It sounds like a disastrous idea: a novelist often criticised for the waywardness of her literary imagination, exploring a genre – science fiction – where she can indulge that waywardness to the full. The fact that the writer in question has admitted in a recent interview that she doesn’t even like sci-fi only adds to the feeling of foreboding as one approaches the book.

In fact, quite against expectation, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods is a remarkably engaging and involving read. The novel may be loosely, almost slackly structured; it may jag about in time and space so much that it sometimes seems like a collection of carelessly linked short stories rather than a novel; it may, too, be overdidactic and often oversentimental; but these faults – all bear traps into which Winterson regularly falls – are amply compensated for here by the playfulness, stylistic brio, ambition and sheer imaginative vim with which the author approaches her task. Winterson may dislike science fiction, but it clearly offers her the elbowroom she needs.

The novel opens in a strikingly imagined future of rampant technological advance, overweening state control and looming ecological apocalypse, where the recent discovery of a new, habitable world (Planet Blue) seems to offer salvation for the inhabitants of earth (now called Orbus). One of the first to investigate Planet Blue is Billie Crusoe, a mildly discontented civil servant who finds herself on an exploratory mission to the new Utopia, falls in love on the way with a beautiful female “Robo sapiens” called Spike, and then has to watch helplessly as the spectacular new planet she has just reached is rendered even less habitable than the old one she has just left.

Winterson has a good deal of fun creating these two worlds, examining, for instance, the unlooked-for consequences of “genetic fixing”, a form of permanent youth and beauty so ubiquitous it simply makes people “bored to death with sex”. But the novel also has more serious targets, taking aim at humanity’s “hubris” in the face of a vast and impermeable universe, and its inability to learn from its mistakes. With this in mind, the story jump-cuts to several other locations, each with its own Billie and each with its own ecological problems: Easter Island in the 1770s (hence the book’s title); a postnuclear Britain where corporations have replaced government; and a world very like Orbus, but 65m years in the future.

As usual with Winterson, it is ideas rather than narrative that provide the motor for the book, and she restlessly investigates dozens of them here – ecological renewal, consciousness, consumerism, belonging, almost anything that comes to hand, really – as The Stone Gods buzzes round the universe. Such is the capaciousness of the structure that she is even able to incorporate a real event from earlier this year (when an editor left a manuscript copy of this book on the Tube) without too much damage.

If all this sounds a bit hit and miss, then it is. But the sheer energy on display, the versatility and the abundant good humour, allow Winterson, almost against the odds, to achieve imaginative lift-off.

THE STONE GODS by Jeanette Winterson
Hamish Hamilton £16.99 pp207

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