Stone (GOLLANCZ S.F.) - Hardcover

Roberts, Adam

3.7

713 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0575070633 ISBN 13: 9780575070639

Publisher: Gollancz, 2002

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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.

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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

Book Description:

The Universe�s first mass murderer for thousands of years confesses; mind-bending SF from one of the genre�s brightest talents.

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