The Stone Gods

There’s a reverse snobbery thing you sometimes find in science fiction in which sf commentators sneer at non-sf authors, so-called “literary fiction” authors, who write sf and sort of get it wrong. I’m not one of them (well, not unless they sneer at science fiction first). Literary authors writing science fiction, whether they acknowledge it or not, has resulted in some excellent science fiction and fiction. Unfortunately, it has also resulted in books some writers would probably sooner didn’t appear on their bibliographies. I mean, Jeanette Winterson is a highly-regarded author in the UK and has written some excellent novels, but The Stone Gods reads like it was written by someone who thinks all literary sf should resemble show more David Mitchell’s highly successful Cloud Atlas. While the prose is actually really good, everything in the story feels secondhand and, well, used, and you have to wonder what point Winterson thought she was trying to prove. I mean, the novel opens with the sort of misogyny that might not have looked out of place in a 1940s sf novel but would certainly have raised eyebrows in a 2000 one. And then the narrative drops back to the 1700s and Easter Island, and takes as real the myth the islanders caused the islands’ ecological collapse. The idea of using science fiction as one of several narratives to illuminate a point is, in principle, almost impossible to abuse, although perhaps not entirely. Mitchell at least has a history in sf – he was a member of the BSFA for many years – but even so his novels still feel somewhat jejeune on a science-fictional level. Which is somewhat ironic, given that science fiction is itself a largely juvenile genre. But Winterson, an otherwise excellent writer, does not compare well with Mitchell with this book, and I don’t simply mean reading The Stone Gods as sf. In other respects, too. It’s clumsy. It fumbles its deployment of its sf tropes. It seems to imagine sf exists in opposition to an historical narrative. Which is not true. And never has been. Everything a literary author could do wrong when when writing sf-as-literary-fiction it sort of does wrong. And yes, I know “wrong” is not the right word, but you know what I mean. It fumbles everything. It’s almost the dictionary definition of a book by a lit author that sf snobs sneer at. Which unfortunately means it is neither good sf nor good literary fiction. Avoidable. show less

A longawaited return to form by one of my all time favourite writers. Using her imagination, instead of over-familiar plots of running away and sordid love-affairs, Winterson took my breath away with this beautifully scripted dystopia. All her themes are still there. We are constantly leaving, the environment sucks, and it's all our own fault. But despite the pessimism, Wintersons love of people and sense of humour keep shining through. And it's loyalty and friendship, however feeble and incapable of saving us, that make for the most memorable scenes in the book. Boating for beginners prefigures the humoristic lightness present here. The plot of The Stone Gods is far more complex, but it fits neatly together, which makes the book a very show more satisfactory read. show less

Any Winterson is a treat, though not necessarily fully intelligible. A lot about this sort-of-science-fiction novel made me laugh, not least of which was the core story in which all of the intrepid explorers, whom the reader might expect will be the new hope of humanity, die. The core narrative, though, is about the continuity (or even more extreme, the inevitability) of human, robot, parrot, and universal experience. A fun novel about archetypes, plus space pirates, bisexual robots, and of course, stone gods.

"The Stone Gods" is Jeanette Winterson's first foray into science fiction. Set on Planet Orbus, our narrator is Billie Crusoe (yes, the name is significant) a resident of the Central Power and a low level official in Enhancement. Billie is having a tough time, since she owes $3 million in parking fines but is unable to find a human being to speak to about them. Orbus is portrayed as a decadent society of mindless entertainment where reading is virtually a dead art, plastic surgery is the norm and people get themselves genetically fixed at a certain age. Consequently, since everyone is young and beautiful, only sex of the most deviant kind retains any appeal.

Orbus's environment is catastrophically polluted, so when Planet Blue is show more discovered it seems to be the solution to the population's future survival. The only problem is the dinosaurs that populate it. The first robo sapiens, known as Spike, is constructed to travel to the planet on a fact finding mission. Billie meets her as she is downloading her findings prior to being decommissioned. They form a relationship, with the two of them eventually escaping to an isolated farmhouse. Now a suspected terrorist, Billie is sent to Planet Blue which is initially being used as a penal colony.

Suddenly, the novel swerves into 1774 onboard Thomas Cook's ship when it lands on Easter Island. Billy, a cabin boy, tells us of an island where the efforts to construct the stone heads have exhausted the island's resources and consequently its inhabitants are starving.

Next stop, near future Earth. The manuscript of a novel called "The Stone Gods" is found on the Underground. It depicts the "post-3 war" world in which Billie Crusoe is a resident. In this version of the future, Billie is programming Spike, now just a head, with information about humanity and the world. A field trip takes them from Tech City to Wreck City to see the devastation mankind has wrought.

I hope the above gives you some idea what a wildly uneven novel "The Stone Gods" is. There's an uneasy mixture of satire, love story, hectoring environmental polemic and post-modern experimentation. That's a lot to cram into a novel covering only 6 discs on audiobook (that's roughly equivalent to 200 pages of text) and a lot of it doesn't work or is very heavy handed. The satire is too slapstick, which might work in the hands of a master pulp writer like Philip K. Dick, but not when one has Winterson's literary pretensions. The experimentation is a distraction and the Easter Island interlude feels tacked on; it doesn't move the story forward and Winterson's lecturing is exhausting.

Really, this kind of stuff should be left to Margaret Atwood, who has a greater imagination and a much lighter, subtler touch. show less

Science fiction, as a genre, is a way for an author and a people to look directly at their society without having to name names or point fingers. Good science fiction should be a dream, a hope, a warning, and a mirror. Not too many books these days can fulfill sci-fi's true potential...

The Stone Gods does.

Ok, so these are very strong words, but this reader does not think that they are entirely without backing. With this book, Winterson has recaptured much of the spirit of the classic Science Fiction writers of the middle 20th Century in a voice that is distinctly modern/post-modern. It begins in a short, descriptive, cleverly and beautify written Bradburyan world where the human planet is dying, illiteracy is state-mandated, robots are show more obligatory, and genetic science allows one to pick their age. When a new world, pristine and primordial, is discovered, what does humanity do?

Though it is a simple and oft-seen theme, this story quickly reveals its depths and twists in a circular pattern of human nature. Part-way through it takes a very unexpected path, but that is for you to discover, not me to divulge. In many ways, it is an Environmentalist novel, but in a way that this reader felt was more touching, more troubling, and more believable than any Ismael or Silent Spring.

A short novel, but one that requires patience, thought, and acceptance of the incredible. If you can give Winterson a chance, she very well might just blow you, as she did me, right off your feet. show less

Science fiction that weaves together future, past, and present in three separate but interlinked stories that comment on humanity’s penchant for destroying the world, contrasted with an individual’s ability to love. In the first section, we see a futuristic setting where materialism and vanity have been taken to extremes. The planet Orbus has been decimated by the inhabitants, so they are searching for a new planet on which to start over. In the second part, we are abruptly shifted to the 18th century, where Captain Cook’s ship is visiting Easter Island. The titular “stone gods” are a reference to this island’s moai statues. In the last story, set near present time, Earth has experienced World War III (called Post-3 War), a show more corporation governs society, and people impacted by the fallout are attempting to survive in the wreckage. The protagonists in each of the three times have the same names (Billie/Billy and Spike/Spikkers), and the relationship forming between them is another primary area of focus.

In two of the three timelines, Spike is portrayed as a “Robo-sapiens,” programmed to gain an understanding of humanity, and designed to learn enough to eventually be able to make better decisions for the benefit of society, rather than to its detriment as humans have done. I would like to have seen more deeply drawn characters, especially Spike, as she is of core importance. The dialogue can seem overly-explanatory, but the prose is elegant. At its heart this is a cautionary tale of history repeating itself, not learning from mistakes of the past, and the dangers of overindulgences without regard to impact. Winterson applies this message to themes of environmental responsibility, authoritarian control, and abuse of technology. She examines questions of how an individual can cope in such a society.

The book itself, The Stone Gods, makes several appearances, as well as Captain Cook’s Journal. At times it can be confusing, requiring patience and re-reading in certain sections, but eventually Winterson brings it all together. It’s definitely not for everyone, as it reflects a rather bleak outlook for humankind and the message can become rather heavy-handed. It will appeal to readers of “literary science fiction” in the vein of Ursula K. LeGuin or Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy.

Memorable quotes:
“The key to happiness…is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.”

“Love is an intervention. Why do we not choose it?”

“[T]he future of the planet is uncertain. Human beings aren’t just in a mess, we are a mess. We have made every mistake, justified ourselves, and made the same mistakes again and again. It’s as though we’re doomed to repetition.” show less

When I bought my copy of The Stone Gods, the bookseller told me two things: it had received strong reviews, and “It’s science fiction, you know.” I parried this last one with some fuzzy comment that much of Winterson’s fiction violates expectations, and we left it at that, both sounding smart and not having said much.

And then I started reading: sure enough, page after page, the thing read true to the sci-fi genre. And not just in the details: it sounded like sci-fi, it thought like sci-fi, it even carried sci-fi’s common politics—as much genre work tends to be, it sounded downright reactionary. The main character, Billie Crusoe, sounded as if she had actually been beamed into her era from our own; she spoke constantly of the show more contrast between then and now, as if she’d been witness to our time, and was quite conscientiously leading us through hers, tour-guide style, with heavy asides to the reader and a general lack of believable selfhood.

I was a bit taken aback; in fact, at several points, I had to remind myself of Winterson’s previous work—I said to myself, in fact, “prose this obvious, this flat and predictable, has been put in place for a reason.” And even fifty pages from the end, after the place and the style had shifted radically—several times, in fact—I was still sitting a few seats back in the auditorium, wondering whether she knew what she was up to.

But the connection comes—again and again, in surprising, subtle, parallel, spooky ways. In fact, much of the intersection is rightly described as spooky; quantum, in fact. As she did in Gut Symmetries, Winterson spends a lot of time pulling on the greater metaphor of quantum physics as she sees it mirrored in human life: it would not be a stretch to say that this book, as was Gut Symmetries, is something of a quantum novel, and that Billie Crusoe, strange particle that she is, exists outside of Newtonian plotting: where we want characters to make choices and suffer results—we want them to see three doors, walk through one, then lose forever what was behind the other two—Billie exists simultaneously in all three. The book travels through three different frames of time and space, and she is there—not only that, she is reading about herself in a manuscript left on the Tube, and she is stumbling across her own adventures in the journals of Captain Cook.

At every turn, she meets human short-sightedness: waste, folly, power. And at every turn, she ends up in a dead world, one sacrificed on the altar of power, but with the promise of a new birth coming soon—a new planet, a new peace, a new sapiens—that will never make the same mistakes again.

And this hits on one of the themes running through: the impossibility of denying the limbic, the spooky, the unreal. It’s not emotion that kills us off, it’s control. It’s our fear of a world more complex, less divided, and less clear that leads us to kill off the potential that exists when control falls away. We see this in the corporate governance of MORE, and we see this in the war between the Ariki Mau and the Bird Man on Easter Island. We see this, too, in the Robo sapiens, free of the unpredictability of emotion, to lead us from the damage of our own fuzzy natures. It’s clear, though, that the obsessive attempts to hide from our fuller selves have brought on our ending.

It was clear to me that the novel was, in part, Winterson’s response to the upsurge in media/commodity culture and feel-good authoritarianism that seems to be cresting so fervently at this time. Initially, I thought to myself, “what a shame that the novel will end up such a didactic response—so flat and obvious.” With the patters apparent, though, I see that the “message” of the book, in fact, is nowhere near as easy and flat as the initial section seems to belie. Maybe I’m a sucker for flash and experimentation, but the risk that Winterson took in the Stone Gods felt—to me—brave, insightful, and revelatory. It’s certainly not her first foray into these waters, nor is it the first book to reinvent linear narrative; however, the mission it takes and the tools it picks match up perfectly. I’m glad I stuck it through. show less