author : Justina Robson

Anjuli is a genius with a perfect memory, who has a great job as psychiatrist to a true AI. Sounds wonderful, except that she believes herself to be a fraud, her best friend has just died in mysterious circumstances, and she has discovered that the Company that she works for has some rather dark secrets. And then things just keep getting worse.

In 2000 I listened to a 2Kon panel discussion of the Arthur C Clarke Awards shortlist, which included Silver Screen. From that I got a strong, and completely incorrect, impression of what it was about, despite the fact that every comment made was correct!

This is certainly a great book, if very confusing in places. The future atmosphere is nicely painted, with no great gobs of infodump, just a slowly dawning realisation of just how different some aspects of life have become under the reality of AIs and nanotech. Anjuli is a deeply flawed character (as are most of the others), and none of the problems have an easy, or indeed any, solution. There is no magic rewind button here. But the journey is interesting, and full of variety.

Natalie Armstrong is a scientist dedicated to mapping and manipulating the brain's meme-plex. She wants to use her nanite technology and programming to help mentally ill and brain-damaged people; various governments and organisations have other ideas. FBI agent Jude Westhorpe is investigating his half-sister's attempted murder, during a strange outbreak of madness in her town. The trail leads him to Natalie, and they soon find themselves caught up in a dangerous web of conspiracies, where they can trust no-one.

After a slow start (I stalled about a hundred pages in, and it took me a few weeks to get started again) this is good stuff. Great gobs of consciousness and complexity science, along with immunology and information theory. It's very complicated, with all sides doing terrible things for what they believe to be the best of motives, and Natalie and Jude get sucked in deeper and deeper until it looks as if there is no possible way out for the entire human race.

Some have criticised "almost supernatural outcomes like walking through walls" as being out of place -- I don't think they are -- it's just (an extreme) extrapolation of the tech and science in the plot.

People also seem to want to comment on "the sense of place". Now, part of it is set in York, where I've worked for the last nearly seven years -- so maybe I should comment. I didn't recognise the places (except for the names), but that's nothing to go by -- I often don't recognise places when I'm actually in them, let alone from descriptions of them.

The main problem I had was with the programming (natch), but then this never feels right to me in books (the coding styles all feel 20 years in the past, rather than 10 years in the future) -- too much "and then I quickly wrote a bunch of code and downloaded it and solved the problem" rather than "and I quickly wrote a bunch of code, so had to spend the next couple of weeks debugging it, but there's still this weird little problem just there. Sometimes." Although here we do also have some horrible hacky kludged code, and one main plot element is due to code going wrong. So that's quite realistic.

Grand scope, good ideas, nicely executed. I'm not sure why I stalled, but if you do too, keep going; it's worth it.

• Helicon 2 panel discussion of the Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist

Elves and Borgs and Rock'n'Roll, oh my!

The Quantum Bomb of 2015 opened the way between the realms of humans, demons, fairies, and elves, and suddenly life has become much more confusing and dangerous. Agent Lila Black is now half cyborg, after much of her body was destroyed on a failed mission to Alfheim. On her first assignment after her cure, she is bodyguarding Zal, a renegade Elf Rock star who's receiving death threats from the Elvish secret police. Soon it turns out everything is much more complicated, and dangerous, than anyone thought, and Lila is in it up to her cyborg neck. But she has a lot of very cool hardware to call on.

Although this might start off looking like a fairly traditional (if I can use that word) Elves and Rock'n'Roll story, it quickly veers off into its own interesting territory. The combination of big-gun-enhanced cyborgs, and fantasy tropes, is all mixed in well together, and very little is what it seems. The particular tale here finishes well, but with enough loose ends and new threads to make the start of an interesting series.

Agent Lila Black has only just been debriefed about her disastrous first mission, which her actions resulted in Alfheim starting a civil war, and she hasn't told her bosses about the dead necromancer elf Tath living inside her chest. She gets sent straight out again, off to Demonia, to learn how the elf Zal became half demon. She has to learn how to avoid demonic assassination attempts without plunging Demonia into civil war, too. It probably means a trip to Hell. Meanwhile, Zal gets trapped somewhere much more dangerous.

The story is now getting more complicated as several more strong characters get entangled with Lila, and as she gets to confront some uncomfortable truths about her past, her family, her current job, and her resident elf. There are more threads this time, making a more complex weave, but there's a great resolution, and interesting scene setting for the next book.