cbr category time
So this one was ordered from the library, from my decades long, very long list of Books To Order from the library, and hell if I know why. Usually I can see fifteen-years-younger me might have wanted to read it, but not this one. Because apocalyptic drama is not my thing, and that’s exactly what this was.
The Stone Gods is written in sections that continue to circle back, or as the author puts it, “a repeating world”. And the world is always a dying one. We open with protagonist Billie and her proto robo-sapian girlfriend Spike. Spike has reached the end of her allotted time, and was due to be sent back to be deprogrammed and discarded, but she and Billie have different ideas on the matter. She does end up losing her body, but her head is all she really needs, so Billie tosses her into a duffle bag and off they go, set for the Blue Planet.
They have escaped the Red Planet, which is being killed by pollution, and the Blue Planet looks promising except that it is currently overrun with an abundance of dinosaurs and other life. However, scientists from the Red Planet are aware that there is an asteroid headed straight for the Blue Planet, and they think, aha! Let the asteroid take care of the dinosaurs and all the other riff-raff, and there you go. A nice clean planet for humans to take over. Alas, the timing was just a tad bit off, and hello, what’s that coming at us?
And then there’s that bit where Billie is Billy, and a stowaway, and still meets up with his friend again, and they are on Easter Island (and there’s the titular Stone Gods). Long term human habitation doesn’t look so promising there, either. And then we are back in space with Billie and Spike again.
I think seeing the same grim scenario repeat itself without any resolution was getting to me, but I suspect that reading it in today’s climate change crisis makes it not as revolutionary a concept as when it was written in 2007.
