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Original Title:	The Stone Gods
ISBN:	0241143950 (ISBN13: 9780241143957)
Edition Language:	English

The Stone Gods

Jeanette Winterson

Hardcover | Pages: 207 pages

Rating: 3.68 | 4886 Users | 603 Reviews

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Title	:	The Stone Gods
Author	:	Jeanette Winterson
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 207 pages
Published	:	April 14th 2008 by Hamish Hamilton (first published 2007)
Categories	:	Fiction. Science Fiction. LGBT. Dystopia. Fantasy

Commentary To Books The Stone Gods

When I bought my copy of The Stone Gods, the bookseller told me two things: it had received strong reviews, and “It’s science fiction, you know.” I parried this last one with some fuzzy comment that much of Winterson’s fiction violates expectations, and we left it at that, both sounding smart and not having said much.

And then I started reading: sure enough, page after page, the thing read true to the sci-fi genre. And not just in the details: it sounded like sci-fi, it thought like sci-fi, it even carried sci-fi’s common politics—as much genre work tends to be, it sounded downright reactionary. The main character, Billie Crusoe, sounded as if she had actually been beamed into her era from our own; she spoke constantly of the contrast between then and now, as if she’d been witness to our time, and was quite conscientiously leading us through hers, tour-guide style, with heavy asides to the reader and a general lack of believable selfhood.

I was a bit taken aback; in fact, at several points, I had to remind myself of Winterson’s previous work—I said to myself, in fact, “prose this obvious, this flat and predictable, has been put in place for a reason.” And even fifty pages from the end, after the place and the style had shifted radically—several times, in fact—I was still sitting a few seats back in the auditorium, wondering whether she knew what she was up to.

But the connection comes—again and again, in surprising, subtle, parallel, spooky ways. In fact, much of the intersection is rightly described as spooky; quantum, in fact. As she did in Gut Symmetries, Winterson spends a lot of time pulling on the greater metaphor of quantum physics as she sees it mirrored in human life: it would not be a stretch to say that this book, as was Gut Symmetries, is something of a quantum novel, and that Billie Crusoe, strange particle that she is, exists outside of Newtonian plotting: where we want characters to make choices and suffer results—we want them to see three doors, walk through one, then lose forever what was behind the other two—Billie exists simultaneously in all three. The book travels through three different frames of time and space, and she is there—not only that, she is reading about herself in a manuscript left on the Tube, and she is stumbling across her own adventures in the journals of Captain Cook.

At every turn, she meets human short-sightedness: waste, folly, power. And at every turn, she ends up in a dead world, one sacrificed on the altar of power, but with the promise of a new birth coming soon—a new planet, a new peace, a new sapiens—that will never make the same mistakes again.

And this hits on one of the themes running through: the impossibility of denying the limbic, the spooky, the unreal. It’s not emotion that kills us off, it’s control. It’s our fear of a world more complex, less divided, and less clear that leads us to kill off the potential that exists when control falls away. We see this in the corporate governance of MORE, and we see this in the war between the Ariki Mau and the Bird Man on Easter Island. We see this, too, in the Robo sapiens, free of the unpredictability of emotion, to lead us from the damage of our own fuzzy natures. It’s clear, though, that the obsessive attempts to hide from our fuller selves have brought on our ending.

It was clear to me that the novel was, in part, Winterson’s response to the upsurge in media/commodity culture and feel-good authoritarianism that seems to be cresting so fervently at this time. Initially, I thought to myself, “what a shame that the novel will end up such a didactic response—so flat and obvious.” With the patters apparent, though, I see that the “message” of the book, in fact, is nowhere near as easy and flat as the initial section seems to belie. Maybe I’m a sucker for flash and experimentation, but the risk that Winterson took in the Stone Gods felt—to me—brave, insightful, and revelatory. It’s certainly not her first foray into these waters, nor is it the first book to reinvent linear narrative; however, the mission it takes and the tools it picks match up perfectly. I’m glad I stuck it through.

Rating Out Of Books The Stone Gods

Ratings: 3.68 From 4886 Users | 603 Reviews

Appraise Out Of Books The Stone Gods

DNF @ page 58I had to read this book for a class at University. All I will say is that the storyline was extremely confusing and I struggled to connect with any of the characters. The writing style was most definitely not for me!

Okay, okay. This is tricky.We all give ratings to books (and everything) within their genres. I do anyway. Five stars for this thing is not the same as five stars for that thing. But the problem with that is that the genres have to mean something. And be identifiable. I have real thing for Jeanette Winterson. It dates back to Gut Symmetries, which I read at an impressionable time (maybe 17, though all my times are fairly impressionable). It was just beautiful and expansive and different and

Winterson leaves me astounded. Her prose is simply fantastic - I am amazed at how she makes the simplest observations read like poetry, and what could be a very fatalistic narrative is instead deeply seeded with hope. Early on in this book, I was thinking I would rate it four stars, since I felt that though truly engaging, and in her wonderful style, her book, "The Passion" was a superior work. I've changed my mind. This is as good as "The Passion". Wholly different, but just as good. It almost

I always find Winterson a little hit and miss. I absolutely LOVED The Passion, but then couldn't get in to Gut Symmetries at all. I enjoyed elements of this, mainly the first and last sections about Billie and Spike. It had a good premise and the moral comment about the way we mistreat and destroy our planet was poignant. I just found myself getting distracted about how you're left to flounder without much linking explanation. The narrative jumped around from paragraph to paragraph and I found

This book strikes me as a very good example of a mainstream "literary" fiction writer experimenting with genre, and failing horribly. Winterson is a highly respected, award-winning English author, and many friends of mine love her writing. However, this foray into speculative fiction ventures into thematic territory (namely the essentially destructive nature of humanity, both with regards to each other and the natural world) that's been deeply explored, and displays all the traits of the worst

I was looking to fill out a theme in my SF/F book club entitled "Even the Lands Have Changed," a mix of post-apocalyptic and climate change fiction. I needed one more book. I'd read the other four, knew they were good. I came up with a list of four more that sounded good, and let my group decide. The Stone Gods was on there, because I have loved Jeanette Winterson's books quite a lot, and seeing what she could do with dinosaurs and planned/unplanned extinction level events and science fiction

Maybe I just didn't get this book, but I definitely didn't enjoy it.The start was somewhat promising, it had potential to be a good story with a powerful message but I feel like after the halfway point the author sort of dropped the ball. The book then became confusing and disjointed for me.I also felt like there was a little too much time spent on the message the author was trying to put in and too little on the story. I didn't feel connected to the characters and neither did I feel like I ever