The Stone Gods. Jeanette Winterson. 2007.
I read the first few pages of this book and was so annoyed I almost didn’t finish it. I’ve had relatively bad luck with genre fiction so far this year; this space just reflects the stuff I didn’t toss aside in frustration, and so much of what I did see to the end left me dissatisfied. I went into The Stone Gods with conflicting feelings. I really liked the only other book of Winterson’s that I’ve read, so I assumed I’d like this, but the sci-fi I’ve picked up in 2024 has been so lackluster that I couldn’t help but assume this would be too.
Then I read the first few pages, and was irritated. It was…dated. I was glad not to be reading a book clearly written by someone raised on Joss Whedon, something full of quippy dialogue and pop culture references and explicit explorations of trauma. I could tell this wasn’t that, right away. But I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I had read it before. It wasn’t just the slightly ironic tone; the form this dystopian future took reminded me so strongly of other books. The sexism in this dystopia was so broad, the dumb women and predatory men and voracious, consumer-driven lifestyles within it so cartoonish. I realized that it reminded me of the great feminist sci-fi of the 1970s. There was a bit of Marge Piercy in there, a bit of James Tiptree, and a great heaping pile of Joanna Russ.
And listen, I love all those writers and I love their work. But as I read the first section of The Stone Gods I kept thinking “I’ve already read The Female Man and ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In,’ they were written decades ago, just what is the point of this?”
I’m glad I kept going, because once I realized that Winterson was not writing a future, but a very distant past, things clicked for me. Once she moved out of that setting and into the more recent past and near future she left the retro tone and style behind, and I could fully appreciate the deftness of her experiment. She did it, I think, on purpose. She reached back to the feminist sci-fi of a generation ago to explore a time that looked like the future, but was itself the past. The fact that the future looks retro and dated was part of the point; the novel is about the cyclical nature of time and human behavior, about the ways we repeat mistakes and catastrophes over and over again.
I imagine if I told Winterson that the first section of this novel reminded me so strongly of Russ, and that I didn’t see the point of imitating Russ in the 21st century, she’d probably tell me that it isn’t as if we’d learned all we could from Russ, is it? Her feminism might feel like something we’ve grown beyond, in some ways, but have we really? Aren’t we just making the same mistakes again, over and over, trusting in the same dumb ideas, over and over?
I really love the way this book forced me to think about that. It’s the best sci-fi I’ve read so far this year. It was also, for what it’s worth, one of the most purely romantic novels I’ve read recently. The central love story, and the way it recurs and repeats through time, is beautifully written, and it was that relationship that kept me reading long enough to appreciate what Winterson was doing. Can’t recommend this one enough.