Read the paperback edition when it first came out an 2000 and enjoyed it very much. ( )

Despite many warm words from divers readers, I struggled with this. The central character becomes his own McGuffin in chapter two; we take up to chapter five for the writing and characterisation to come alive. There's a lot of telling rather than showing; and when the novel isn't engaged in moments of tension, we are treated to a lot of hi-tech office politics.

The POV character is engaging and quite ordinary (though it says something about how our lives are accelerating when we can look at a woman who is a qualified psychiatrist for AIs and who works on a space station and think of her life as 'ordinary', so credit to Robson). The main problem I had with this character was that she was written as a character of mixed ethnicity - Anglo-Indian - but that background played little or no part in the novel until quite late on. At one point, I misattributed her detailed ethnic background, and other reviewers have done that too. More, she hardly came over as 'Yorkshire' at all. And although the story used Northern English settings - a Good Thing, to be sure - they didn't convince and sometimes felt like little more than names plucked from a road atlas. Which given that Robson is a native of Leeds, I find a bit surprising. Perhaps she lacks the 'sense of place' gene - I lack it too, so I understand that this can happen - but then why make a point of a setting that you can't carry off?

Given that this is a 1999 novel, though, the technology doesn't come over as particularly off-target; the AI autonomous taxis ring especially true. A bit more surprising was the sudden inclusion of a religious cult as a major player in a drama about AIs and their legal status. And a terrorist bombing at an unspecified railway station in Manchester was unfortunate. Indeed, there are Green and anti-Green extremist groups referenced in the plot but they are kept very much in the background and indeed are made to seem more like implements in the office politics; had the novel been written five years later, that would not have been possible, and it's one of the things that rings false in a modern reading.

Certainly, the pacing seemed somewhat uneven, though the last third of the book improves greatly on the first two-thirds. Still, enough people thought well of this book to promote Robson's career, and other works followed; so this may just be me. Certainly, there is talent on display because when this novel works, it works adequately. I shall return to Justina Robson's work; but perhaps not just yet. ( )

This somehow seems like it should merit more than one and a half stars, yet I became insanely bored and stopped reading around page 80. There are severe pacing problems here; Robson takes at least three times as many pages to develop things as she should. ( )

The premise: ganked from publisher's website: Silver Screen presents an enjoyably different, subversive slant on the science fiction themes of AI and cyberspace. Insecure and overweight heroine Anjuli O’Connell is one of a group of friends who have been hot-housed from an early age to perform in genius-level jobs. But Anjuli worries that her eidetic memory and her friendship with genuine smart boy Roy Croft has been her ticket to success, rather than any real intelligence of her own.

She’s put to the test when Roy kills himself in an experiment to upload his mind into cyberspace, seeking that SF dream of bodiless immortality, which doesn’t work as expected. At the same time her boyfriend’s research has led to him harnessing himself to dubious biomechanoid technologies, which pull the user into mental symbiosis, creating hybrid consciousness – a new “I”, continuous with the old, but different. “Where does life end and the machine begin?”

Meanwhile Anjuli’s grasping multinational employer, OptiNet, the owner of global communications AI, 901, is locked into an increasingly bitter war with the Machine-Greens, who preach AI liberation. As the case for 901’s humanity, or otherwise, comes up before the Strasbourg Court, expert witness Anjuli is targeted by assassins and entangled in the hunt for an algorithm which is the key to machine consciousness, and which may even be the master-code of life itself.

This story explores many interfaces between humans and their technologies, between the promises of science and the explanations of faith. It is written in a first-person style that mingles elements of detective story and confessional. Alongside its SF content, the book delves into the complexities of friendship, loyalty, love, and betrayal from an intimate human perspective.

This is "grrrl-style" SF: as well as all the favorite “Airfix” features, the protagonists deconstruct personal relationships amidst macrocosmic and deeply philosophical goings-on. The writing is punchy, but with a literary sheen. It delivers complex concepts and a twisting plot with a deceptively light touch.

My Rating: Good Read

I really enjoyed reading this book. It may not be for self-professed cyberpunk snobs, but I think if you enjoy character-centric SF, if you enjoy the focus on people and their problems against the backdrop of an SF-nal setting (and this setting is very SF-nal, you can tell Robson loves the genre), and if you have a relatively solid dose of SF in your reading/viewing background, you should be fine with this book. It boasts of a fascinating heroine who's rather likable (overweight but with the memory of a machine), who's trying desperately to solve both a murder as well as stop the death of another, who also has best friends who pass the Bechdel test, you may want to stick this book in your TBR pile. The AI character is fascinating as well, because not only will it appear as classic film stars from the silver screen (hence the title, but there's more to it than that), but also, you get to learn the AI's creation myth as the AI sees it, which is really cool.

Of Robson's work, Mappa Mundi is still my favorite (and it is a FAVORITE), but this isn't a bad place to start, not at all. That said, if you're more of a fantasy reader than SF reader, you may want to start with Keeping It Real instead, which is her cyberpunk, urban elf fantasy, and is a lot of fun. All that said, Robson's an author whose work I almost always enjoy, and if you find the right book from her for you, I think you will too. :)

Spoilers, yay or nay?: Nay. It took me a while to get to reviewing this, and the book isn't as fresh on my mind as it would have been otherwise. Still, there are some details I'd like to discuss that -- while not spoilerific -- might make some people jumpy, so if you're one of those people (or if you're in a hurry), don't worry about the full review, which is linked below. Everyone else, comments and discussion are most welcome!

REVIEW: Justina Robson's SILVER SCREEN

Happy Reading! ( )

One of the best AI books I've ever read. The only thing I felt was a little off was the handling of the character Augustine, who never seemed like he quite fit properly into the narrative, although maybe that was intentional. ( )