORLD )

"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 naive 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 )

"This is by far the most entertaining book Robson has written, a novel packed with memorable characters and ideas but that doubles as holiday reading escapism. No mean balancing act." (Jonathan Wright SFX )

"Keeping it Real provides a very enjoyable and diverting romp." (Sharon Gosling DREAMWATCH )

"Richly inventive. The work of a smart and sexy novelist having smart and sexy fun, and what's the problem with that?" (LOCUS )

"This combination of cyberpunk and the Byzantine twee ought not to work, but the icy intelligence Robson brings to her serious books applies in equal measure to her entertainments. There is also a passionate wistful romanticism which breaks your heart in places here." (Roz Kaveney TIME OUT )

"Half cyborg, half human, all attitude, Lila Black is the archetypal post-cyberpunk bodygurad/assasin, set down a amid characters ripped from mainstream fantasy and occupying a world created by a typically SF disaster. Keeping It Real is billed as Robson having fun. And fun it certainly is." (THE TIMES )

"Fun and fast paced, but in behind the literary pyrotechnics are deeper themes about discrimination, sexual politics and identity." (Dave Golder BBC FOCUS )

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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity 1)
69% buy the item featured on this page:
Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity 1) 3.2 out of 5 stars (24)
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Going Under: Quantum Gravity Book Three: Quantum Gravity Bk. 3 (Gollancz S.F.) 4.5 out of 5 stars (2)
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Customer Reviews

24 Reviews
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4 star:
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3 star:
 (4)
2 star:
 (5)
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Average Customer Review
3.2 out of 5 stars (24 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Some good ideas, but overall weak execution, 8 Jun 2007
By A. Whitehead "Werthead" (Colchester, Essex United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: Keeping It Real (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
Keeping It Real is the first novel in the Quantum Gravity series by British SF author Justina Robson. Robson is a noted author of hard SF novels such as Silver Screen and Mappa Mundi, but for her latest project she has ventured into Science Fantasy, giving us a world where cyborgs and elves coexist with fairies and advanced AIs.

In 2015 the Quantum Bomb exploded. An accident at an atom-smasher has fractured reality and opened Earth - now called Otopia - to waves of immigration from other dimensions, home to demons, fairies, elves and elementals. It is now 2021 and Lila Black, a special operative condemned to live as a cyborg after losing her limbs on a dangerous mission, has been assigned as bodyguard to Zal, a charismatic elven rock star. Zal's decision to live among humans and do unelven things such as eat meat and exist as a celebrity has made him many enemies among his own people in Alfheim, some of whom have made threats against him. Black has to protect Zal from death or capture whilst uncovering secrets that threaten the relationships between the realms.

Keeping It Real is a book with a lot of excellent ideas. The combination of SF ideas and fantasy tropes works pretty well for the most part and the plot fairly clips along, as it has to in a relatively short (270-page) book. However, there is no denying that the central idea is pretty zany, and the reader is probably expecting a zany, funny book to explore it. This isn't what you get with Keeping It Real. This is a serious book which treats the central daftness of its concept with grim severity. There is some humour in the book - the demon bouncers at a party for example - but overall this is a mostly laughter-free zone.

This wouldn't matter if the characters are likable and interesting. They are not. When she's not dwelling on her horrific injuries, being cut off from her parents and her somewhat tedious 'Game' relationship with Zal, Lila Black is an intriguing character. Unfortunately this is in only about a quarter of the book. The rest of the time her character is engaged in moody introspection about how awful it is to be welded into a metal body with enough firepower to level a small city secreted about your person. Zal is completely unlikeable from the second you meet him to the very last page of the book: a selfish hedonistic egotist with no redeemable features at all. Some of the other characters were much more intriguing - Black being forced to work alongside a rival intelligence agent who was responsible for her injuries is an interesting plotline - but with the two central characters being rather unsympathetic, this made engaging with the novel very hard work.

Luckily, the story kicks into gear towards the end, after the action moves from Otopia to Alfheim. The last 50 pages or so are much faster-paced and you do find yourself drawn more into the narrative. However, for most readers I fear this improvement will come too late in the day to keep them interested.
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Science fiction readers deserve better than this, 25 Aug 2006
This review is from: Keeping It Real (Gollancz S.F.) (Hardcover)
I came to this book after reading the author's previous novel, Living Next Door to the God of Love, which if not entirely successful was ambitious and innovative. Keeping it Real, unfortunately, is not even of that calibre. The ideas are interesting (I have no objection to combining elements of sf and high fantasy), but the novel appears to have been written very quickly and only lightly edited (if at all) before publication.

The premise is that a quantum bomb created openings between our world (since renamed Otopia, for reasons never explained) and numerous other worlds (ie Alfheim, Faery, Thanatopia). These worlds are little more than cardboard backdrops. Otopia is skimpily described, with few material differences from the world we know. A sojourn in Alfheim feels like a hike through generic woodland, with no telling details to bring it into focus. The closest we come to the fantastical is being told that "everything is more itself there -- like ultra-authentic".

Before the novel opens the protagonist, Lila Black, suffered life-threatening injuries during a diplomatic mission. She was (implausibly) given a choice between dying or being rebuilt -- complete with restored limbs, nuclear core, and various armament -- on the condition that she cut off contact with her family and friends, who are told that she is dead. (Why? The author doesn't say.) The names of her loved ones appear on the page a few times, like tokens of a backstory rather than people for whom the protagonist feels a real sense of loss.

The behaviour of principal characters is inconsistent, often scarcely credible. Lila Black, who is supposed to be a ruthless spy, comes across as a troubled teenager. She flirts clumsily with Zal, the high elf rock star she's been assigned to protect, who himself behaves like a rebellious, surly adolescent. Lila is insecure about her new (half machine) body, but as soon as it becomes convenient for the plot she abruptly loses all self-consciousness.

Lila's relationship with Dar, the elf responsible for torturing her almost to the point of death, is one of the most implausible aspects of the book. She loathes him for about 5 minutes, then her anger dissipates because "it made her feel like a total jerk". After a few half-hearted attempts at hostile dialogue, any pretense of animosity is abandoned. As they are obliged to travel together for several days, their relationship quickly moves to friendship and then sexual attraction.

Secondary characters rarely rise above stereotype -- such as the demon who talks like a black chick from the hood and a psychologist who advises Lila to "take time for yourself".

The novel suffers from numerous basic writing errors: said bookisms, excessive adverbs, inconsistent levels of diction, incorrect punctuation. In a few places the quality of the writing is cringe-inducing ("This is so incredibly -- well, she hated to say it, being a top spy with a mission, but -- it was so cool!").

Some may excuse this book's failings on the grounds that it is intended as light entertainment. But it does not succeed either as entertainment (not being very entertaining) nor as satisfying fiction with memorable characters and settings. For science fiction to be meaningful, we must at a minimum be able to believe in the characters. To paraphrase an eminent science fiction writer, they are the real toads in the imaginary garden.

Writers in this genre have a responsibility to set high standards for themselves -- because there are few critics with high expectations, while the mediocre and the excellent alike are devoured by fans. It's worrisome that this novel is the first in a projected series. It marks a major step-down for a talented writer who seemed previously to aspire to work of greater scope and ambition.
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13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars First book in a brilliant new series, 25 May 2006
By Marshall Lord (Whitehaven, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
This is the first book in the "Quantum Gravity" series. The publication date for the second, "Selling out", has slipped to May 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 earth 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. However, during 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 surprisingly well. The author manages to include seriously weird events and yet somehow make them seem completely plausible while you are reading about them.

If you really don't like stories which include elves, fairies, demons etc you probably shouldn't read this. If you ignore that advice, don't come back and slag off the book because it contains them. If you accept the premise that a mixing of different worlds has made possible the interaction of magic and high technology, this is internally consistent and good fun.

There is plenty of snappy, cynical humour in the book - anyone under forty reading this book 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 probably 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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Oh come on it's not *that* bad
I think the people giving this book bad reviews are expecting too much.

"Keeping It Real" by Justina Robson is a fun read. Read more
Published 10 days ago by Shutsumon

2.0 out of 5 stars Sadly Uninteresting
Other reviewers have pretty much summed up my feelings about this novel. The basic ideas are good but the execution is poor and the main characters unappealing and uninteresting... Read more
Published 22 days ago by Ms. T. Kane

2.0 out of 5 stars Not for this sci-fi reader
Having had Book II in the series recommended to me, with the caveat of having to read Book I (i.e. this one) first, I was looking forward to settling in to a new series. Read more
Published 12 months ago by J. Sambrook

5.0 out of 5 stars Unexpectectedly enterteining...
I found it on an Italian bookshelf and first read it in its Italian translation. I bought it just out of curiosity for the unusual mixture (at least down here, though) of Fantasy... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Ushuayia

3.0 out of 5 stars Too much romance overwhelms the SF
I bought this for the concept of a robot enhanced woman battling against what we've always imagined to be only in fairytales, i.e. elves, fairies, demons, elementals etc etc. Read more
Published on 24 May 2007 by Foureyes

1.0 out of 5 stars disappointing
The characters are cardboard, the imagined worlds are worse. The plot is ridiculous. If you want sex and fairies try Diane Duane or even Laurell Hamilton.
Published on 11 April 2007 by Stephen

3.0 out of 5 stars Intrigued by the conflicting reviews...
... I bought this book, and am pleased to say I did really enjoy it. Completed it in one sitting.
Yes - it would have benefited from tighter editing; yes, some of the... Read more
Published on 20 Mar 2007 by Lornarna

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining read
Justina Robson's books have been short-listed for the Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell, and the British Science Fiction Association Awards. Read more
Published on 1 Mar 2007 by Patrick St-Denis

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
Just thought i'd do a quick mention for this book - especially seeing some of the negative reviews given! Read more
Published on 24 Feb 2007 by J. A. Howells

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantasy and Cyber-Punk
Well, I really enjoyed it. It's not deep or heavy - it's a 'good read'. My personal favourite sub-genre within Sci-Fi is cyber-punk and I stay well clear of fantasy. Read more
Published on 23 Feb 2007 by Diziet

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