Customer Reviews

The Stone Gods

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Despite a mere 200 pages you too can experience what seems like an epic, multi-volume heap of guilt vomited upon the vulgar vanity with which us humans tuck ourselves in each night. We describe ourselves as civilized, perhaps even progressive, yet in her book The Stone Gods, Jeanette Winterson skillfully reiterates what what we humans are so good at, and obliterates such vanity like a bear would to a sausage pinata.

The problem with us, Winterson reminds, is that for all our abilities, we just can't seem to learn anything from history. This recurring idea is the theme of 3 and 1/2 short stories, vignettes maybe, all intertwined within The Stone Gods. The first story, centering around the newly discovered Planet Blue, deals with a very advanced "civilization" coming to terms with its interplanetary recolonization, or at least it's inevitable effect upon colonization. The second story, a historical speculative taking place on Easter Island, illustrates the more aged impulses involved in worshiping your chosen god while sacrificing your home in the process. The third + 1/2 story deals with our near-future hubris after the inevitable Post-3 War, or a not-so-subtle hint at World War III.

This novel is a brilliantly conceived yet complex mix of science fiction and dramatic literature. It's up to the reader to discern what worlds, time periods, even places Winterson is alluding to, and she does fantastic job of speculating human behavior, if it is indeed human, within each. She grapples with relevant concepts of today such as war, artificial intelligence, global warming, cosmetic enhancement, all the stuff we humans turn toward when we we turn away from ourselves. Our nuance is that we accept how flawed as a species we are, yet we still are too lazy to do anything about it.

Because of this, Winterson unleashes three apocalyptic scenarios upon the reader, both with beauty and inanity. It's a profound exposition on what it means to be human; dare I say it's vividly gonzo. Although it's an excellent book, for me it tended to degrade a bit at the third + story, amounting to more an effort of stream-of-consciousness than a coherent storyline. Here she also gets a little too complex in referring to the book within the story itself.

In any case, this is an imaginative and important work, good for both China Mieville and Cormac McCarthy fans.

a pleasant and enjoyable book with powerful ideas sprinkled through that make it well worth reading. while the political issues are timely as the world slides further into the destructive ideology of violence, these are not treated with much depth, nor are the characters very thoroughly crafted. great pushing of conceptual boundaries of sexuality for those who do not live in metropolises where we've seen (done? ;-) it all perhaps. implausible plot points occasionally bordering on silly. that said i'd still recommend it for the interwoven aspects of truly deep, touching, and thought provoking associations between characters and existential concepts.

Similiar in plot structure with the DVD "The Fountain," "The Stone Gods" has a three part setting of time and space in this apocalyptic warning tale of human self-destruction. Opening 65 million years ago, an advanced human civilization looks for immigration to Earth to escape the ecological damage and wars that plague their planet Orbus. The middle section takes place on Easter Island in 1774 while the finale is set in the future with civilization trying to rebuild among the ruins. The author is the writer of "The Passion" and "Oranges are not the Only Fruit." This book may not be for every reader, as the writing is an acquired taste of brief sentences and paragraphs. But it is a book that will make you think and rue Earth's future.

This book was recommended to me because I like feminist science fiction, and I was surprised to find out that Winterson mostly writes much more mainstream feminist works. The style seemed reminiscent of Sheri Tepper and Kurt Vonnegut -- clear prose, very quirky world, strong environmentalist motifs. It's a cautionary fable with a lot of resonance to our modern world, but more humor than plausibility, even if it's often a disturbing kind of humor, modern trends drawn to their illogical extremes.

The main character is a somewhat rebelliously old-fashioned young woman struggling to deal with a bureaucratic near-future world. There is an extremely sexy female Robo sapiens, a sentient AI. There is a dying red planet, a dying blue planet, different ways in which a planet can die. There is an interlude set during the voyages of Captain Cook. The protagonist is sympathetic and convincingly drawn; the other characters never fully make sense to her, but that seems to be part of the point.

It was also recommended to me for the lesbian robot sex. There is, in fact, lesbian robot sex, although it's not depicted very graphically, which may be a good or a bad thing depending on tastes. It seems to make sense in context.

Jeanette Winterson is absolutely one of my favorite authors, and The Stone Gods really illustrates why. There is so much beauty and heartbreak in her prose, an intense longing belied by the sheer exhilaration of love and a deep understanding of what is considered human and why it is so. Her writing breaks my heart several times over, but I always feel fully mended by the end.

The Stone Gods is an exceptional book. It is lyrical but dense, a deep love story that also discusses some fundamental ideas of humanity (freedom, maturity and humanity, sexuality and love) against the backdrop of a frighteningly possible future (a third world war resulting in corporate takeover and an untenable environment). It mixes these elements together impressively and in only 200 pages has considerable impact. I can understand why Atwood (who wrote "Oryx and Crake," another excellent novel about the 'end' of the world) likes this book so much.

Many of the low reviews for this book appear to have wanted a potboiler. This is not a book read solely for the series of events that happen in it. Its lyricism is not limited to the writing, but extends to the portrayal of this world and its characters. The names of the characters (Billie Crusoe is later assisted by Friday, Cpt. Handsome, etc.) reflects this, as do some of their decisions, and complaints of "unbelievability" are misplaced.

One low reviewer appears to be offended by the discussion of pedophilia and sex in the book. I think Winterson does a masterful job demonstrating a consumer culture's sexual appetites, and presents a believable progression of current society. Maybe a "degradation" to pedophilia would be more appropriate, since the protagonist is strongly opposed to the practice, and I think in part it is presented as a reflection of society's failure to mature past childhood. Second, this speculative fiction (as Atwood would say) appears to treat people as people in the purest sense, and has little interest in trapping them by being male or female. It is implied being straight is uncommon, although not necessarily a negative. This treatment is similar to Heinlein's "The Golden Globe" (public nudity also appears to not be a taboo anymore, etc.) Finally, this book has very little focus on physical sex, and sex acts that are described are brief and usually comic. If you are offended by same sex relationships then I hope you enjoy this book and after reading it appreciate they are like any other.

This satirical, sad, and often poetic presentation of the human condition is described in three short stories (or three and a half), all linked by a protagonist of the same name, though the three time periods (past, present, future) are far from each other. The author chooses the name Billie Crusoe for the protagonist in all three(female in the first and last, male in the second), and the famous castaway's dilemma of survival hovers behind it all, with even a "Friday" character as a guide in the final episode. There are several themes, each poignantly presented so well by the author that the reader is pulled into the hopes and heartbreaks of the protagonist. All stories are linked by the flaw of organized humanity's need to destroy what has gone before in order to present and preserve a `new and better way'--- whether the dinosaur population of Earth in the first vignette, the stone gods of Easter Island in the second, or the wretched remnant of the free thinkers in the third. Within these settings lies a second theme, the need for love and reality of abandonment. At times this is stretched to the absurd--- whether that love lies in a better-than-human robot, in a dear friend, or in a mother. All in all, this is science fiction at its best, moving us to see the present and future, and ourselves in it, complete with our blatant flaws---and yet with constant hope for a better day, whatever the cost.

Jared Diamond, in his book on environmental destruction "Collapse," poses a question first asked by his students, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say as he was doing it?" In the central section of "The Stone Gods," Jeanette Winterson transforms Diamond's historical account into the story of Billy, a young boy who abandoned on Easter Island by Captain Cook's crew and who becomes a witness to the final stages of the demise of the native society. Young Billy's story mirrors the themes of flanking sections of the book, which are set in two alternate versions of a future. In the first, Billie Crusoe and her fellow refugees have been banished to a faraway planet to make it habitable for colonization--but their mission goes irreversibly awry. In the final section, yet another Billie ends up in a post-apocalyptic ghetto composed of the dregs of environmental degradation and population overload. Unlike their literary forebear Robinson Crusoe, however, each version of Billie/Billy is stranded not on a desert island but in a desert civilization, where the problem is not the lack of people but their surfeit, along with their seemingly innate inability to tell when things are FUBAR.

Is one of these versions of the future fiction-within-the-fiction? Or is Winterson suggesting parallel universes? As the robot Spike says in the first section, "Any civilization will think as we did--that they are the first and the only." (Shades of "Battlestar Galactica"?) I'm sure the ambiguity is intentional; it's certainly worthwhile to flip back through the book and try to figure out how all the pieces "fit" into one coherent "Twelve Monkeys"-style narrative. But, while fun, that's an exercise that seems to me somewhat beside Winterson's point. Because in each of the three parallel stories about the meltdown of civilization, there are also three parallel stories about love. Even in the bleakest scenarios, when all else is literally lost, love can survive--even though the futuristic Billies fall in love with robots--and that irrepressible optimism is the silver lining of this dystopian nightmare. (While reading the novel, I found myself unexpectedly recalling various scenes from the Spielberg-Kubrick movie, "A.I.")

Also counteracting the bleakness is the fact that "The Stone Gods" is surely one of the funnier science fiction novels of recent years; Winterson's schtick ranges from slapstick and farce to sarcasm and biting cynicism--sometimes all at once. (Billie explains Spike to a bartender, "She's a robot." "She's got no body." "She's designed to think." . . . "What's she designed to think about?" "War, money, the future." "She'll need a drink, then.") There is an endearing nerdiness throughout that will be familiar to readers of Winterson's "Gut Symmetries."

As both a fan of Winterson's other novels and a fan of science fiction, then, I enjoyed the novel for its humor and its humanity--but it's not without incongruities and exposition that many sci-fi readers will find jarring or awkward, not to mention the occasional tendency to polemic that seems unnecessary, since the stories themselves do a capable job of conveying Winterson's dire warnings. As Ursula Le Guin points out in an otherwise positive review of the novel, such traps are the type of thing authors more at home with science fiction would avoid--but what Winterson unquestionably brings to the genre is her imaginative and quirky voice.

The Stone Gods is basically three separate end of the world scenarios all involving heroine, Billie Crusoe. The first one, Planet Blue, is about a planet called Orbus where the pollution levels have become so high that human life will only be able to survive there for a few more years. Because of this, a new planet, Planet Blue, was sought out for the people of Orbus to move to. The second story, Easter Island, is about an island that the natives have stripped of all its natural resources in order to make a series of Stone Gods. The islanders are at war however, and while one side is all about the Stone Gods, the other is all about destroying them. In the meantime, both sides are destroying all of their food sources without realizing it. The third story, Post-3 War/Wreck City is set on Earth after a horrible nuclear war.

All three of these stories are about humans not learning from their mistakes until it is too late. Even when they're given a second chance, it seems they still screw it all up. This is my first book by Winterson and I find her to be very intelligent and a wonderful writer. She has a way with words unlike any other. The stories in this book are eye opening and I loved the characters of Billie and Spike. I must admit going into this book I had no idea that it was three different albeit related stories, so I was a bit confused when it went from a futuristic space adventure to Earth in 1774. I can't drop my rating based on that because that was entirely my fault for not researching the book beforehand. I would definitely recommend the book and I will actively seek out more of Winterson's work.

This is the first of her books I've read....and I was completely delighted with it...and plan to read more of her writings. The historical nature of the book was most intriquing and I loved the use and reference to older writngs and poetry; how that was a thread which she used to weave the story around. Some might consider it a silly bit of writing....those that don't think too much. But for the thinkers out there this is well worth a read.