Teaser Tuesday: The Stone Gods

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Miz B of Should Be Reading.

My teaser this week comes from The Stone Gods, by Jeannette Winterson.

Book synopsis from Publisher’s Weekly:

Prize-winning Brit Winterson applies her fantastical touch to a sci-fi, postapocalyptic setting. Heroine Billie Crusoe appears in three different end-of-the-world scenarios, allowing Winterson to explore the repetitive and destructive nature of human history and an inability (or unwillingness) of people to learn from previous mistakes. In the first section, inhabitants of the pollution-choked planet Orbus have discovered Planet Blue (Earth), and soon set about launching an asteroid at it to kill the dinosaurs that would prevent them from colonizing the planet. The second and third sections are set on Earth in 1774 and then in the Post-3 War era. Though passionate condemnations of global warming and war appear frequently, the book also contains a triptych love story: Billie meets Spike, a female Robo sapien capable of emotion and evolution, and falls (reluctantly) in love with her. In each of the scenarios, Billie and Spike (or versions of them) fall in love anew while encroaching annihilation looms in the background. Winterson’s lapses into polemic can be tedious, but her prose—as stunning, lyrical and evocative as ever—and intelligence easily carry the book.

Teaser:

And so, while we were all arguing about whether is was Christian or Pagan, Democratic or Conservative to save the planet, and whether technology would solve all of our problems, and whether we should fly less, drive less, eat less, weight less, consume less, dump less, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to 550 parts per million, the ice caps melted, and Iran launched a nuclear attack on the USA.

The policy wonks had miscalculated.  We got blown up.