Stone (Gollancz Sf S.) [Paperback]

Adam Roberts (Author)

Book Description

Series: Gollancz Sf S. | Publication Date: March 1, 2003

Sprung from a prison in the center of a star, the universe’s last criminal is employed to kill the entire population of a planet—and leave the planet itself intact. It is a crime that will tear apart an interstellar utopia that has existed for centuries. To keep ahead of detection while the crime is prepared, the killer voyages to the worlds where, in exotic and varied landscapes, mankind searches for the excitement of a new experience And all the while, the killer is re-awaking the instincts required for murder.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In the idyllic civilization of t'T, in which dotTech--nanotechnology ensconced in every person's body--takes care of every discontent and bodily modification anyone could have, rendering the people functionally immortal, crime is basically unknown. Ae, however, has committed crimes horrible enough to warrant imprisonment in the heart of a star, which is accomplished slowly by expelling all the dotTech from his body. Even so, a mysterious entity hires him to kill the entire t'T population but leave its planet untouched, and to get things started, breaks him out of prison. Using the arch conceit of Ae telling his story to a stone that was once part of the prison, Roberts makes Ae's curiosity about his employer's identity and the fascination of the t'T drive a well-paced read and an engaging crime story. The revelation of Ae's employer's identity is unexpectedly strange yet appropriate, amply rewarding following Ae on his criminal flight. Even in a paradisical world, someone is always willing to sow destruction, and sometimes destruction isn't entirely negative. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Adam Roberts is 36 and a Senior Reader in English at London University. His first novel, Salt, was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He has also published a number of academic works on both 19th century poetry and SF.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Gollancz; First edition & printing edition (March 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0575073969
• ISBN-13: 978-0575073968
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 3.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,472,148 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing, July 10, 2003

By 

Amberblade (New England, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stone (Gollancz Sf S.) (Paperback)

Stone was one of the more interesting books that I have read this year. The story was just so different, I was hooked on page one. I mean, how many books have you read in the form of letters written to a stone?
One of the things I like most was that as the story unfolded, we all knew that he had broken out of that prison he was describing, and we knew that he was recaptured at some point. What we didn't know was, had he succeded in his mission? And why was he in prison in the first place? And who hired him to destroy the population of an entire planet?
The first person perspective let us get almost disturbingly close to a very odd man, who doesn't seem to understand quite what he's doing even while he's in the proccess of actually DOING it.
The writing style in Stone is slightly skewed, and definitly unique. I have a feeling that you'll probably either like this book, or stop reading after the first few pages.
And as for the characters.... Well, there is only one real character. There are other people who interact briefly with Ae, even get to know him a little, or travel with him, but there really is only one character in this book, throughout the whole story. Well, two if you count the stone.
All in all, I would recomend this book to anyone who enjoys an offbeat, odd book, whether a science fiction reader, or fantasy lover, or perhaps even a mystery fan as well. After all, trying to figure out who wished an entire planet dead is certainly quite a mystery.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WoW-undiscovered Sci-Fi Gem, May 30, 2005

By 

Debs "Debbie" (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stone (Gollancz Sf S.) (Paperback)

WOW!!!! I hope to Godess this isn't a fluke! I loved this book. A very unique story. In this story a "bad guy" is the main character. One of the best sci-fi novels I have read this year, and I read a lot of SciFi. Not your ordinary run of the mill novel in that genre. Basically it is the story of one of the last sickos in the known universe. Someone who is sought out for his ability to kill. In world where nanotechnology makes it very hard to kill people. I mean why would you want to kill in a world where money grows on trees, people live to be a thousand, and fun is a way of life! Why indeed. The end was a bit of a let down for me becasue I had pretty much guessed who the "bad guys" really were, I'm sure you will too but don't let that distract you from a very well written, original, and very entertaining read. I am ordering other books by this author as soon as possible, I hope he keeps it up!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, June 13, 2010

By 

Jacob Glicklich "Raskolnikov" (The American Midwest) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stone (Sf Masterworks) (Paperback)

Very different from his other books I've read, which is in itself a recommendation to Roberts' skill. As before, he's also very good with language and crafting a complex setting, and brings in a mix of hard science to a tight focus on a distant social atmosphere.

This story features an individual in a utopian future of material prosperity and individual freedom, where absence of constraint and education mean there's also virtually no crime. The protagonist is one of the one in a billion off-cases, being disturbed enough to murder people for psychosexual gratification. At the time the novel begins zie (adopting gender-neutral language for this review, matching ambiguity in the book as explored bellow) is in a prison for several such murders. The story begins when zie is contacted by a mysterious source offering to break her out of prison if she'll in return depopulate a specific planet, killing sixty million people. There's no immediate answer given as to who they are or why they want this killing to occur, the story then concerns the physical challenge of escape, evading detection and various encounters, while also proceeding the larger challenge of who is behind the assignment and whether to go through with the mass murder.

I didn't realize it while reading this book, but Stone in many ways plays out with the level of creepiness as if Fire had kept the sociopathic narrator as the main point of view. It's an interesting choice to play with the viewpoint being so fundamentally unbalanced and destructive, amidst an environment that's far less violent than our current world. There's a bit of a credibility strain in the main premise--excepting that someone that went out of their way to kill others just as a type of experiment would have any moral hesitation about killing a larger number of strangers for the sake of securing their own self-interest. On the whole the different elements are effectively balanced, with the slow deterioration of an already damaged individual across the story.

Mixed with this layout is the environment of the t'T, the utopian interstellar environment. Assessing whether it's a better world than our own is an interesting question. They have less violence, no real poverty, and a individuals do less damage to eachother. At the same time, emerging in this environment people appear to have a fundamental lack of ethics or real altruism. They're not cruel and they don't (for the overwhelming majority) have any desire to harm others, yet what emerges isn't really a society, more a collection of individuals without permanent social ties. It's in many ways the ultimate fantasy of individual affirmation and possibility writ large, yet it's also rendered as a cold and fairly unappealing milieu, and reads as a call for turning from the whole Heinlein-esque libertarian strand in science fiction, individual rights and core egotistic narratives writ large across the entire setting. In this regard, making the "hero" of the account so damaged and harmful to others works at an even deeper level. It's not just an emotionally stunted antihero we're presented with but a full on sociopath that enacts mass murder, and one of the main accomplishments of the story is the way it makes this perspective comprehensible without glamorizing it or making it appear edgy.

Gender has a major presence in the book, particularly in its mutability. This future, like a number of other distant high tech environemnts is one where gender can be easily altered, and the population continually varies across male to female as a part of the life cycle. How this element works is particularly in centering questions of power, identity and emotions. The narrative plays at several points with the gender we might expect the protagonist to be, and by the end works to break down assumptions and stark assumptions. This element connects somewhat to the ubiquitous presence of technology within individual lives and the instability of the larger sociopathic self and the society, and there's a possible association there that I'm not entirely comfortable with. On the whole, however, both elements work pretty well in tangent, emphasizing a level of instability in the understanding of society while also making a highly coherent setting and plot. In this element I take Roberts to be portraying the instability and fluid ambiguity at work in any society, including our current one. That makes for a pretty strong critique of a whole range of conventional political attitudes and narratives in "the real world" along with science fiction, and it's to the story's benefit that it can pull this element off without being remotely preachy.

One of the questions in all this worldbuilding is if it's intended as a commentary or critique on the Culture. I know Roberts is familiar with Banks' work, and there seem to be a couple of strong similarities, while also diverging a lot--no supergenius AIs, for instance, a much more fragmented environment, a lot harsher interpretation of the level of ethics and awareness formed by people in this environment. It's a little hard to see whether the distinctive elements of the t'T are meant as a more realistic implementation of the Culture, or simply an independent take that happens to have some similar elements. Reading it as a criticism of the Culture it feels a little unfocused, a little haphazard in the harsher deconstructive elements, in part because the protagonist is such an anomaly and the larger problem in the society remains a plot twist only uncovered in the last fifteen pages, making for less opportunity to follow through on the implications. Taken as only peripherally commenting on Banks shows it as the more effective book, and it may be my judgement on the effectiveness of the whole thought experiment that makes me inclined to downplay its meta-literary commentary (always a danger with Roberts, given how concerned his work typically is with past literature science fiction and non). In any case, I think the novel is stronger than just being a riff on the Culture series, in stronger and weaker elements.

There are some issues with quality, however. While the main setup is excellent and the larger themes work well, the section-by-section layout of the story isn't always ideal. The coldness of the whole story and unlikability of the main character is rather the point, but it does leave a bit too much alienation for feeling invested in the first person exploration of an unfamiliar environment. More problematic is the level of the plot--there are simply too many points where the main character reminds hirself on the mission zie was charged with and speculates as to what agency might be wanting to kill off the planet. The true solution was never within this character's ability to figure out and it feels less like advancing the mystery than filling time. It's interesting, brings in a lot of nice little details and complex questions. However it feels a bit too long for the existing story, and there's too much continued return to the basic question of who is involved and why. The final answer does manage a satisfying and believable resolution, but the process getting there is a bit strained. There is room for some improvement in the layout, but Stone remains a unique and powerful piece of speculative fiction.

Similar and better than: Blindsight by Peter Watts

Similar and worse than: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks