Roberts, Adam: Stone
Stone (2002)
Written by: Adam Roberts
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 338 (Mass Market--UK)
Based on Amazon reviews (in both the US and the UK), I think I'm one of the very few who actually enjoyed Adam Roberts's Gradisil. I'd wanted to get more of his work right away, but the majority of it's published in the UK, and at the time, I didn't want to spend the extra cash.
But I'm not the only one who enjoyed Gradisil. I bought it for digitalclone, who also enjoyed it enough to pick up another one of Roberts's titles. The one she picked up was Stone, which she promptly recommended to me due to his usage of nanotechnology. She was going to let me borrow it, but I'm a sucker for having my own copies of stuff, so I bought it myself, despite the edition being more expensive for having come from the UK. For a mass market, it's quite a lovely little book, but I'll talk about that later.
The premise: in this utopian far-future, criminality is pretty much extinct, but criminal mentalities do pop up, and our narrator, who refers to him/herself*** as Ae, is one of those mentalities. S/he is a killer, and someone wants his/her services very, very badly. So badly they'll spring Ae from a prison in the center of a star so that Ae can murder the population of an entire planet. Ae's happy to do so, but s/he wants to know why, and who's behind it. The employers won't tell him/her, so Ae takes it upon him/herself to discover why, and thus plays the role of both the detective and the murder at the same time.
Review style: breaking the review into two parts has become the norm in my LJ, and that's what I'm doing with this one. What I liked and what I didn't, both including spoilers because this is one of those books that helps to talk about in full instead of generalities. If spoilers bother you, simply skip to the bottom of the review to "My Rating".
What I Liked
This is, at its heart, a really tight story. Everything is funneled into a single point of view, Ae's, and even though Ae doesn't exactly follow a straight course from the prison break to the murder (we hear about everything in between, as well as his/her past), the narrative feels very focused. That's due in part because it's being narrated to a stone. Yes, a stone. As in a pebble. A rock. The conceit is that Ae is telling what has already happened from a different prison, and his doctors believe he might open up if he talks to an inanimate object instead of a real person. Ae chooses a stone, which doesn't seem very significant until the end, when the reader learns that the method of murder relates to six very special stones, and then Ae's choice of confessor takes on far more meaning.
I also really, really enjoyed and appreciated Ae's characterization. For starters, you've got a character who can be male or female, depending on one's mood and how you employ your dotTech. Granted, Ae is a female body for most of the book because his/her dotTech has been taken away and Ae simply can't get it back, but the narrative voice, how the character actually VIEWS him/herself, is as a male. Whether that's because Roberts can't write a truly female POV to save his life (I don't think that's the case: I really liked Klara in Gradisil and the voice never struck me as distinctly male there) or because Ae simply prefers to be male (a thought--female serial killers are very rare, but male ones are not) is probably up to the reader, but I feel it's the latter (plus, I haven't read enough of Roberts's work to truly make a judgment on whether or not he can convincingly write the female narrative). Anyway, getting back to the character of Ae: another reason this character is so fascinating is that s/he must survive in a universe that wholly relies on dotTech, and that's important because the dotTech does more than allow cosmetic and gender-based changes and upgrades: it keeps you healthy. So as Ae travels from planet to planet, s/he must contend with the various illnesses or injuries that come from his/her travels, and that's particularly detrimental on the planet Rain, where Ae is seriously ill and his/her wounds become infested with maggots (lovely descriptions there, and I mean that. Don't eat lunch while reading those sections).
But my favorite part of Ae's character was the fact that s/he is a narcissistic psychopath. Clinically speaking (paraphrasing from the doctor at the end), Ae isn't entirely sure other people exist, s/he thinks they're all a part of his/her head, hallucinations or ghosts. This is important, because Ae doesn't empathize with others, thinks only of him/herself and his/her needs, and that allows Ae to be the killer s/he is. This is a fantastic, if not always likable, character, and I feel Roberts portrayed Ae very, very well. It's also telling that Ae's able to tell his/her story to a stone instead of a doctor. Reflecting on the narrative, it reminds me a bit of the style of Lolita in that you've got a despicable character telling of his crimes to . . . well, that's not the best comparison actually. In Lolita, the character is relating his crimes to a jury, who will judge him, and Ae is relating his/her crimes to a stone, who won't judge. However, the doctors listening DO judge him, so maybe my comparison is apt after all. Anyway.
Roberts use of the AI and dotTech were also fascinating. The AI particularly, especially when the reader learns at the end of the book that not every time Ae and the AI conversed was real. Sometimes, Ae was making it all up, hallucinating, which is all kinds of awesome and a further proof of that character's narcissism and hallucinations. And the dotTech. Well. I didn't have the whole murder scenario figured out until Roberts WANTED me to figure it out, and when we got the explanation of why, I loved it. I also loved how the dotTech's goal seemed to relate to the Gravity Trench, which may come from the future, which reminded me very much of the Time Tombs in Dan Simmons's The Fall of Hyperion, in a good way. That whole thing was very satisfying, though I did question Ae's feelings of guilt and rage when the dotTech brought up a good point--s/he never SAW the population s/he murdered. However, this just goes to show us that Ae, for all his/her flaws, was human, especially without the dotTech that kept his/her emotions and hormones in check.
What I Didn't Like
The narrative did, at certain points, get on my nerves. I didn't mind Ae talking to the stone so much, nor did I mind the occasional shout-outs to the doctors listening in, but rather, the sometimes melodramatic feel of it. The style reminded me of that Dan Simmons used in Drood, which really annoyed me. Admittedly, when a character is as narcissistic as Ae is, you can expect a certain bit of melodrama, so maybe I'm just being harsh.
However, there's one line that Roberts crossed that bothered the snot out of me. Through-out the whole book, there's an additional conceit on top of the one of Ae telling his/her story to the stone. It's a translation of an original text/recording, so through-out the next, we get these footnotes of some unknown translator talking about what certain words or phrases meant in the futuristic Glice language and why certain words/translations were used. I thought, and rather hoped, that the ending would give me some major revelation as to why this conceit was being used. I thought that Ae had gotten away with his/her murder and was caught so much later that the major language and culture had shifted radically, and that's why it was being translated. But no. It's not. Even the glossary at the end is prefaced with some gibberish about a translation, and at that point, I was sitting there thinking, "Come ON."
Don't get me wrong: I love maps. I love glossaries. I love notes and references. BUT NOT when they're disguised like this. It's just pretentious--could the author have not just told the story as-is, comfortable with the knowledge that with most fantasy and science fiction, there's sort of an intuitive assumption that you're reading a translation into English anyway (which is why we have foreign words in italics, because THOSE words simply don't translate to OUR language)? And even if there's not that intuitive assumption, can't Roberts just tell the story and stick a glossary in the back? Why add another layer? Another conceit? I said it before and I'll say it again: it's pretentious. The story is good. The writing is good. You don't need to go that extra mile to show off how clever you are, because the whole idea of US reading this account as translated from the Glice has no bearing or point on the story! Unless someone wants to convince me that Roberts intended this story to really "exist" in our future and it has someone traveled to us, in the past (via the Gravity Trench?), for Mr. Roberts to translate? No one wants to convince me of this, right? Because that's just stupid.
Anyway.
While I enjoyed learning the methods for space travel in this story and found it all very interesting (particularly fast space, slow space, sublight space, etc), I had trouble really conceiving and believing the notion that we would travel, THROUGH SPACE, with nothing but a super-special foam to protect us. I was able to accept it enough to read the book, but everytime Ae or someone else traveled by that method, my brain had issues. Clever and well explained (don't ask me to parrot the explanation back though. I can't, not very well), but just really hard for me to swallow.
Also, the typos in this book annoyed me. Someone should've caught them, especially the use of "your" instead of "you're." *twitches*
My Rating
Worth the Cash: to be honest, I think I liked Gradisil better, but this book is doing something very different from Gradisil so it makes it difficult to compare, even though both are penned by the same author. I really enjoyed the tightness of the narrative and the focus on the story, the various uses of technology, particularly the AI and the dotTech and how all of it played together in the ultimate climax of the book. I also enjoyed how our narrator told his/her story to a stone, of all things. It was charming, in a way, and it worked because Roberts's writing is just very solid, very strong. I also loved the characterization of Ae. Not a sympathetic character per se (though at times, you can't help but feel sorry for him/her), but certainly a fascinating one and one that's easy to understand, especially by the end. I'm glad I decided to get this particular title, and I'm still interested in reading more of Roberts's work, because he's a very good writer, literary in some regards. Stone is a piece of SF that's literary while still entertaining, and offered more "science" in it than I would've expected, though I shouldn't be surprised, given the level of science offered in Gradisil. If you liked Gradisil, you should give this a shot. If you didn't like Gradisil, but were interested in Roberts's writing, this is a very different tale and definitely worth reading, so check it out. Even if you are in the US like me and have to order the UK edition. :)
Cover Commentary: I really like this style of cover, which is prominent on all of Roberts's UK editions. A solid color with an interesting, eye-catching design in the middle, and the title at the bottom. Contrary to the picture I'm using for this review, this is a very BRIGHT book, but I quite enjoy looking at it. Hell, I want to buy more of Roberts's work (the UK editions) just to get the pretty covers! I know, I know, that's a bad idea, but still . . . they're abstract and pretty! :)
*** = the reason I keep using s/he or him/her and so on and so forth is because while Ae is physically female, the voice is very much male--in fact, the only reason Ae isn't physically male is because the dotTech, which allowed the body to be male, was taken away from him/her. So it's hard to refer to Ae as one gender or the other, because s/he is both, IMHO.