Customer Reviews

Stone (Gollancz Sf S.)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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!

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

When I first came across 'Stone' in the bookstore I was intrigued by the although a little unsure once I realized it was written in the form of 'letters'. However my doubts were misplaced - I was immediately engrossed in the book after page one and could not put it down. 'Stone' is a brilliant science fiction filled with such incredibly creative ideas, and a happy departure from the more conventional science fiction books. Some of the ideas presented made my head spin, but in a good way, and I'll be sure to purchase more of Adam Robert's books. A brilliant science fiction book I highly recommend it!

Adam Roberts is an innovative, turbocharged writer who takes on big ideas and renders them into entertaining, fast-paced fiction.

Stone has such a cool premise: in a utopian society without crime, somebody commits murder. As punishment they get locked up in the heart of a star - but then escape.

I found Stone a disappointment, though, for several reasons.

Stone takes place on multiple planets, but suffers from a newbie mistake in world building, which is to assign one principal geographic or terrain characteristic to an entire world. So we have the rain planet, the crevasse planet, the ocean planet and so on. It's not fatal, but I found it increasingly difficult to suspend my disbelief as the action moved from one monolithic world to another.

The action on those planets, moreover, just meanders around without building much dramatic tension. Some of the protagonist's activities contribute to their development as a character and our understanding of them, but mostly they just wander around.

The book also has a bunch of footnotes about translations. Neither the translator, nor the audience for these translations, is ever revealed. It's true that the main character is under some kind of clinical or academic observation for the whole book, but the protagonist is from the same culture, and speaks the same language, as their watchers - so what's the point of the translation footnotes? I found them needlessly distracting.

The twist at the end - with Roberts, there's always a twist at the end - heads off at such a right angle to the rest of the story that it fails with a thud in my opinion. Explaining why in detail would spoil it, but basically it's a thread that appears more or less out of thin air.

Finally, Roberts also tackles the whole "observing a system changes it" school of explaining why reality at the quantum level is so weird. This is a Cliff Notes version of formulations like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; but even leaving that aside, Roberts just doesn't do very much that's interesting here. For a much more dramatic and entertaining exploration of the consequences of the idea that observation collapses quantum superposition, for example, I'd recommend Greg Egan's novel Quarantine.

On the assumption that Stone was an off day, I'll keep reading Roberts; but I'd give Stone a swerve if you haven't read it. Yellow Blue Tibia and New Model Army are both cracking good yarns, and far better examples of what Roberts can do.

Once in a while I 'discover' a new favorite writer. Roberts is one of them. Stone is a great book which perfectly combines the contents/style dichotomy most writers seem to be unable to bridge. Having a soft spot for 'the bad guy', I loved thinking along with Ae to commit the perfect crime (CIA stop reading) whilst figuring out who is behind his jailbreak. His secret confessions to a stone gives him the necessary heart for sympathy. Loved it!

An excellent read for anyone interested in high-concept. Detailed, imaginative; another great Adam Roberts book.

A good example of using a reading list. I have read this one before, a few years ago, and hadn't remembered, even when talking about it. Whacky. Anyway, a man is hired because he has no nanotech in his body, and is willing to kill.

The novel takes it base theme from quantum probability.

Such a combination doesn't really exist anywhere else. He is in prison, being 'executed' - that is, they have removed all his beneficial nanotech and left him baseline.

He wanders around for decades deciding if he should fulfil his contract: namely, killing all 60 million people on a particular planet.

He eventually discovers, after some adventures, who is behind all this, and it is not who he expected. A large quantum motivated manipulation.

The plot is "one thing after another" -- Conan the Barbarian plotting (I read one of those once, must have been desparate). Inventive, well-written.

But, the character is pathological, and there is a lot of re-thinking and re-living the murder by knife which is described so well. Not someone you would like to know, not particularly interesting in his pathology.

Possibly there is some brilliant plot yet to come. Possibly there is some deep connection to quantuum physics. But, they sure aren't revealed by page 160.

I pass along almost all of the books I buy. This one, I threw away.

I read tons of SciFi, prefer 'hard', where there are serious constraints because of scientific laws. There isn't much discussion of such, and is nearer fantasy than 'hard' SciFi. At least for the first 160 pages.