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| The Stone Gods | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $24.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 94737
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0151014914
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780151014910
ASIN: 0151014914
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
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Product Description
This new world weighs a yatto-gram. But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me-tiny or blurred-out-offocus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there are long-toed claw prints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish . . . Mankind has rendered its planet unlivable and is beginning to colonize a new blue planet. Our heroine Billie Crusoe’s flight to the future is also a return to the distant past—“Everything is imprinted forever with what once was.” What begins as a witty, satirical futurist adventure deepens into a dazzling exploration of our relationship to environment, to power and technology, and to what defines us as humans. For over twenty years Jeanette Winterson has consistently been one of our most brilliant writers. Lyrical, visionary, by turns funny and devastating, The Stone Gods is fiction at its most provocative.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
"I think all my life I've been calling you, across time." March 15, 2008
7 out of 14 found this review helpful
"I hate science fiction." So says a man who happens upon a scrap of written material, scarce now, a relic of the past. And from the first pages of this imaginative novel one might assume The Stone Gods a love story set in the future. Indeed, it is a love story, or stories, universal, untethered by time and place. Beginning with a dying planet that sends out explorative tentacles into space in search of a habitable environment, rebel scientist Billie Crusoe is pressured by an intrusive government to settle prematurely on the Blue Planet (Earth), a place still unlivable because of the dinosaurs that must be destroyed before further colonization. In a space vehicle with Captain Handsome, the genetically "fixed" Pink and a robo-sapiens, Spike, Billie finds herself falling for the beautiful robo-sapiens, who teaches the human about the flexible boundaries of love.
Unfortunately the crew soon learns that "randomness is not a mistake in the equation- it is a part of the equation". That their mission faces dire consequences is insignificant in light of Billie's growing comprehension of the deepest yearnings of the human heart. Does love perish with death? Are we doomed to the endless repetition of our mistakes? Or is life an intervention that transcends imagination? Winterson treads the uncharted waters of time, the future and the past, the unimaginable human capacity for affection that she mines through unique characters who blunder into life-threatening situations but rise above their limitation to reinvent love in all its incarnations.
Billie Crusoe experiences a relationship with an evolving robo-sapiens; Billy, the lone seaman abandoned by Capt. Cook on Easter Island in 1774, confronts gigantic stone deities, finding solace with a castaway who dreams of an unknown country; and the unwanted child of a junk yard world wanders in search of connection. A devastated landscape (Wreck City) becomes the final time-bending stage for a recurring theme. While 1774 is more familiar, the apocalyptic landscapes that dominate the novel say far more about the direction of the world we inhabit. Although sometimes tedious in its irony-weighted rhetoric, the essence of the novel remains consistent, love among the ruins of one kind or another, the urge to connect meaningfully as imperative as the self-destruction that runs civilization aground on its own hubris: "Love is an intervention. Why do we not choose it?" Luan Gaines/2008.
 Three Ways To Threaten Earth March 30, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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.
 FINDING REASONS WHERE THERE ARE NONE? March 16, 2008
5 out of 36 found this review helpful
As the author of the "Complete Guide to Easter Island" and a devoted Rapanuiphile, I believe I am qualified to comment on those aspects of this novel that deal with Easter Island -- even though I realize this may prove irritating to those who say such a narrow focus of criticism doesn't do justice to the work at large. But my point is if one area of the author's coverage provokes criticism, the prospective reader may justly wonder if this is a trend, an aberration, or just a quirk of the writing. But if the reader cares about details like this, even in fiction with an historical base, I am comfortable trying to find reasons to explain it, even if there are none
"The Stone Gods" is the latest of nearly twenty books written by Jeanette Winterson that, according to other reviewers, are either very well liked or generally hated. Being unfamiliar with her work, I make no such comparisons here, and, indeed, the emphasis in this review is on the Easter Island portion of the novel whence the title largely derives. "The Stone Gods" is written in the science-fiction genre not because it particularly belongs there but because it is required for the narrative to function. Even the author, in a recent interview, says she doesn't like sci-fi. I mention this because the novel is set in a future where the Earth (referred to as "Orbus") is a highly-technological but dystopic world on the brink of ecological apocalypse and where the recent discovery of a new, habitable world (called "Planet Blue") offers salvation. This scenario will be no doubt familiar to those who have seen the movie "Blade Runner" but that's where any comparison ends even if one may be inspired to wonder if Winterson has lightly borrowed plot material from another source.
The protagonist, a lamely named "Billie Crusoe", is charged with exploring Planet Blue, and does so, along with jump-cuts to several other narratives each featuring its own Billie and its own ecological crises, from Easter Island in the 1700s to a post-nuclear Britain where corporations have replaced government (which smacks of the theme of the film "Rollerball" --another apparent borrowing) to a world like Earth 65 million years in the future. All this zigging and zagging creates the sense that the novel is really just a collection of lazily-linked short stories rather than a novel -- or, moreover, a novel without a consistent narrative (think "Monty Python's Meaning of Life"; i.e., vignettes with an ad hoc thread allegedly holding them together). And though the language is stylish and playful, evidencing great imagination on the author's part, it is not sufficient to creatively describe material that hovers only slightly above the ordinary even if it deals with complex issues such as gender polarities or sexual identity, especially when a didactic voice prevails. And this one has a message, yes, which makes for a nice segue to the Easter Island portion of the novel.
Here, the "Billie" character consists of a seaman named "Billy" left behind when the Cook expedition of 1774 departed the island. In so far as this "Billy" is one of several belonging to those narrative vignettes, one doesn't necessarily have to be inordinately bothered by the fact that no such character existed in history (at least Cook's journals make no reference to anyone being left behind and there's no other evidence to support this). But tinkering with history in this way is risky. James Cameron avoided this potential problem with the introduction of his character "Jack Dawson" in the film "Titanic", even though no such character existed, because Jack ostensibly managed to get on board the ship by winning someone else's ticket in a poker game -- so naturally there would be no record of him.
Despite this perhaps necessary indifference to historical fact, it's obvious that Winterson did some research on Easter Island circa the 1770s and thus Billy's observations clearly reflect more of what we know today than what anyone in 1774 would have known. Yet Winterson could have been more accurate and therefore more convincing -- as if she concluded that, so long as she could create an "historical" character that didn't exist, why should she worry about other fudges? For example, the explanation for Billy being left behind is because of a hostile reception the Cook expedition receives from Easter Islanders. Yet Cook received no hostile reception and he himself said the islanders neither had nor employed either sticks or rocks, a remark that draws specific inferences from the disastrous confrontation between islanders and sailors in 1722. So is Winterson confusing the two visits? For another example, Billy meets a "deserter" from the Roggeveen expedition, a man named "Spikkers" who has no historical counterpart (at least no such mention of a desertion appears in Roggeveen's journals and, again, there's no evidence to substantiate this character's existence). And while there is discussion about the "Bird Man" (which is not unreasonable; symbols characteristic of the cult were used by the islanders in "signing" the Spanish Treaty of Annexation in 1770), descriptions of the competition are thoroughly confused and confusing, as Winterson seems to have competitors start the race by climbing UP the Rano Kau volcano to recover the "manu tara" egg and she says they strapped bone and wood spikes to their bodies to aid in their ascent, which is a completely fictional invention. (Spikkers, incidentally, also participates in the competition and falls to his death; maybe this is Winterson's attempt to erase the character from history like Jack Dawson?) And for some reason Winterson associates the Ariki Mau (or paramount chief) with the "White Man" in opposition to adherents of the Bird Man cult, where no such juxtaposition has ever been known to exist. The goofs don't end here. Winterson proclaims the volcanic peninsula of Poike as the home of the Bird Man (when it fact the "home" is on the complete opposite side of the island), describes the "moai" as facing out to sea (when they all face inland to ceremonial areas), and says the "ahu" or ceremonial platforms consist of "great plinths of wood and stone". Wood? They are made of stone. Period.
Since the central theme of the novel is the environmental imbalance that substantiates the contrast between Orbus (Earth) and Blue Planet -- the ecological apocalypse clearly facing the planet Earth today in the "Easter Island as microcosm" paradigm -- it's not surprising that a sequence would inevitably ensue during which the last palm tree on the island would be chopped down. This is a popular theme these days but Pacific scientists and scholars have come to understand that it was a constellation of factors that brought about the demise of Easter Island, including human actions and environmental conditions. But Winterson takes it a step into a weird dimension by having all the island women stand against the island men in trying to protect the tree. The women are slapped down, literally, and the tree similarly falls to the ground under the indifferent but skillful hands of the axeman. This is sexism at its worst, for presumably only women are nurturers? Only women understand the consequences of resource depletion? Easter Islanders were no doubt partly culpable for the deforestation of their island because they so desperately needed the wood from the trees but is it really necessary to confine the blame to the island's men? Nor is there any legendary, cultural, or historic basis for this scene and its implications.
To be fair, Winterson describes Billy's astonishment at the falling of this last tree, and the denuding of the island itself, in terms appropriate for anyone contemplating the extent to which Easter Island can function as a microcosm of the Earth: "I gazed at the stump of the Palm", Billy says. "Why would a man destroy the very thing he most needs?" Why indeed? But mankind, as Winterson says, "must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists". So, too, there must be a reason for the decadence of Easter Island, the potential demise of planet Earth, and even a book as ramshackle as The Stone Gods". We're slowly gaining an understanding of the first two, but I think it'll be a while before anyone fully grasps the third.
 Mediocre - Love Story or SF? Too Many Undeveloped Ideas June 14, 2008
3 out of 8 found this review helpful
I bought the book because I was especially interested in one of the three stories: Planet Blue. I wanted to discover how the author would handle the SF subject of humanities dilemma facing a dying planet. I was highly disappointed. From the style of the writing to the plot, nothing appealed to me. I forced myself to read through it to see how the end would turn up, which proved a waste of time. The story suggests a handful of intriguing ideas but these are never properly developed leaving you with the feeling of an incomplete novel.
Everything is odd and awkward in the story. First, there is a "love" story between the main (female) character Billie and a female robot named Spike that goes nowhere. Then, the robot is showing more desire to be human than the humans themselves (?) - a theme already brought in by Data in Star Trek The Next Generation, and hardly developed in this novel. It goes on with the author's attempt to create a universe half way between 1984 and Blade Runner (?), which only results in serving the reader cliches after cliches of the typical gloomy modern and decadent civilization that humanity is heading into. Next, the captain of the ship en route to Planet Blue decides it is a great idea to modify the course of a meteorite to hit Planet Blue in order to destroy unwanted dinosaurs (?) - yeah right, like I will believe that - this humanity would have the technology to push a meteorite off from its trajectory not even thinking that it would obviously jeopardize the chance of the new humanity's settlement on the planet, but they don't have the technology to simply kill the dinosaurs with a virus or other much more direct methods (?); SF is not an open genre for anything at the push of a button, is it? And the choice of the meteorite is a pathetic attempt to "emulate" a still much debated theory that might have taken place billions of years ago on earth. And then we have the choice of names for the characters like "Handsome" for the captain of the ship transporting our main characters, who barely displays the charisma, composure, and leadership expected from a captain. Can you imagine this dialogue: "Hello Captain Handsome, this is Darth Vader here, how's things with your dinosaurs in your neck of the woods? Don't hesitate to send me an email if you need my help with that, I am good at destroying things. How about you, what are you good at Captain Handsome? Is Handsome a nickname or your mommy really thought it was going to be groovy?" I made my point. Finally there is the writing style with long winded confusing and boring sentences, trying to be more poetic than realistic, and the choice of narration in the first person, which locks the reader in the mind of one character and one character only (?). First person is a narration style that I find totally inappropriate for this story - the use of multiple point of views would have broadened the story and brought depth to the many intriguing yet unexplored SF elements of the plot. Everything in the story contributed to an awkward and mediocre ensemble.
There is so much better SF out there, don't waste your time with this book. I can't imagine how an agent or an editor could have accepted such pale imitation of Science-Fiction.
answer to "when will they ever learn"? Never! April 2, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
"Planet Blue". Orbus is dying; some will say died. The planetary residents destroyed their home by polluting everything. However, led by Captain Handsome and with Billie Crusoe and robo sapien Spike as part of the crew, they escape their madness by discovering a perfect blue planet, but must rid this new earth of its dominant species. While the humans plan on their usual mass destruction to solve a problem, Billie and Spike fall in love. They send an asteroid to crash planet-side, destroying the dinosaurs that would have made colonization difficult.
"Easter Island". In 1774 the longboats arrive to be greeted by the giant monuments, but first they must control the natives before they explore. As is the human way, the newcomers plan on mass destruction to restrain the islanders even as Billie and Spike fall in love.
"Wreck City". The 3 War along with previous out of control pollution to keep the economy strong has left many places like Wreck City as no zones. These unfit places are expanding as pollution and war has wrecked the once blue planet turning it into a sickly gray. Those with wealth know it is time to escape this dying world and find a new earth to colonize even as Billie and Spike fall in love.
This poignant cautionary tale focuses on the theory that humans as a species or as individuals never learn from previous mistakes; if a person as a child touches a hot stove, his or her child will not heed their advice and touch the hot stove. With little hope, Jeannette Winterson provides a withering condemnation of mankind who she asserts cannot help it that our DNA contains pandemic (as a society) and localized (as a person and family) destructive genes. As Zager and Evans say in 2525: "He's taken everything this old Earth can give. And he ain't put back nothing". However, instead of Judgement Day, we leave behind our mess for those struggling to survive and cannot afford escape.
Harriet Klausner
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