The Stone Gods

Winterson, Jeanette. The Stone Gods. New York: Harcourt, 2007.

Reviewed by Bruce A. Beatie, SFRA Review #285 (Spring 2008): pp. 32-33.[1]

See for "Tech City" on a renamed version of our Earth,

enabled by specialized robots of infinite variety. For the colonization of Planet Blue, a sort of robot has been developed, a “Robo sapiens” named Spike, a beautiful female equivalent of Star Trek’s Mr. Data who is, as I believe Data himself once said, “fully functional.”[2] Billie (whom we discover is also female) is asked to interview Spike for The One Minute Show. Through various plot convolutions, Billie ends up on the colonizing spaceship, where she and Spike become lovers. (Beatie, p. 32)

In a different dystopian section of the novel, MORE (a ruling corporate entity) "is constructing a Robo sapiens named Spike, but this time Spike is only a head connected wirelessly to a mainframe computer" (Beatie, p. 33).

For a talking head associated with a nasty bureaucratic operation, see C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength.

RDE, finishing, 13Jan21