Living Next Door to the God of Love | ||||||||
Justina Robson | ||||||||
Bantam Spectra, 453 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Greg L. Johnson
Living Next Door to the God of Love is nominally a sequel to Natural History, in which humanity and its
post-human creations, the Forged, first encountered Stuff, a bit of eleven-dimensional matter extended into our own four
dimensions. Stuff brought contact with Unity, and by the time of Living Next Door that contact is having a profound
impact on humanity. Unity can provide access to universes created to amuse and entertain, places such as Metropolis and
Sankhara. The dark cloud hovering overhead is called Translation. Coming into contact with Stuff, or sometimes just being
in the wrong place for too long can result in Translation into Unity. The claim is that the individual survives, the
reality is that to everyone else it looks an awful lot like death.
Living Next Door to the God of Love kicks off when Metropolis is destroyed, and everyone in it Translated. At about
the same time, a teenager named Francine runs away to Sankhara. When she meets Jalaeka, her need for love changes him,
and places herself and everyone else in danger. For Jalaeka is Unity's ages-old nemesis, and the reason Metropolis was destroyed.
If a god is the embodiment of human urges and desires writ large, transformed into archetype and natural force, then contact
with such a being can have a profound impact on the individuals and the god. Everyone who meets Jalaeka is changed by
the experience, and at the same time Jalaeka is constantly being affected by the desires and longings of the humans
around him. Whether he will be pulled in the direction of Unity or find another path for the expression of his feelings
is the central concern of the story. The conflict is between a love that seeks to consume and a love that seeks to
free the other. It's one of the great issues of human existence, but not necessarily a common theme in hard science
fiction. There have been many attempts at portraying god-like characters in SF, Jalaeka is one of the few whose abilities
and motivations seem convincingly greater than human.
Robson sets her story, for the most part, in a post-human playground, a pocket universe featuring an urban landscape
surrounded by a vast, expanding wilderness, peopled by humans, Forged, and creatures made of Stuff. It's a fitting
setting for an extremely ambitious novel. Living Next Door to the God of Love is one of the rare examples of the
sequel outshining the predecessor, the prose is more consistent from beginning to end, the characters more complex and
more likeable. The theme of competing aspects of love sets the novel apart, while the setting and occasional hints of
mathematics and cosmology leave no doubt that this is a science fiction novel, one in which literary values, philosophical
inquiry, and those elements unique to science fiction add up to form a much greater whole.
Reviewer Greg L Johnson lives in Minneapolis, MN, where he is fairly certain that none of his neighbors are gods. His reviews also appear in the The New York Review of Science Fiction. |
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