‘We were flying in a strange part of the sky,’ said Handsome, ‘and we thought we’d hit a meteorite shower, ship spinning like a windsock in a gale. I took a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree shot of the ship, and I saw that what we were flying through was a bookstorm – encyclopedias, dictionaries, a Uniform Edition of the Romantic poets, the complete works of Shakespeare.’
‘Yeah, I heard of him,’ said Pink, nodding.
It has been a number of years and I am still fuming about Margaret Atwood‘s little rant: “Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.” Yes it was years ago. Yes she has been backpedalling ever since and why should I even care?
Really though it comes down to marketability. Science fiction is a publishing ghetto. Literature that dabbles in ‘speculative’ fancies is far more respectable and ensures the authors still get invited to the important parties.
To my mind this is the definition of pretentiousness. A rather literal kind of pretension, but it asserts the dominance of one genre of literature over another.
The Stone Gods opens in a immoral far-future dystopia. Humanity has exhausted their home planet, known as Orbus. The atmosphere is filled with deadly dust-storms. Civilization is completely broken down, with different ideological enclaves controlling their own territories across the globe. The Eastern Caliphate is consumed by religious fundamentalism; the SinoMosco Pact is an extrapolation of the most corrupt form of communism; and finally the Central Power has realized the deepest desires of free market capitalism, with state government replaced by a hierarchy of corporate institutes.
Billie Crusoe is a scientist trapped in a thankless and soul-destroying media job, covering the discovery of a new planet that represents a possible hopeful future for the human race. Completely disenchanted with humanity, Billie can see that if the wealthy elite transfer themselves to this ‘Planet Blue’, history will simply repeat itself. Once the native species of dinosaurs are artificially wiped out, conversion will begin. Injustice against the lower classes will be repeated; the wealthy will sink into even more immoral depravity; and when the planet itself is stripped of all vegetation, humans will simply find another planetary body to infect.
While covering the story Billie meets the robo-sapiens Spike, an emotionless gynoid who is more than capable of reading human emotion. After Billie is forced to return to Planet Blue with a new crew, composed of scientists and a lucky celebrity, she falls in love with Spike.
However, as Captain Handsome reminds them, history has a habit of repeating itself. The book is split into four sections that reveal that these events are being recycled through a form of eternal recurrence. At times Billie becomes Billy, a sailor on Easter island, or a near-future scientist who encounters an account of the destruction of Orbus, titled The Stone Gods.
I mentioned Margaret Atwood above, because like her work, this book treats of a ‘speculative fiction’, scenario that smacks of science fiction tropes, but evidently wishes to be counted among more refined literary fellows. References to Samuel Beckett, including his ‘begin again‘, absurdist nihilism abound. Spike is threatened with being recycled to avoid her falling into the hands of rebel forces. Her knowledge and experience of the Planet Blue is intended to be extracted from her, but as the overall story hints, minds undergo a form of evolution ensuring that they are not simply limited stacks of data. Spike ultimately survives, even as Billie will be reborn, or simply return to life over and over again.
Yet this book apes science fiction, while at the same time pretending to philosophical profundity. A swing and a miss I am afraid, one that leaves the text perilously suspended between two stools. In fact at times it resembles bad sf!
Where the book excels, however, is its shocking description of a futuristic dystopia obsessed with sexual depravity. Genuinely unsettling and disturbing, these early passages of The Stone Gods vibrate with anger towards the sexual domination of women by men. There are also moments of surreal humour, such as Spike’s disembodied head performing cunnilingus. The book swings between extremes of righteous anger, attempted profundities and comical humour.
I could not help but be reminded of David Mitchell’s superior novel, Cloud Atlas, which introduces similar themes to greater effect. A disappointment.
.... i can stay 
6 comments
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February 26, 2011 at 3:10 am
Stacey
Ah….Margaret Atwood will never live that one down at least not with SF lovers! 🙂
Interesting review!
Stacey
February 26, 2011 at 4:33 am
Patrick Rennie
Ah, the old “I don’t respect science fiction so I don’t read science fiction, so when I write science fiction but market it as literature, it ends up kind of bad” problem. Although Atwood herself managed to avoid the “kind of bad” part of the problem.
I tend to treat genre as two different things: a marketing method and an academic categorization. I don’t get too upset when they market it to match the whims of an audience rather than strict adherence to categories based on content. On the other hand, if you want to flame the author for marketing it by being a snob in public, I don’t have a problem with that.
February 26, 2011 at 8:01 am
Emmet
@Patrick well this is the crux of of it isn’t it? Good writing is just good writing. Throwing a strop because the author does not wish to be lumped in with a certain kind of writing is pedantic nerdery on my part and I recognize that.
I find it frustrating all the same, regardless, as I feel I have to defend sf from accusations of its irrelevance, when it’s clear that in the right hands – a good writer, lets say – sf can be a fantastic form of storytelling. Sometimes it feels like the literati are playing ‘keep away’, with poor, socially insecure sf!
March 1, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Colin Smith
Oh, God, Jeanette Winterson, a woman so beloved of the chattering classes who produce the British “quality” press and the various arts programmes on TV and radio that you’d think that she was not just an incredibly, incredibly fine writer, but a uniquely perceptive critic and an fantastically able social commentator too, a paragon for our times, if not for all of history. I can think of no-one that more embodies the snobbery, elitism and self-delusion of so much of the British literary classes. I was unfortunate enough to be subject to one of her discourses on how she’d redeemed SF on Radio 4 one afternoon. Hell must surely be listening to her talking about how she’s superior to entire genres that she clearly knows nothing – nothing – about. To have written a terrible SF novel while believing it’s a work of transcendental art is par for the course where JW is concerned. But that the culture as a whole didn’t mock her out of her Saturday supplement interviews and TV punditry for doing so is the real shame, and deeply worrying too. (That TSG was so often lauded for supposedly transcending “the boundaries of mere genre into high art” is enough to make stone weep.)
As nearly always, I will turn to John Carey to help me deal with the rage that JW inspires in me, though not for herself as an individual – well, I’d like to believe that – but for what her ubiquity says about how easy it is for someone who ticks a particular set of boxes on a feel-good Hampstead liberal checklist to become acclaimed as not just a brilliant writer, but a moral and political sage too. (And I have a liberal, with a small “l”, sensibility myself.) Right, reach for “What Good Are The Arts?” and read Carey’s take on JW’s opinions, just to convince myself that it is possible to be, as he is, a literary figure in the public eye and not be an utter ……..
I enjoyed your review and admired your restraint. Me, I’m finished now, I’m sorry I dropped the crockery and I will get my coat …
March 1, 2011 at 10:20 pm
Emmet
*cheers from the gallery*
My thanks good sir 🙂
That does remind me, I saw an episode of Newsnight once where Kevin Smith and Jeanette Winterson shared the same panel. Worlds collided.
April 12, 2011 at 1:46 pm
Guest Blogger! – The Lost Fleet: Courageous by Jack Campbell « a book a day till i can stay
[…] that what we read reflects our soul and our moral worth than I accept the premise that Jeanette Winterson shouldn’t be constantly mocked for her ignorance, arrogance and pretension. It’s just that […]