Lila Black is a cyborg. She’s got human bits, but she’s more metal than flesh, and she’s packed with weapons and gadgets that pop out of every conceivable square inch of her body when she goes into combat mode. Cassandra Kresnov is a synthetic person, with super strength and heightened reflexes. She doesn’t have any hidden weaponry, though she can interface directly with computer nets, an ability she shares with Lila. Think of Cassandra as a female Terminator, with Lila as a bit more like RoboCop. Naturally, I can’t help but wonder who would win in a fight? Cassandra doesn’t have Lila’s on board weapon systems, but she seems a good deal more self-adjusted/self-assured than Lila. But then Lila, despite her emotional anxieties, is nuclear powered. Somewhere in the multiverse, these two ladies must have met, and if Marvel comics has taught us anything, it’s that when world’s collide, super folk always throw down. Still, I suspect after the tussle, Lila and Sandy would actually get along quite well.

Meanwhile, back here on Earth Prime, both of these ass-kicking augmented women continue to amass the love.

Tomas L Martin, of SFCrowsnest, returns to Cassandra Kresnov’s world with his review of Joel Shepherd’s Breakaway, in which he says:

“It is this extremely nuanced political spectrum that truly brings ‘Breakaway’ to life. That and the explosions. The superb set pieces featuring SWAT teams against extremists are matched in excitement by the battles on the floors of government. The debates between Callay’s representatives are as exciting as the running gun battles in its streets… The brilliance of ‘Breakaway’ in making these politicians seem just as real as those in the real world adds a huge depth of interest to this book… an extremely well rounded novel. Recommended.”

And on Blog, Jvstin Style, we read of Justina Robson’s work: “I really enjoyed Keeping It Real. The book is unabashedly the first in a series, the book ends with lots of dangling questions to be answered. Hyping and turbocharging Earth into the 21st century, with high tech to counter and contrast against the sorceries of the other realms provides new life for the ‘Elves meet modern humans’ genre. Here, we do get an Elf riding a motorcycle, but we have a special agent with a nuclear reactor to help give her an edge, as well as a lot of other toys. There is a decent leavening of sex and eroticism, but not to the point where it overwhelms the narrative as it seems to do in a certain writer’s oeuvre…there is a lot of potential here, to explore these new worlds and the interactions between these interesting characters. Not just Zal and Lila, but other characters in the band, and others we meet throughout the course of the novel, from elf necromancers to a demoness singer to a dragon that reminded me of the elemental entities of Exalted. Robson knows that the characters that inhabit her worlds have to hold up as well as the world itself, and she does this ably.”