"The apocalypse is coming. You'll need something to read. "The Stone Gods," Jeanette Winterson's new novel, 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." (New York Times Book Review ) "Heart-stoppingly immediate...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." (Los Angeles Times ) Prize-winning Brit Winterson applies her fantastical touch to a sci-fi, postapocalyptic setting. Heroine Billie Crusoe appears in three different end-of-the-world scenarios, allowing Winterson to explore the repetitive and destructive nature of human history and an inability (or unwillingness) of people to learn from previous mistakes. In the first section, inhabitants of the pollution-choked planet Orbus have discovered Planet Blue (Earth), and soon set about launching an asteroid at it to kill the dinosaurs that would prevent them from colonizing the planet. The second and third sections are set on Earth in 1774 and then in the Post-3 War era. Though passionate condemnations of global warming and war appear frequently, the book also contains a triptych love story: Billie meets Spike, a female Robo sapien capable of emotion and evolution, and falls (reluctantly) in love with her. In each of the scenarios, Billie and Spike (or versions of them) fall in love anew while encroaching annihilation looms in the background. Winterson's lapses into polemic can be tedious, but her proseβas stunning, lyrical and evocative as everβand intelligence easily carry the book.
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