Until recently, I'd heard relatively little about author Adam Roberts. I have a certain fascination with titles, so the poetic austerity of his uniformly single-word titles--Salt (2000), On (2001), Stone (2002), and Polystom (2003)--struck a chord. Then, when a downright worshipful review on my other favourite science fiction review site, the SF Site, referred to Roberts as "the best science fiction writer you've never heard of", he rocketed to the highest tier of my reading list. And that's how I came to read Stone.
Much of Roberts' narrative success hinges on clever premises. In On, he gives the force of gravity a 90 degree turn and explores the result. In Polystom, he replaces the vacuum of space with a thick, aerially navigable atmosphere. The premise of Stone is equally clever: impel the Galaxy's only sociopath to both commit and investigate the most heinous crime in history. They're gimmicks, but they work.
In the far-future utopian Galaxy of Stone, pervasive nanotechnology has eliminated disease and poverty. Argumentation and politics are arcane hobbies. War is a distant memory. Crime is unknown. Or rather, almost unknown: the only criminal in all the known Galaxy is Ae, a viscious serial killer, stripped of nanotechnology and left to wither and die, buried inside a star. Ae has nothing to lose when a disembodied voice makes a proposition: freedom from the impregnable jailstar in exchange for the commission of genocide. The only caveat--and it seems such a small one, initially--is that the identity of Ae's employers will not be revealed until the job is done. Ae has no compunctions about murder--and what is genocide if not just another serial spree?--and so agrees. But, once freed, once faced with the task of genocide, Ae is haunted by unresolvable questions. In a utopian empire, who could aspire to genocide? And why? Why?
In another author's hands, Stone might have been a story about a man's struggle with his conscience. But Adam Roberts is a little too twisted for that. Except for a few minor twinges of conscience, the ethics of genocide are beneath Ae's concern. Ae is, after all, homicidally disposed. The real story here is Ae's flirtation with true and utter madness in the face of paradox: Ae simply cannot figure out who could want to exterminate the population of a planet, and not knowing threatens to drive Ae mad.
The queer content in Stone centres on Ae's lack of a fixed gender, as you may have guessed from my awkward avoidance of pronouns, until now. Like most of the nanotech-infused citizens of Roberts' far-future t'T empire, Ae can change gender essentially at will. Though female by birth, Ae ultimately settled into life as a man. Being stripped of nanotech as a form of slow execution, however, causes Ae's body to revert to its "default" gender. The Ae we know for most of Stone is biologically female, though one could easily dispute any assignment of a single gender to Ae. All of Ae's lovers we are acquainted with are female, at the time they know Ae, so one could claim that Ae is a lesbian but, as you can imagine, it's a lot more complicated than that.
By far the most interesting aspect of Ae's gender fluidity is how little we notice. Or care. Roberts actually explains on the first page that Ae has gone through more than one sex change but, even though I keep my eye out for that sort of thing, it didn't really register with me for probably another hundred pages. It comes up over and over, but it's just one part of the manifold complexity of Ae's personality. Is this a minor revolution in the representation of queer characters in SF? A queer character whose queerness is so well integrated that it becomes just another characteristic, lost in the mix? I somehow doubt this was Roberts' intent in inventing Ae, but he's succeeded nonetheless.
Is Stone a good read, you ask? Yes, yes, a hearty yes. Let me join the chorus of reviewers praising Adam Roberts: he is very, very good. Roberts' talent for world-building is Vancian, and exceeded in recent memory only by that other UK speculative fiction phenomenon, China Mieville. Both excel at texturing their newly-invented worlds with a lived-in feel. Ae's journey across the Galaxy in Stone carries her from one spectacularly imagined world to the next, from the monsoon planet of Rain to the high-flying cities of Narcissus, suspended in webs between implausible mountain peaks, to the tech-obsessed world of Nu Hirsch, populated in part by semi-sentient, shapeshifting blobs, called Haud machines. The imagination reels and reels.
Quibbles? Only a few. The editing of Stone is distractingly lax in places. And Roberts' decision to tell Ae's story as a series of epistles to the titular stone, as translated into English from a fictional language, is baffling--it adds little or nothing to the story and is sometimes confusing.
Adam Roberts has secured a place on my list of essential authors. I wonder whether we will see more queer characters in his fiction? You'll find out as soon as I do.