Sunday, 29th of December, 2002

I just finished this latest novel by Adam Roberts. See the previous entry for a little info on the Roberts. As well as a science fiction author, Roberts is an academic, specialising in science fiction and 19th century literature. I haven’t read his previous two novels, which were well received but didn’t grab me content-wise (and I have sooo much to read, dahhling!) This one, however, sounded fascinating, and that is, indeed!

It’s really late (check the timestamp on the blog entry… I’m writing this before the entry gets stamped, but still…) so I don’t want to write a whole essay. Suffice to say, though, that this is a very very fine hard science fiction novel, one which manages to impart a huge amount of science fact, and speculate convincingly in the areas of quantum physics, relativity and gravity. At the same time it is a disturbingly compelling piece of characterisation.
Written in the first person, Stone is the tale of a psychopath in a society where crime is unheard of. He or she (for the inhabitants of this particular galactic society can change the gender at will) narrates his or her story to a stone in the prison within which s/he is held - it’s easier than interpersonal communication…
Stone is set in a far-future society called the t’T, where all humans are imbued with dotTech (nanotechnology) which makes it almost impossible for them to die, and nearly impossible even to feel pain… Roberts expores the implications of this for his society in great detail. Faster-than-light travel is possible within certain limits, and for most of the humans life involves “Zhip”-ing around the galaxy having adventures, recreational sex, and so on. Ae, our very much flawed protagonist, is a murderer who has been incarcerated inside a star, and she (her default gender is female) is approached, at the start of the novel, by a mysterious voice that offers her freedom if she performs a particular task. That task, horrifyingly, is to murder the inhabitants of an entire planet.
Ae is a wonderful character. She is exceedingly complex in her moral and emotional makeup, and the writing style beautifully reflects this. The increasingly horrific acts of murder are described by her in an often detached fashion, and when describing her childhood she comments explicitly on the feeling that she’s not intentionally guiding her actions at some points… Part of her punishment is to have the dotTech inhabiting her body removed, and her trials and tribulations trying to live without the near-magical nanotech are described in detail. She becomes manic-depressive and, if it were possible, even more insane… Yet the narrative is always gripping and clear. Ae becomes more obsessed with who her “employers” are, and becomes the detective as well as the criminal. Of course she never solves that conundrum, but all is revealed, rather spectacularly, by the end. I found that increasingly, as Ae interrogates her own morals or lack thereof (and she experiences a huge amount of what might by considered remorse), I was particularly disturbed by how much empathy I felt towards the character. Clearly Ae is a sociopath and indeed a psychopath, yet she is also a highly sympathetic and compelling character.

In this novel, Roberts has created a future utopia as full of wonder and contradiction as Iain M Banks’ Culture, as well as one of the most memorably characters one will have the simultaneous pleasure and horror of reading… And it’s radical hard science fiction to the core. Strongly recommended.

Note: “radical” hard science fiction? That’s a term originating, I believe, from Britain’s great science fiction magazine Interzone in the (maybe) late ’80s, in which various science fiction authors including Paul McAuley resolved to try to write a form of hard science fiction which, rather than focus on one world-changing advance or one scientific conundrum, would try to depict a realistic future world where all predictable technologies have an impact (whether communications technology, virtual reality, biotechnology, climate change, nanotech, etc etc)… Radical hard sf is where it’s at. Read Greg Egan, Paul McAuley, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, and more recently add Alastair Reynolds, Charlie Stross, etc etc… The list goes on. I imagine I could include Brian Stableford in that list. These people (a couple of generations there, and Stableford comes from an even earlier generation, but is still writing cutting edge stuff right now) happen to all be British or Australian, and this form of sf seems to be something of a British tendency. There is a strong sense of morality, but it’s a realistic morality with all the shades of grey and contradictions that real life offers up; there’s a strong understanding of politics; and there’s a dedication to a scientific epistemology/ontology of the world… Hurrah, I say.

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