Product Description

Sprung from a prison in the centre of a star, the universe's last criminal is employed to kill the population of a planet. It is a crime that will tear apart an interstellar utopia. Keeping ahead of detection and preparing the crime, the killer voyages to numerous worlds and hones the instincts required for murder. And wonders who is behind the contract. Roberts' new novel is an extraordinary fusing of ideas, exotic locations, personal drama and an enquiry into the nature of crime in a society that thinks it has forgotten how to commit it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #305791 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Stone is Adam Roberts' third SF novel following Salt and On--all three independent and very different from each other. His psychopathic narrator tells the story of his life and crimes to--for special personal reasons--a stone...

Ae's narrative begins in an uncrackable prison inside a star where he's been jailed for his latest murder. Indeed he's the only living murderer in humanity's vast interstellar utopia, the "t'T". A voice in his head offers freedom and wealth if he'll perform one little chore: murdering an entire planetary population of over 60 million people without destroying the planet.

It's a tough proposition, since t'T people are crammed with "dotTech" nanomachines that extend life, repel disease, and repair fatal injuries. Nevertheless Ae escapes from the star-jail with heavy technomagical assistance, has good and bad times (and kills again) on various worlds, and acquires a carefully hidden info-chip loaded with cutting-edge physics. With this armoury, planetary murder becomes possible. Just take 12 smallish stones...

What baffles Ae is the mystery of who's employing him. Could one of the galaxy's other harmless-seeming human societies be launching war on the t'T? The answer is much stranger and connects with Ae's repeated musings on quantum mechanics as he follows his destiny. Other weird science appears: for example, t'T space is divided by the Trench, a mysterious zone 1,000 light years long where gravity reaches fatal extremes, but there's no mass to account for it.

Like Roberts' previous SF novels, it's an odd and offbeat mixture. Chilling insight into Ae's psychology mingles with flamboyantly space-operatic gadgetry. Though intriguing and inventive, Stone promises more than it ultimately delivers. --David Langford

About the Author
Adam Roberts is Professor of 19th century literature at London University. His first novel, Salt, was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award as was his novel Gradisil. He has also published a number of academic works on both 19th century poetry and SF.

Customer Reviews

Interesting in Parts
"Stone" is a curious book. The quality of writing and characterisation is poor and the narrative is at times risible. The worlds of the t'T are Sci-Fi stereotypes, two-dimensional and bland with planets with names like "Rain" (so called because,er, it rains continually) whose main city is "Raintown", and there is an embarrassing half-baked attempt to add depth to the book by references to the t'T language, "Glice". However amidst this mediocrity there is a plot which keeps the reader guessing throughout and one good theme relating to the "Dot Tech", a kind of sub-atomic AI that the citizens of t'T have infused in their bloodstream which keeps them disease free and void of negative and destructive emotions and behaviour. The author repeatedly compares and contrasts the sentient world that we humans experience with the sub-quantum state of flux that the "Dot Tech" inhabit and introduces interesting ,but complex ,philosophical concepts based on sub-atomic physics about what constitutes the nature of reality at it's smallest level and the consequences of this for the human experience of cosmic life. The narrative is written by the central character , Ae, in the form of a letter to a stone, the relevance of which becomes apparent as the plot unfolds. However the reader doesn't need to be reminded of this constantly by the narrator who intersperses the dialogue unnecessarily with phrases like "my dear Stone" all the time. "Stone" is good in parts, poor in others and does provoke some thought , but overall it is a fairly average effort .

Intelligent
Stone is Roberts' second novel (following Salt) and adds further to his reputation as a talented author.

The story is the monologue (as told to a stone) of a prisoner, and how he came to be where he is. The prisoner, Ae, is given a mission in return for his freedom; a mission to commit murder. What makes Ae special is that he is capable of murder - in this future murder is almost unheard of. Life is peaceful, there is no scarcity, and, thanks to nanotechnology, humans may live for many hundreds of years.

What unfolds is a linear story of Ae's mission, and this could be a very ordinary sci-fi tale. Why makes it otherwise, is an intelligent and entertaining writing style.

Compared to Salt, this novel has more and better science, and richer characterisation. It does lack complexity and originality, and to some readers these will be critical shortcomings, but to me it was a solid and worthwhile read.

Four stars.

A future classic - if there's any justice
I first came across Adam Roberts when I read 'On', an early novel that, for all that its central concept was breathtakingly original, was let down by an abrupt ending that left me feeling utterly cheated.
I gave the author the benefit of the doubt, however, and read 'Salt', his first book, which was dreadful enough to put me off sci fi for a while - one of those hackneyed, formulaic colonisation sagas that only appeal to people who read nothing but sci-fi, the only surprise being that it didn't feature a beautiful alien female who inexplicably fell for the central character.
Then I saw 'Stone', and I decided to give the guy another go. And I'm so glad I did, as this is one of my all-time favourite books - in any genre.
It's an intelligently and beautifully written road trip of a book that stands up to repeated readings and that, in 50 years time, I hope will be held aloft as an example of how imaginative, intelligent science fiction can match the best novels in any other genre, in terms of quality of prose, narrative drive, and emotive power.
The plot is deceptively straightforward, with a destination that's spelled out from the opening chapter, but which, thanks to a masterful build-up of tension teased out over a number of superbly-written episodes along the way, doesn't disappoint or feel contrived. As the central character, Ae, stumbles inexorably towards a genocidal destiny that ought to make the reader hate and fear him, we instead come to sympathise with him, seeing him for what he really is: a tragically suggestible and mentally unhinged human being who, because of a genetic anomaly at birth, is the last known living being in the universe who is still capable of murder.
Even when he's driven to kill, through his confusion and inability to interact with other people - in what is one of the best-written murder scenes I've ever come across in a sci-fi book - we're not repulsed by him or hateful of him, and by the end of the book, as he's on the verge of annihilating the entire population of a whole planet, we're positively rooting for the guy.
And for a writer to be able to carry that trick off, while creating exotic yet utterly believable alien worlds, pacing the novel beautifully, and writing with a raw intelligence that never detracts from the tale, is almost unique.
This is not a comfortable read, but it is nonetheless a book that you'll want to read again and again. It's high-concept, but don't let that put you off. It's written with a story-telling skill that is, in my experience, hard to find in serious science fiction novels. No sci fi writer I've ever read comes close to being able to write a story as moving, challenging and satisfying as this. Only Iain Banks can, for my money, write fantastic science fiction that's as intelligent and imaginative as this, while still being utterly readable and not at all cliched or lacking in emotion.
This is head and shoulders above anything else I've read by Adam Roberts, but for this novel alone he deserves to be remembered as a true story-telling master.