- published: 09 Mar 2014
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Stone, published in 2002, is a science fiction novel by the British writer Adam Roberts.
Stone is a story about a criminal, Ae, who lives in a utopian society, the 't'T', which is spread across a region of space where the density of interstellar objects is sufficiently low that faster-than-light travel is permitted. This society heavily uses nanotechnology, here called 'Dot-tech'. One of the primary uses of Dot-tech is to maintain peoples' health and safety, enabling citizens of the t'T to survive in extreme conditions and making them extremely difficult to kill.
Due to the ubiquitous presence of advanced nanotechnology, the t'T has become something of a post-scarcity society, where every citizen's whims may be easily satisfied. Crime is also virtually non-existent, as all citizens are screened for psychological abnormalities and the Dot-tech satisfies everyone's needs. The few police forces that remain apparently spend more time investigating unusual stellar activity than actual crimes.
Ae has been imprisoned for a crime rarely committed in the society he lives in: murder (mainly due to the difficulty of killing a body protected by nano-tech). He is placed in a high-tech prison (a stone with an artificial environment inside held in the plasma of a sun). He is "executed" by having his Dot-tech purged from his body, which, while not immediately lethal, will eventually cause him to die of natural causes.
In geology, rock or stone is a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids.
The Earth's outer solid layer, the lithosphere, is made of rock. Three majors groups of rocks are defined: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. The scientific study of rocks is called petrology, which is an essential component of geology.
Rocks are generally classified by mineral and chemical composition, by the texture of the constituent particles and by the processes that formed them. These indicators separate rocks into three types: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. They are further classified according to particle size. The transformation of one rock type to another is described by the geological model called the rock cycle.
Igneous rocks are formed when molten magma cools and are divided into two main categories: plutonic rock and volcanic. Plutonic or intrusive rocks result when magma cools and crystallizes slowly within the Earth's crust (example granite), while volcanic or extrusive rocks result from magma reaching the surface either as lava or fragmental ejecta (examples pumice and basalt).
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century.
Further definition of the genre is historically difficult. The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the works of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history.
The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction. The separation of a field of histories from a field of literary fiction fueled the evolution of these features in the last 400 years.