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. In this case, Winterson cross-pollinates Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe with Nietzsche’s theory of “eternal recurrence,” a little Orwell, and a dash of quantum physics, to tell the cosmic odyssey of the renegade Sapphic scientist, Billie Crusoe and of her love for Spike, a sexy female robo-sapiens, with whom she flees the Earth-like, ecologically devastated planet Orbus to reach the paradisiacal Planet Blue. (Alas, inter-species sex is punishable by death!)
Civilization on Orbus may have compromised its ecosystem beyond repair, but science has found a way to make everyone cosmetically correct:
Making everyone young and beautiful also made us all bored to death with sex. All men are hung like whales. All women are tight as clams below and inflated like lifebuoys above. Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It’s a global crisis. At least, it’s a crisis among the cities of the Central Power. The Eastern Caliphate has banned genetic fixing, and the SinoMosco Pact does not make it available to all its citizens, only to members of the ruling party and their favorites. That way the leaders look like star gods and the rest look like shit-shovelers. They never claimed to be a democracy.
The coveted Planet Blue seems like the perfect host for the privileged people of Orbus, except for the pesky dinosaurs currently dominating the scene. Mission Control’s solution is to strategically divert an asteroid to destroy the behemoths and make settlement more feasible. However, the mission goes awry, triggers a mini-ice age, and leaves Billie and Spike to face the chilly consequences.
Since time can bend in a quantum universe, Winterson navigates us back to 1774, with the story of Billy, a young ship’s hand on Captain Cook’s Resolution, who’s left behind on remote Easter Island after Cook sails off to escape the bellicose natives. Billy soon falls in love with Spikkers, whose father arrived on the island back in 1722 with the Dutch Captain Roggweins, but deserted ship to live there with one of the women. We are reminded how the island became barren through the systematic removal of trees to transport stones from the quarries, and in order to erect the famous stone idols which, in turn, were often toppled and destroyed during tribal warfare.
Winterson’s ecological cri de coeur culminates in two chapters, “Post-3 War” and “Wreck City,” which depict our own planet in its final, dismal throes after nuclear devastation. In this post-war dystopia, human survivors inhabit a renegade city-state cobbled out of the ruins, while the radioactive “mutants” are isolated from the more fortunate citizens in the contaminated Dead Forest. Billie has fled to Wreck City, bringing Spike’s dismantled head, now that her trans-human lover has chosen to sever her connection with the official mainframe computer to which it had been attached.
The Stone Gods doesn’t have a conventional ending, since its narrative is a perpetual loop, within which past and future are inconsequential abstractions. However, we are left with the poignant proposition that “Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.” Fortunately, in Winterson’s fiction, that includes her generosity and brio in the art of storytelling.
