inter-dimensional cyber elf sex!

Does anyone remember Shadowrun? It was a FASA role-playing setting and system which went through a brief vogue in the early 90s: the premise was that Weirdness Happens somewhere around 2050, and a dark near-future high-tech world is suddenly infused with elves and magic and trolls and dwarves, oh my. The William Gibson-style cyberpunk setting was very big at the time, with systems like R.Talsorian's Cyberpunk itself and ICE's Cyberspace (sheds a tear for the late lamented Rolemaster...); Shadowrun was a fairly inevitable portmanteau spinoff in which you, the happy roleplayer, didn't have to choose between sf and fantasy, but could indeed have it all. It's actually interesting that in some ways the contemporary paranormal romance genre follows a similar path - modern urban setting mixed with magic, although not always with the big-corp heavy-tech cyberware feel that Shadowrun had.

One of the upshots of Shadowrun, though, is that I can't really come across any setting in which magic and tech exist side-by-side without a sort of mental yawn and shrug - so done, you know, so old, such a cliché. So when the book club acquired the first in Justina Robson's Quantum Gravity series, Keeping It Real, I grabbed it precisely because I was expecting formulaic stuff with reportedly hot and schlocky elf-sex, and that's pretty much where my still sinus-infected and glandular brain is at right now. Oops. Um. Error.

Justina Robson is a pretty damned good writer, and while her series (of which I have now whacked through the first two) is superficially similar to the Shadowrun premise (weird mystic event creates parallel dimensions filled with elves, faerie, demons, ghosts and elementals who all joyously impinge on Earth; the main character is a hugely cybernetic assassin), it's also a lesson in how to take a cliché and twist it into something dense, thought-provoking and astonishingly real. The world-building here is superb: these different creatures and dimensions come with their own complex, challenging, truly alien societies, all tied in beautifully to different kinds of magic and energy, with complicated political goings-on, double-bluffs and betrayals. (The demon society is sheer genius). There's actually hot elf-sex, but not gratuitously, and it's enormously illuminating of the characters, races and magical systems involved. I tip my hat to an author capable of constructing a love interest who's an elven rock-star and who isn't actually cheesy. Also, her exploration of the damaged psyche of the cyberised character, and the implications of being a mostly metal killing machine in a magical world, is sensitive and compassionate.

So, yes. I recommend these books highly. They're at least ten times as dense and challenging as you expect, they don't go where you expect them to, they do it at breakneck speed while ripping your brain out through both ears and tying it in a bow on the top of your head, and they're fiercely intelligent. It's a hell of a ride. I want the rest of the series, now. Or at least when this bloody headache lets up and I can focus to read. Three days of Sid laughing at the Advil is really pushing it, I think.