Synopses & Reviews
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 Crusoes 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.
Review
PRAISE FOR THE STONE GODS: "[The Stone Gods] makes an excellent choice for desert-planet reading --scary, beautiful, witty and wistful by turns, dipping into the known past as it explores potential futures..."
The New York Times Book Review"Some novels are intriguing enough to shorten a plane trip; some even offer a trip into other people's skins and minds. And then there is this kind of book, one that you don't so much read as drink in, refuse to put down, cast inside of like a hunting dog, seeking against all odds the insight that will illuminate everything, a true answer to the fix we're in." -- LA Times
"The Stone Gods is a vivid, cautionary tale - or, more precisely, a keen lament for our irremediably incautious species." -- Ursula LeGuin
Synopsis
A glimpse into unlikely love braved in the face of the void. On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet-pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What will happen when their story combines with the world's story, as they whirl towards Planet Blue, into the future? Will they-and we-ever find a safe landing place?
Of immense imaginary and emotional scope, The Stone Gods is Jeanette Winterson at her prescient, playful, muscular best. An interplanetary love story, a traveller's tale, a hymn to the beauty of the world, this is a novel that will change forever the stories we tell about the earth, about love and about stories themselves.
From the Hardcover edition.
Synopsis
The Whitbread Prize-winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit delivers a novel that "transports us to something like the future of our own planet" (Washington Post Book World).
On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet -- pristine and plentiful, as our own was 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction.
Off the air, Billie Crusoe and the renegade Robo sapien Spike are falling in love. Along with Captain Handsome and Pink, they're assigned to colonize the new blue planet.
But when a technical maneuver intended to make it habitable backfires, Billie and Spike's flight to the future becomes a surprising return to the distant past, and they discover that "everything is imprinted forever with what once was."
Synopsis
Playful, passionate, provocative, and frequently very funny, Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods is a story about Earth, about love, and about stories themselves.
On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet—pristine and plentiful, as our own was 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. Off the air, Billie Crusoe and the renegade Robo sapien Spike are falling in love. Along with Captain Handsome and Pink, they're assigned to colonize the new blue planet. But when a technical maneuver intended to make it habitable backfires, Billie and Spike's flight to the future becomes a surprising return to the distant past, and they discover that “everything is imprinted forever with what once was.”
Synopsis
Billie Crusoe and the renegade robo-sapian Spike have been assigned to colonize a new blue planet. But when a technical maneuver intended to make it inhabitable backfires, Billie and Spike's flight to the future becomes a surprising return to the distant past.
About the Author
Jeanette Winterson is the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1985. Her second novel, The Passion, won the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize in 1987, and was followed by Sexing the Cherry, which won the 1989 EM Forster Award. Her other works include The Powerbook, Written on the Body, Arts and Lies, Boating for Beginners, The World and Other Places, and a collection of eassays, Art Objects. She lives in Oxfordshire, England.