Doom Is in the Air
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The Stone Gods
by Jeanette Winterson
Harcourt.  224 pages, $24.

TO SAY that the British novelist Jeanette Winterson takes on the sci-fi genre in her new novel, The Stone Gods—in which, with an air of ironic fatalism, she relates an interplanetary saga of love and loss—is tantamount to saying that Jonathan Swift took on the nautical adventure genre in Gulliver’s Travels. Fans of Winterson’s previous work will immediately fall into step with her unique lyrical-paradoxical syntax and Voltairian wit from the first sentence: “This new world weighs a yatto-gram.”

The Stone Gods exemplifies what has come to be known as the eco-millenarian novel.