Harcourt, April 2008
The inhabitants of Orbus are running out of planet. The unchecked consumption of fossil fuels has finally run its course. Global Warming is no longer a disputed phenomenon or a point for political positioning. Sea levels have risen, ice caps have melted, and the planet has been laid to waste. The world has devolved to three massive urban axes: The Central Power (a thinly disguised United States), Eastern Caliphate, and the SinoMosco Pact.
Socially, it's worse. Citizens of The Central Power are all artificially beautiful. Everyone, in fact, looks alike, "except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That's what you'd expect in a democracy." The allure of youth is now taken to the extreme. Women who have been "fixed" not to age past twenty-four are now competing with twelve-year-olds, or at least with women who look twelve. With robots doing all the work for us, our minds have atrophied. Literacy has plummeted, and we rely more than ever on the corporate infrastructure of Tech City to do things for us. But with all the resources used up, Tech City won't be around much longer.
The inhabitants of Orbus are running out of planet. The unchecked consumption of fossil fuels has finally run its course. Global Warming is no longer a disputed phenomenon or a point for political positioning. Sea levels have risen, ice caps have melted, and the planet has been laid to waste. The world has devolved to three massive urban axes: The Central Power (a thinly disguised United States), Eastern Caliphate, and the SinoMosco Pact.
Socially, it's worse. Citizens of The Central Power are all artificially beautiful. Everyone, in fact, looks alike, "except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That's what you'd expect in a democracy." The allure of youth is now taken to the extreme. Women who have been "fixed" not to age past twenty-four are now competing with twelve-year-olds, or at least with women who look twelve. With robots doing all the work for us, our minds have atrophied. Literacy has plummeted, and we rely more than ever on the corporate infrastructure of Tech City to do things for us. But with all the resources used up, Tech City won't be around much longer.
On the up-side, a new planet has been discovered, and Orbus can finally be abandoned. Lush, green, and oxygenated, Planet Blue may just be ready for human colonization - except of course for the dinosaurs. Renegade scientist/activist, Billie Crusoe, finds herself aboard the next exploratory mission to the new blue planet, along with space pirate, Captain Handsome, a battered eighteenth-century edition of Captain Cook's Journals, and Spike, an incredibly sexy, dark-haired, green-eyed Robo sapiens, who although created as thought rather than emotion, neural rather than limbic, finds herself evolving and smitten, not with Captain Handsome, but with Billie.
Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods is at once a socio-environmental cautionary tale and a love story in three acts. Act I finds human and Robot sapiens love-entangled in the next potential-rich world the human race is destined to destroy; Act II is an historical re-imagining of a 1774 visit to Easter Island by British seamen, one of whom is marooned with a Dutchman named Spikkers amidst the warring tribes who have rendered the island barren, a microcosm forewarning the future plight of Orbus/Earth; and in the third act, the future holds no Planet Blue, merely an Orbus in which the post World War III lives of the citizenry are minutely controlled by the many arms of MORE, the corporate entity that has created Spike, in this incarnation a disembodied robot head/conciousness who is being positioned to rule the world.
Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods is at once a socio-environmental cautionary tale and a love story in three acts. Act I finds human and Robot sapiens love-entangled in the next potential-rich world the human race is destined to destroy; Act II is an historical re-imagining of a 1774 visit to Easter Island by British seamen, one of whom is marooned with a Dutchman named Spikkers amidst the warring tribes who have rendered the island barren, a microcosm forewarning the future plight of Orbus/Earth; and in the third act, the future holds no Planet Blue, merely an Orbus in which the post World War III lives of the citizenry are minutely controlled by the many arms of MORE, the corporate entity that has created Spike, in this incarnation a disembodied robot head/conciousness who is being positioned to rule the world.
It is too bad that Winterson, known for wonderfully poetic prose, is hampered in The Stone Gods by the inherently didactic nature of her environmental message. More often than palatable, we are at the receiving end of one of many morality lessons on why humanity finds itself in this predicament.
However, Winterson, author of the Whitbread Prize-winning Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) and numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction, has uniquely and richly novelized our growing concern about humanity's impact upon the Earth in this multi-layered story of repeating worlds, wherein we seem doomed to endlessly repeat our mistakes on succeeding planets in cycles of millions of years. Winterson's repetition of characters in altered-incarnations, autobiographical details from the her childhood, and references to The Stone Gods within The Stone Gods (including reference to the unexpected discovery of the novel's manuscript in a tube stop last year) make the novel a surprising, if not sometimes jarring, journey.
However, Winterson, author of the Whitbread Prize-winning Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) and numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction, has uniquely and richly novelized our growing concern about humanity's impact upon the Earth in this multi-layered story of repeating worlds, wherein we seem doomed to endlessly repeat our mistakes on succeeding planets in cycles of millions of years. Winterson's repetition of characters in altered-incarnations, autobiographical details from the her childhood, and references to The Stone Gods within The Stone Gods (including reference to the unexpected discovery of the novel's manuscript in a tube stop last year) make the novel a surprising, if not sometimes jarring, journey.
