A fantastic post-modern sci-fi political commentary that does not try to hide its intentions. Jeanette Winterson crafts her novel to simulate the repetition that her story invokes. She connects the past to the present to the future and to the imaginary past, present, and future in this phenomenal look at what it means to be human and what we do with our humanity. ( )

It's better when an SF writer discovers an ism than vice-versa (though not by much) as in this novel "The Stone Gods". While re-hashing and the eternal return, the cycle of violence... are a basic theme of the novel, this doesn't save it from being a bit like a badly informed but 'enthusiastic' blog: derivative, recycled, and parasitic on the form. It may work for those who have never read SF and to whom some of the elements will be new.
Avoid it. ( )

Title: The Stone Gods
Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Harcourt, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-15-101491-0
Review by Bob Lane, MA

In "On Literature" Umberto Eco, considering recipes for writers, writes:

" There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules; and there is no hot magma of inspiration. But it is true that there is a sort of initial idea and that there are very precise phases in a process that develops only gradually."

Winterson’s novel grows naturally out of that non-recipe. She presents and develops an idea that radiates through all of the phases of the book. Even as her protagonist becomes unstuck in time, reminiscent of that great American moralist, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., (“So it Goes”), the idea is foremost, the profundity and humour manifest on every page. Eco, Vonnegut, and other writers come to mind when reading The Stone Gods. For example, Jared Diamond’s book Collapse strikes me as a scientific source for the story. Diamond writes of the collapse of Easter Island, “The sad story of of European impacts on Easter Islanders may be quickly summarized. After Captain Cook’s brief sojourn in 1774, there was a steady trickle of European visitors. .. They must be assumed to have introduced European diseases and thereby to have killed many previously unexposed islanders…” (111, 112) Collapse is a central idea in The Stone Gods.

One additional description of the art of writing that pertains to Winterson’s novel is from the famous preface to Joseph Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus:

"The sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness, or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to those who, in the fullness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus: My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to you deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm - all you demand - and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."

Conrad’s pronouns may be sexist but his insight is universal. The Stone Gods certainly provides encouragement, consolation, fear, charm, and a glimpse of truth. What is the nature of the container that carries this truth? Is it fantasy? Science fiction? Here’s Winterson’s take, “People say to me, ‘so is the Stone Gods science fiction?’ Well, it is fiction, and it has science in it, and it is set (mostly) in the future, but the labels are meaningless. I can’t see the point of labelling a book like a pre-packed supermarket meal. There are books worth reading and books not worth reading. That’s all.” (Source)
“What’s it about?” asks one of the characters. “A repeating world.”

As we are destroying the atmosphere, the lakes and rivers that sustain us, the oceans from whence we came, we seem unable to face those facts of collapse and continue to pollute the waters and spew waste into the air. What if we found another planet rich with mammal sustaining oxygen, clear skies, and clean water? Could we travel there by advanced space travel? If so, would we mistreat it in the same way? Would we find that we were in a repeating world?

The novel is fascinating in its answers to all of those questions. Peopled with characters both human and robotic it moves freely in time and space to deliver on the promise of what might save us form disaster. Billie is unstuck in time like Vonnegut’s character in Slaughterhouse-Five and the ride through time and space is well worth the price of a ticket. Billie learns this:
"A quantum universe – neither random nor determined. A universe of potentialities, waiting for an intervention to affect the outcome.
Love is an intervention.
Why do we not choose it?" (203)

Winterson is at the top of her game in this novel. She continues to grow as an author who writes with compassion and skill. Her writing is creative and fresh; her language sharp and incisive.

Let Winterson herself have the last word: "People have asked me, ‘is this a political book? Is it a statement?’ I have said many times that I believe our time to be unique in the history of the world. Either we face our environmental challenges now, or many of us will perish, and much of what we cherish in civilisation will be destroyed. I am sorry to sound apocalyptic, but this is what I believe.
Stone Gods isn’t a pamphlet or a docudrama or even a call to arms, it is first and foremost a work of fiction, but I am sure that change of any kind starts in the self, not in the State, and I am sure that when we challenge ourselves imaginatively, we then use that challenge in our lives. I want the Stone Gods to be a prompt, but most of all, a place of possibility.” (Source)

Bob Lane is an Honorary Research Associate in Philosophy and Literature at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia. ( )

This book is science fiction. Some people have a problem with this.
How people react to this is always of great entertainment. It can be seen in the various online reviews of this book, trying to decipher what it is and what it is not.
Most comical for me was when one reviewer insisted on correcting all the errors about Easter island the book contains; how captain cook did not abandon any of his crew on that island, how the deforestation of that island actually happened, how the natives really treated Cook and his crew. Clearly, he did not understand what was meant by the word fiction.
I am sure no one questioned the validity of Jeanette Winterson's web-footed Venetians in 'The Passion', or her extraordinary revision of Noah's ark in 'Boating for Beginners'. In fact, that she even got any facts correct about Easter Island impressed me.
While I was reading this I assumed, being completely ignorant of Easter Island and it's history, that the fact that it had been completely stripped of trees was a fact of her invention. I was willing to go that far to listen to Winterson's argument.
Someone else nominated the absurdity of space travel for the purpose of alleviating a polluted planet. Again, the actual functionality of this plot is not the point, the point was to illustrate a flaw in human nature that causes us to have an effect on our planet. ( )

I love Winterson, I love sci fi, and I especially love dystopian novels. But something about The Stone Gods sadly fell flat for me. Perhaps it was just because Winterson was out of her comfort zone with the genre; all of the sci fi elements were either vintage or cliche (depending on how charitable one is about them). Most of the characters didn't resonate strongly with me, and the story was sketchy and hard to grasp.

The last part may actually be to the book's credit. The plot is about humans' inability to grasp "the big picture," and their inability to keep from making the same mistakes - of consumerism and damage to the economy - over and over again. Quick fixes, living in the here and now, are more attractive solutions than foresight or prudence.

That is how The Stone Gods begins: when it looks like the planet has just about had it, the inhabitants have caused too much permanent destruction, a new planet is discovered. It is politicized and viewed as a reprieve and a solution. But human nature doesn't change.

Winterson does have some interesting things to say as far as environmental politics goes (although I couldn't help but wonder as I was reading, if the politics she satirizes will all read as terribly dated, looking back on it). But as a work of literature, it needs a bit of polish. ( )