The Stone Gods

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.

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.

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.”

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.