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Stone by Adam Roberts
pub: Gollancz. 338 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99.
ISBN: 0-575-07396-9
check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk
t'T
is a utopia - all pain, illness and negative emotion are controlled
and tempered by the nanotechs that coarse through the bloodstream
of every t'T human being.
All except one - Ae, an anomaly in t'T, someone who doesn't seek
his thrills by travelling from planet to planet or by modifying
his body but from murder. Psychopathic murder.
He
has been caught and is held in an impenetrable prison but is offered
a deal by mysterious voices in his head, freedom in exchange for
the apparently motiveless murder of an entire plane.
He accepts and Adam Roberts uses this story to explore what it
means to be a conscious being and quantum physics
If this sounds like a serious issue to be explored then you are
right - the ideas behind this novel force their way past the words
and past the story to be at the forefront of this novel.
There is no doubt that this is a book designed to make you think.
At times, I felt like a removal man carrying new ideas up to my
brain having to pause frequently due to the size of the load.
It also means that the novel's tone is as dispassionate and calculating
as the character of Ae, there is no in-depth connection with any
characters. In this way I felt that it was similar to Margaret Atwood's
speculative fiction; a dispassionate look at what could be.
It read like a scientist observing an experiment, which he set
up, through the objectivity of a microscope. That isn't to say I
disliked this novel, it's more that there was no emotional hook
on which to catch my interest on.
Katie McGivern
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