It would be easy during the course of this review to embark on a debate as to whether Living Next Door to the God of Love is in fact Hard SF or fantasy. However, I find such discourse somewhat dull, introspective and ultimately incompatible with my view, that being: you use whatever tropes work to tell the story you need to tell. I suspect much of what some call Science Fantasy arises from a similar attitude.

And Living Next Door to the God of Love is very much cut from that mould.

On the SF front we have multiple universes, people wired up to networks, cyborgs, machine controlled universes and vast multidimensional beings so great in their power they are considered gods. But we also have elves, superheroes, mythical creatures and angels. In short there’s an awful lot going on in this book.

Ostensibly the book is about Francine, a fifteen year old run away and Jalaeka, a run away of a different kind, chased by the vast entity that created him and now wants to consume him. Weaving in and out of their story are a collection of characters with their own tales to tell: from a grief-stricken cyborg and a flirtatious elf through to a scientist seeking answers, stitching it all together is the central theme of love. Whether that’s the loss of, nature of, absence of, breaking of or any other facets that my limited experience of the world failed to pick up on.

Woven in with this you’ll find the nature of identity being picked at and poked at, in particular what close relationships do to who you are, how they change you and make you into something new. And I think it’s safe to say there’s a liberal dose of ethics there as well.

By which you could be feeling: Jeez, a little light reading then… However, I would be doing the book a disservice if I left you with that impression because there’s also: cyborgs, elves, mythical creatures, AI, multiple-universe, big epic conflict…you get the idea. The story has layers.

I really liked this book. I’m quite a big fan of the first in Robson’s Quantum Gravity series but I liked Living Next Door to the God of Love rather more, even though it shows clear foreshadowing of that later story. The prose has a good, clean, visual style and I really warmed to the split POV structure of the book (each chapter tells the story from a different character’s POV, some of them overlapping slightly).

That SF is a literature of ideas is something Robson clearly understands and the maelstrom of ideas in this book will have such addicts purring, but there’s real thematic depth and story to this book, keeping story junkies like myself happy. The characters, particularly the central cast, are well drawn and inject an all-important emotional heartbeat into the work.

The book has a few weaknesses. The structure of the book, whilst being one I enjoyed, is unlikely to appeal to more mainstream sensibilities and this is a bit of a shame as they’re missing out. There is also such an abundance of stuff going on in this book that at times it feels unrelenting and undoubtedly results in some points getting lost in the mix.

Final thoughts: a really smart, honest look at love, relationships and identity in a sexy cyberpunk cross fantasy wrapper. If you like your reading to be challenging and entertaining you’ll love this and I recommend it whole-heartedly.

4/5