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: #249028 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

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.

sci-fi out of this earth
Stone, is an exciting book, where the story is not confined in a single area, or planet, but evolves throughout the only patch of universe where travelling at n times light speed is possible.
In a place where anybody can be anyone-or-anything and where crime has been long forgotten, we encounter the last criminal, fighting to remain sane, confiding his inner thoughts to a stone.
Committing the ultimate crime and trying to solve the crime mystery at the same time, Stone proves to be a very enjoyable read, one of the few books that deserve a second read, and for this reason 5 stars are well deserved.

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 .