Summary

Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods begins with the first-person narration of Billie Crusoe, speaking in present tense. The novel opens with Billie's description of Planet Blue, the new world found by explorers from her home planet, Orbus, which is slowly dying from pollution. Orbus is a futuristic, dystopic, high-tech society: genetic fixing allows men and women to stop aging at whatever age they want, and mass illiteracy is encouraged as technology and robots take on almost all human tasks requiring intellectual or physical labor.

Billie works in Enhancement Services, a department of the Central Power, a government with near-global power. Billie and Spike, a beautiful robot who has explored the new planet, are both interviewed by the media and publicly attest to the new planet's habitability.

Manfred, Billie's boss, often grows frustrated with Billie's politically incorrect complaints and analyses, and therefore becomes a...