Gods, I hope that's her first novel.
Jun. 4th, 2007 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThe other day, while I was visiting ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shemayazi, I spotted a novel on her desk with a hot cyborged babe on the cover in shiny black latex standing in front of your typical long-haired D&D elf with the leather fanny back and the plunging neckline pirate blouse. The title was Quantum Gravity: Keeping It Real.
I opened it up. The prologue was entitled, "Common Knowledge," and was a six page infodump of "the world after the Superconducting Supercollider shattered the walls between the worlds." It goes on in a sonorous voice about the six planes that intersect with ours: the world of elves, the world of daemons, the world of death, the world of elementals. There were more, I don't remember them.
Good grief, some publisher paid for this crap? It read like a bad Shadowrun novel, but with the labels ripped off and the serial numbers filed down. It reads as if the author, Justina Robson, wanted to write something Shadowrunny but she also wanted it to be edgier, sexier, more "adult" (for weighted values of), so she wrote this instead. I thumbed through the book, and discovered that she used five different typefaces, so her character's AI could talk in bold san serif and her daemon-elf-spirit-possessor thingy used a flowery, curlicue type face, the kind where the letter i is dotted with a heart and the artists's eyes should be dotted with bleach.
Apparently the premise is that the Elves want to kill the world's first Elfin rock star as punishment for his association with humans, and our heroine, Lila, a borged-out babe whose AI interface may or may not have an agenda of its own, is sent to be his bodyguard.
Amazon has seven reviews: two 5-stars and five 4-stars. What I read was trite, contrived, silly.
Unfortunately, it does look like Robson has other books that I might be interested in, like Natural History and Silver Screen, both of which look like posthuman or transhuman pulp. But unless she's a master of characterization, there's nothing yet that convinces me I'm going to have the sense of wonder I like out of my SF.
shemayazi, I spotted a novel on her desk with a hot cyborged babe on the cover in shiny black latex standing in front of your typical long-haired D&D elf with the leather fanny back and the plunging neckline pirate blouse. The title was Quantum Gravity: Keeping It Real.I opened it up. The prologue was entitled, "Common Knowledge," and was a six page infodump of "the world after the Superconducting Supercollider shattered the walls between the worlds." It goes on in a sonorous voice about the six planes that intersect with ours: the world of elves, the world of daemons, the world of death, the world of elementals. There were more, I don't remember them.
Good grief, some publisher paid for this crap? It read like a bad Shadowrun novel, but with the labels ripped off and the serial numbers filed down. It reads as if the author, Justina Robson, wanted to write something Shadowrunny but she also wanted it to be edgier, sexier, more "adult" (for weighted values of), so she wrote this instead. I thumbed through the book, and discovered that she used five different typefaces, so her character's AI could talk in bold san serif and her daemon-elf-spirit-possessor thingy used a flowery, curlicue type face, the kind where the letter i is dotted with a heart and the artists's eyes should be dotted with bleach.
Apparently the premise is that the Elves want to kill the world's first Elfin rock star as punishment for his association with humans, and our heroine, Lila, a borged-out babe whose AI interface may or may not have an agenda of its own, is sent to be his bodyguard.
Amazon has seven reviews: two 5-stars and five 4-stars. What I read was trite, contrived, silly.
Unfortunately, it does look like Robson has other books that I might be interested in, like Natural History and Silver Screen, both of which look like posthuman or transhuman pulp. But unless she's a master of characterization, there's nothing yet that convinces me I'm going to have the sense of wonder I like out of my SF.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-04 08:34 pm (UTC)(also, I wonder if she has any relation to Jennifer Robson? Which might explain why a publisher paid for it.)
no subject
Date: 2007-06-04 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-04 11:44 pm (UTC)I suspect some of her earlier books may be better, which would explain someone paying for a series before finding out it was a Gurps-Rifts takeoff.
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Date: 2007-06-04 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-05 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-05 07:52 pm (UTC)I think part of the reason I haven't is because I like my garden. It's a nice little hothouse, and I'm comfortable with my current employment such that I don't feel compelled to do more. Like every gardener, I'll grouse about how I wish it could be bigger, but as long as I'm well-satisfied with the results as they stand, and I don't have to do more, I probably won't.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-05 07:43 am (UTC)My experience of those systems that rate works by what the buyer, or viewer, thinks is that there is a huge sampling bias. Are any of my CGI pics really worth a 10? So why does everyone who rates them give them the maximum?
Now, as a sub-sub-genre, there's a lot of stuff in the secret-elves line which doesn't convince. And some pretty blatant authorial axe-grinding (though the axe may be worthy of an edge). It unbalances the stories. The worst might as well have the elves be a long-lived alien race, slumming it on some backwoods planet.
And there's be a better story in that idea than in scare stories about the effects of big science projects.
Maybe there's a symbolism: elves and nature and nurturing against the crude exploitation of our high-tech world; magic, shit-free, horses rather than pollution-spewing cars.
And it doesn't help that a hot cyborged babe in shiny black latex provokes spasms of insane jealousy. But Ghost in the Shell does pesent the major as a troubled person, somebody who's still human.
The characters in the book you describe seem to be all shell and no ghost.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-05 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-06 11:17 am (UTC)Afraid that I have to disagree with you in that I found it to be a very British tongue-in-cheek spin on the whole urban fantasy/cyberpunk genre. While she's clearly having some fun, her otherworldly characters are, well, *alien*, not humans in funny make-up. However, she reveals their motivations subtly and I appreciated that. Light reading? Sure, but better and funnier than some of the "new wave" urban fantasy out there.
It Might Have Been Interesting...
Date: 2007-06-06 06:50 pm (UTC)And yes, I agree, the decisions of what does get published, and what publishers refuse to touch, have long been confusing to me.
Respectfully,
DB_Story