The Stone Gods [Hardcover]

Prize-winning Brit Winterson applies her fantastical touch to a sci-fi, postapocalyptic setting. Heroine Billie Crusoe appears in three different end-of-the-world scenarios, allowing Winterson to explore the repetitive and destructive nature of human history and an inability (or unwillingness) of people to learn from previous mistakes. In the first section, inhabitants of the pollution-choked planet Orbus have discovered Planet Blue (Earth), and soon set about launching an asteroid at it to kill the dinosaurs that would prevent them from colonizing the planet. The second and third sections are set on Earth in 1774 and then in the Post-3 War era. Though passionate condemnations of global warming and war appear frequently, the book also contains a triptych love story: Billie meets Spike, a female Robo sapien capable of emotion and evolution, and falls (reluctantly) in love with her. In each of the scenarios, Billie and Spike (or versions of them) fall in love anew while encroaching annihilation looms in the background. Winterson's lapses into polemic can be tedious, but her prose—as stunning, lyrical and evocative as ever—and intelligence easily carry the book. (Apr.)
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“Everything she does suspends readers between the mind and the body, between ‘atom and dream.’ She is a kind of magician. She can do anything.” –Ali Smith

“Written in lilting, beautiful, crisply modulated prose. . .The Stone Gods is a playful but impassioned novel.” –The Times (UK)

“The Stone Gods is a vivid, cautionary tale – or, more precisely, a keen lament for our irremediably incautious species.” –Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian (UK)

“Scary, beautiful, witty and wistful by turns, dipping into the known past as it explores potential futures. . . . Winterson’s story transcends the established facts and common fantasies; it becomes art. . . . Winterson is an unquestionably virtuoso stylist. . . . Read The Stone Gods for new discoveries in language, love and what it means to be human.” –The New York Times Book Review

“This witty, challenging and thought-provoking novel should be essential reading for anyone concerned with how we live and how we might survive.” –Daily Mail

“Winterson’s most engrossing and adventurous novel in some years . . . If she keeps on like this, there may be a glimmer of hope for the future after all.” –The Daily Telegraph

“Prize-winning Brit Winterson applies her fantastical touch to a sci-fi, postapocalyptic setting. Heroine Billie Crusoe appears in three different end-of-the-world scenarios, allowing Winterson to explore the repetitive and destructive nature of human history and an inability (or unwillingness) of people to learn from previous mistakes. . . . [Winterson’s] prose – as stunning, lyrical and evocative as ever – and intelligence easily carry the book.” –Publishers Weekly

“The Stone Gods contains bold scientific hypotheses, enough anger to topple mountains and the imaginative assurance of a sleepwalker pirouetting on a tight wire. . . . while this emotionally charged dream is sustained over considerable time (about 65 million years), it feels heart-stoppingly immediate on nearly every page. . . . chilling and fulfilling.” –Los Angeles Times

“[A] stunning moral fable for our times. . . . In The Stone Gods, Winterson has written a beautifully modulated encomium to art and love, an epic elegy for our culture. . . . Sentence by sentence this novel simply sings. . . . [A] wondrously savage and gorgeous work of fiction.” –Ottawa Citizen

“Moral seriousness anchoring the playfulness. . . . The Stone Gods is entertaining, thought provoking and deftly paved. But the greatest pleasure of Winterson’s work is her language, which ranges from tartly aphoristic to rhapsodically lyrical.” –Toronto Star

“In this dense but also curiously spacious novel, Winterson dives deep into her well of crazy wisdom. . . . She compresses and blows the passage of history and literature past the reader at something like the speed of sound. Her established gift for manipulating time, character and language is nothing short of spectacular here.” –The Globe and Mail

“Winterson is such a masterful storyteller, her prose so perfectly cadenced, that readers are swept along through a structure that is complex and often puzzling. At times, reading The Stone Gods is like travelling through a lovely maze set with mirrors. You’re never sure whether you're going forward or back. In the end, you realize it doesn’t matter. . . . Whatever world Winterson takes us to, the scene is reassuringly, horrifyingly human.” –The Gazette

“[Winterson’s] novels tend to read like spells or incantations and her latest, The Stone Gods, runs true to type. . . . As always, her thoughts on these subjects are couched in language of thrilling richness and invention; we are reminded that Winterson is a pasticheuse of brilliance, a tender writer on animals and states of longing, an ingenious cartographer of imaginary worlds.” –National Post