''The Stone Gods'' is a 2007 novel by

Jeanette Winterson Jeanette Winterson (born 27 August 1959) is an English writer. Her first book, '' Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit'', was a semi-autobiographical novel about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against convention. Other novels explore gender pola ...

. It is a post apocalyptic, postmodern, dystopic love story concerned with themes of corporate government control, the harshness of war, artificial intelligence and technology. The novel is

self-referential Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...

as characters make intertextual references, and cyclical as certain characters’ story arcs repeat. Particularly those of a Robo ''sapien'' AI named Spike and her reluctant human companion, Billie. The novel aims mainly to warn against history’s tendency to repeat itself, as well as humanity’s inability to learn from past mistakes.

Ursula Le Guin Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (; October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the '' Earthsea'' fantasy series. She was ...

, while criticizing exposition and sentimentality, thought the novel a worthwhile and cautionary tale. Andrew Milner, a literary critic and author of ''Science Fiction and Climate Change'', notes that this book is an early example of ' doomer'

climate fiction Climate fiction (sometimes shortened as cli-fi) is literature that deals with climate change.Glass, Rodge (31 May 2013).Global Warning: The Rise of 'Cli-fi' retrieved 3 March 2016 Generally speculative in nature but scientifically-grounded, wor ...

A novel in four parts

* "Planet Blue" – set in a futuristic past, where humanity's destruction of its own homeworld, Orbus, seems to be fixed when they come across and terraform another viable planet. * "Easter Island" – set in the 18th century, a time when

Easter Island Easter Island ( rap, Rapa Nui; es, Isla de Pascua) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is most famous for its ne ...

's inhabitants destroyed many of the

moai Moai or moʻai ( ; es, moái; rap, moʻai, , statue) are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Rapa Nui in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but ...

statues (and the last tree) on their island. * "Post-3War" – set in "Tech City" after

World War III World War III or the Third World War, often abbreviated as WWIII or WW3, are names given to a hypothetical worldwide large-scale military conflict subsequent to World War I and World War II. The term has been in use since at ...

, with Billie educating Spike, the Robo ''sapiens''. * "Wreck City" – set in the same setting, although moved to a derelict trash city where those abandoned by the corporate-controlled society struggle to live.

References

2007 British novels Post-apocalyptic novels Postmodern novels Self-reflexive novels Hamish Hamilton books Novels by Jeanette Winterson Environmental fiction books Novels about robots Novels about multiple time paths Novels about genetic engineering Space colonization literature Climate change novels {{postmodern-novel-stub