See also my reviews of Salt, On and Polystom

Tell me that this isn't a glorious old-style sf back-cover tagline:

‘Sprung from a prison in the center of a star, the universe’s last criminal is employed to kill the entire population of a planet. And leave the planet itself intact.’

Put Adam Roberts’ name on the front cover and you must, surely, be onto a winner?

Well, yes, actually, you are.

Ae, the aforementioned ‘last criminal’ in Stone, recounts her time spent running amok in the t’T, a utopian society reminiscent of Banks’ Culture (but then aren’t most utopias influenced by the Culture these days?) The t’T is a distant descendant of humanity and one in which the nanotechnology - or dotTech - inside everyone has lifted the burden of poverty, toil, ill-health and even itching. FTL travel is possible, within limits; helpful AIs abound, again within limits, and most styles of living can be accommodated. Now everyone in the t’T is free to pursue their lives, hobbies, partners and interests to their hearts’ content. From the outside it can be seen that the t’T isn’t perfect (it is rather static and unadventurous), but it’s pretty damn close.

Stone begins (and ends) with Ae stripped of her dotTech and incarcerated in a jailstar, a hollowed out asteroid prison balanced among the outer layers of a small, nondescript star. Between her first and last imprisonment she escapes to travel the worlds of the t’T looking not only to do the murderous bidding of the mysterious benefactors who have sprung her from the jailstar but also to discover their identity and need for her unique, ahem, services. In a perfect world where even a single homicide is rare, why should anyone need to commit genocide?

Ae is not a sympathetic figure: her self-pity, self-justification and often overt psychopathy preclude that; but it’s these very qualities and her unreliable narration that render the story as engaging as it is. We can feel superior to Ae in that we better understand some parts of the story , although we come no closer than her to unraveling the mystery of the plot. Add to this the physical (and other) wonders of the t’T, and Roberts’s examination of some unexamined consequences of quantum theory alongside it, and Stone becomes a thrilling tour de force of scientific and social exploration.

I really, really enjoyed Stone, it’s absorbing, intelligent and, importantly for a relatively hard sf book, lucid. Despite containing any number of familiar elements this seems a very fresh cocktail, mixing some Vinge, some Banks (the perspective rather than the spaceships) and even some Le Guin.

If anything Stone would probably benefit from being another 100 pages longer since there’s a lot more I’d be interested to learn about the t’T, but even that’s praise rather than criticism.