I feel like Roberts created a fascinating, well-thought-out far future that he wanted to show off in a novel, but instead he had a short novella of a plot, and ended up writing a not-very-well-paced novel.

The beginning was good. Then comes a long section, maybe 40-50% of the book, lasting well past the midpoint, where the protagonist wanders around avoiding his task, but visiting various worlds so the author can write about the setting. Sure, there's some character development, but I didn't like Ae enough for this section to rise above the level of 'more tedious than not.'

Things pick up again at, oh, around the two-thirds mark, and the story moves along nicely from there on.

I liked the premise and setting. The mystery of who Ae's employers are and why they want him to murder the population of a planet keeps you guessing until the end. Ae had his own ideas, which I never found believable. Whether Roberts intended that or not is unclear. They seemed preposterous to me, so I tend to think no.

In fact, I found a lot of what Ae did frustrating or dumb. Though given what he's been asked to do, it was at least understandable. I'd dither on depopulating a planet too! I think I could tolerate not knowing who'd hired me better than Ae, though.

In this end, this shy of three stars for me, but better than two, so, lacking partial stars as GR does, I'll give it a three. This is one of his earliest novels, so perhaps his writing hadn't developed to what it would be for works such as The Thing Itself and Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea. Which is to say, there are better Adam Roberts books out there, read them first. ( )

Roberts' books are always clever - superbly far-out ideas and excellent plots - and his writing is getting better with each book. Not just the prose, although that is, but the way he handles the themes and morals. I don't think there is another writer like him - hardest of the hard science fiction based in real science (if wildly extrapolated), with a real literary sensibility; SF as a mirror for the real world, like Balllard and Banks and le Guin. Awesome stuff. ( )

I give the plot 3.5★s and the writing 2★s. I kept reading it because I was curious about the storyline, which did interest me. However, there was a lot of sludge in the writing. I can only guess Roberts was trying to prove himself a write of "hard scifi" or some such, because there was a lot of senseless "factual" science-type information scattered around, and plenty of repetition amongst this "data" the reader is provided. For no reason at all. It doesn't help with the story, it doesn't move the plot along, it slows it down and takes you out of the story. The ending... I suppose it was alright, but after a whole book of trying to figure out the who/why of it, it felt a bit like a let-down to me. I'm also admittedly a bit concerned with his ideas about relationships/sex. E.g. "Imagine yourself rattled with another stone, a smooth marble pebble of white milky coloration - imagine that, you and this other pebble cupped between two hands and rattled and shaken together, so that you clack and bounce off one another. That's something like it. Then imagine you and this fellow-stone were tossed together into the furnace, so hot a furnace that your brittly-tough layer of oxidised skin melts away, and the igneous rock-substance out of which you are made goes gluey and runs and deliquesces in the heat; as your lava mixes and flows with the lava of your fellow stone." Also, that a utopia means everything is chill and casual therefore everything revolves around sex.

There were some interesting aspects to this story but overall, I would be hard-pressed to recommend it. ( )

This novel took a while for me to engage with it properly. In a far future space-faring society, where nanotechnology is ubiquitous and allows the society's inhabitants perpetual health, safety from injury, a cure for many of the less complex forms of death and the ability to reshape themselves at will, a murderer is sprung from an escape-proof jail to carry out the biggest contract of their life - the murder of an entire planetary population.

Roberts engages in some interesting world-building, and that is very much a part of the story. The world-building places a range of constraints on the plotting and the direction of the narrative. The main protagonist is telling the story in flashback, and a lot of their inner dialogue plays a part in the novel. Indeed, we are set up to wonder, along with the protagonist, whether their commission is real or fantasy.

The act of murder itself is told in a few paragraphs and actually plays but a small part in the story. The overall resolution is a logical result of the world-building, but isn't flagged up in a advance in any way. I wouldn't say it was a surprise because it's not that sort of novel.

Roberts' novels are continually different and this book is no exception. ( )

This is an epistolary novel unusual in that the addressee of each letter is the stone of the title.

In a space-faring society known as t’T where crime is all but unknown Ae starts her narration awaiting execution in a seemingly inescapable jail situated in the upper atmosphere of a star. The death sentence is carried out by the removal of her dotTech (nanodevices which repair any deleterious damage and render humans effectively immortal.) However, having struck a bargain with mysterious would be liberators to kill the inhabitants of an entire planet she is soon sprung from her confinement. Unfortunately we do not get to this climax for a long part of the book as Ae travels the galaxy and meets with various people fascinated by the injuries, illnesses and scars she suffers as a result of her lack of dotTech.

She kills one who has begun to suspect her status as an escapee - this is a necessarily laborious process because of their dotTech and is gone into in detail - yet later takes a lover. A lot of discussion centres around a galactic phenomenon known as the Great Gravity Trench, an anomaly where space has been bent back on itself like a ruffled sheet. Indeed it sometimes seems as if Roberts is using his story to present a primer text on quantum theory. The faster than light mechanism works by means of simultaneous quantum adjustments but is constrained by mass - effectively anything larger than a human is debarred - and also by the volume of space involved; fast-space allows up to 3000c, slow-space up to 3c and sub-light space only Einsteinian travel. These areas are seemingly influenced by the Gravity Trench.

To portray a mass murderer in any sort of sympathetic light is a difficult trick to pull off. While Roberts does not quite succeed in this he nevertheless draws the reader in to the story. In many ways I felt I was reading a 1950s or 60s piece of SF, here. The characters seemed a bit wooden, but of course they were being filtered through Ae’s consciousness.

It is a neat authorial trick to get round the information dumping problem by having the narration couched as what is effectively a confession but also as a translation (supposedly from Ae’s language Glicé into Amglish) complete with footnotes. Under a psychiatrist’s suggestion Ae is telling her story to a stone due to her inability/reluctance to communicate with other humans.

Stone is an interesting read but with some longueurs. I’ll look out for more Roberts. ( )