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 ev More...

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 sent More...

A very pleasant surprise. Wonderfully written and a joy to read.

It is a hard book to say much about without spoiling major parts. I will say that if you are reading this because it is "science fiction", don't give up on it too quickly. The first part of the book is pretty clumsy in the SF department but that is to be expected from someone who makes it clear that she is not a science fiction fan. Just keep reading until the end and trust me that it will all make sense.

What a daunting task, writing a review of a Jeanette Winterson book, and this book is so prolix, I may just start with a few paragraphs and then add on as ideas begin to formulate.

Let's start with form: it is a sci-fi, anti-Utopian, satire, biography, lyric poem.

Here's my synopsis of the plot, maybe. Part I is called "Planet Blue" and the characters are aboard a spaceship leaving Orbis (Earth) which has finally succeeded in annihilating itself. Planet Blue is populated by dinosaurs, so the M More...

As she did in "The Passion", Winterson displays her gift for punching the reader in the face, then kicking you in the heart, and you still come out of the experience saying, "Can someone read this to me, out loud?"

It's a critique of the modern world, a critique of the future (extrapolated from the modern world), a re-vamped look at the past, and then another critique of the future. Seriously.

Oh... also...? It's fantastic. Bleak, beautiful, poignant, hopeless, hopeful... and definitely not for th More...

Jeanette Winterson is one of my favorite authors. The Passion is one of my favorite books of all time, but I found this book to be lacking, much in the way of a favorite band branching off in some new direction and simply not striking the chord that made you love them in the first place. You still love their voices, and there's a glimmer of the past greatness about them, but it still falls short.

Perhaps it's my general dislike of the Science Fiction genre or my discomfort with the preachy / pol More...

"Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was" is the final line in this stunning novel.

So, Winterson would tell us, Read closely. Planet Blue, Easter Island, Post-3 War. There is a connection between these three scenarios-these three apocalyptic tales-these three love stories. Life is repetition. Can humans learn from the mistakes of the past? Winterson unfolds all at once, a cautionary tale, a survival story, and a complicated, exquisitely written novel on what it means to be human, More...

eanette Winterson's latest novel, the Stone Gods, is a dark mix of 1984, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the Cloud Atlas. Despite the fact that her characters state they don't like science fiction and she herself says she hates it in this interview, the book is very much a science fiction novel. It is fixed on ideas, but would be comfortably shelved in either the literature or the science fiction sections of the bookstore.

The book's principal idea is that human society is pre-disposed to More...

After all the identity blurring and timeline overlapping in her work, nobody was surprised when Jeanette Winterson turned into Angela Carter.

I don't know whether this will replace the Passion or Lighthousekeeping as one of my top favorites of hers. I mean, it's way better than the Powerbook or Gut Symmetries, in my way less than humble opinion, but I honestly can't predict whether it'll stick like my favorites of hers. It's beautifully constructed, though, it's a great idea, it's science fictio More...

jeanette has been one of my all time favourite authors and has given me so much inspiration and joy in my life. her language is such a beautiful one. it's been a long time since i read any of her work. while i really enjoyed the book and the theme is a very timely and important one, this book didn't burrow into me like her other works from the past. well maybe the sci-fi side of things just didn't take with me. it was fresh... the move from historical to futuristic, but i didn't feel the charact More...

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 More...

Any Winterson is a treat, though not necessarily fully intelligible. A lot about this sort-of-science-fiction novel made me laugh, not least of which was the core story in which all of the intrepid explorers, whom the reader might expect will be the new hope of humanity, (view spoiler)[die. (hide spoiler)] The core narrative, though, is about the continuity (or even more extreme, the inevitability) of human, robot, parrot, and universal experience. A fun novel about archetypes, plus space pirates, bisexual robots, and of cour More...

Generally categorized as science fiction, this book is so much more. It is a commentary of the earth and the way humanity has behaved over time. It is about the past and the future, about the inevitability of man's destruction of his world, and about the hope that humanity can get past that and work together for a better outcome.
Winterson touches on today's hot topics of technology, global warming, war, globalization, corporate control and individual rights. She includes social and class issues More...

This novel was very different than others I have read by Winterson, as it takes place mostly in the future, or rather several interwoven futures. The writing was beautiful (as Winterson always is) but the plot was rather hard to untangle, perhaps because I don't really manage futuristic sci-fi very well.

Some choice strands of prose to share:

p. 63: I don't know which is worse, to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood.

p. 127: I am a lost manuscript, surfacing in fragments, like her set t More...

Yeah. What to say.

On the plus side, the last chapter has some funny parts, and the protagonist sort of gets a happy ending.

On the minus side, from beginning to end this reads like a bunch of liberal hand-wringing about sexism, government/corporate control, and the exploitation of nature and of other humans. Don't get me wrong, I'm a liberal, and I do plenty of hand-wringing myself, but this was a little over the top. Really, the characters were pretty uniformly flat and uninteresting, though tha More...

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 k More...

So, I’ve finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, and my reactions are mixed, to say the least. My primary reaction was one of intense sadness: she really does believe that she’s braving new territory. She is completely unaware that she’s hacking through a jungle right next to a long, well-trodden road and the crew that’s building it is far, far ahead of her, and her course takes her away from the best conclusions. She’s off in a strange, dualistic universe in which robots come to More...

I could easily give this book four stars if not for the third section. The book is made up of four separate stories or sections. The first is set in a futuristic and idyllic future world where humans continue to rape the world, but science is able to mask most of the inconveniences. The second is set in 18th century Easter Island, and basically makes the point that this raping of our planet is nothing new, and not a particularly "western" problem. The fourth section returns to the future, althou More...

I learned that i do like Jeanette Winterson's writing. I have little tabs of paper sticking our marking almost a dozen pages.

"'The thing about life that drives me mad,' I said, 'is that is doesn't make sense. We make plans. We try to control, but the whole thing is random.

'This is a quantum universe, ' said Spike, 'neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene.'"


"'One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud More...

This satirical, sad, and often poetic presentation of the human condition is described in three short stories (or three and a half), all linked by a protagonist of the same name, though the three time periods (past, present, future) are far from each other. The author chooses the name Billie Crusoe for the protagonist in all three(female in the first and last, male in the second), and the famous castaway’s dilemma of survival hovers behind it all, with even a “Friday” character as a guide in the More...

"everything is imprinted forever with what it once was"

Billie Crusoe and a roque "Robo sapien" named Spike are sent to help settle Planet Blue before humans completely destroy their home planet. Through further human mismanagement this plan backfires and the two find themselves reliving a past life (lives) and similar human foibles.

I loved this book (and I don't like science fiction so I really wouldn't call it a science fiction book although I know the summary I just wrote makes it sound pretty More...

"Sometimes, at the moment of waking, I get a sense for a second that I have found a way forward. Then I stand up, losing all direction, relying on someone else's instructions to tell me where I am. If I could make a compass out of a dream. If I could trust my own night-sight..."

I loved this book, the way it is structured is a work of art. I wasn't as keen on the central section (uncomfortable about racism in the narrative), and I didn't understand the stone gods thing being honest, although it p More...

I count Jeanette Winterson among my favorite authors, and I hold a very short list. However, The Stone Gods was obtuse and impossible. The novel is vaguely science-fiction: there are robots (well, robo-sapiens), rocket ships, and quantum physics. These fantastic elements often come across as mere set dressing for a story that is rooted in present day soapboxing about the dangers of ecological ruin.

The novel is broken down into four parts. Part one finds the narrator, Billy Crusoe, on mission fr More...

This book was clearly written in Jeanette Winterson's voice, but it was speaking in a way that seemed foreign and distant. Missing was the honesty of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, the poetry of The Passion, the richness of The Passion. This novel might be comparable to Gut Symmetries in the way it has bound science into its narrative, but it lacks the poetry of that story.
I was perplexed the entire time I read this novel. I could find hints of the sheer beauty in Winterson's voice and descript More...

This is an amazing, heartbreakingly beautiful novel. Soewhere in the far past or the far future, Billie and Spike are leaving their world to explore a new planet, but will their people learn from their mistakes? The first signs indicate that they probably won't as the new planet is bombed to get rid of the giant lizards that live there so that it can be safe for the new settlers.

Action then moves to Easter Island where Billy has been abandoned to his fate, but will Spikkers be able to guide him More...

I'm not really sure what to write. This is closer to 3.5 than 4 in my opinion, but it's not average so I have to give it the extra star.

Wonderful in that marvelously dystopian way. Though I disagree with some of the messages that Jeanette Winterson tries to convey. Maybe I'm too hopeful for her dystopia.

Or maybe I'm just a man which Winterson isn't very... fond of? I'm not sure that that is the best term, but others are slightly too harsh.

The novel chalks up a lot of the world's problems by indi More...

This novel is beautifully and poetically written with rare wit. Billie Crusoe, a disillusioned enhancement officer, where depression should no longer exist, meets a beautiful robot, Spike (the first robo sapiens) and together they head for a blue planet which offers hope for a world which has been slowly destroying its own planet. The book could come over as preachy if you don t share the author's concern for the environment, but for those sympathetic to her views we can say "amen!". The Stone G More...

I really love Winterson's early work, but she has been fading in recent years and I found her latest book to be a huge disappointment. Billed as a sort of science-fiction story, it reads more like a cranky diatribe about various random aspects of the modern world. At times this involves meaningful subjects, like the human propensity for war and environmental destruction, but it also involves complaining that everyone writes on computers instead of notebooks and romanticizing an imagined pastoral More...

Winterson is best known for challenging boundaries