‘Love is an intervention,’ Jeanette Winterson writes three times in the face of environmental collapse in The Stone Gods; ‘[n]ot romance, not sentimentality, but a force of a different nature from the forces of death that dictate what will be.’But is it an intervention that works?

In the novel, Billie/Billy and Spike/Spikkers (for simplicity, Billie and Spike when referred to as a couple in this article) are reincarnated across three space-times, repeatedly forming a queer, sometimes transhuman, bond until they are separated by death against the backdrop of ecological disaster. The Stone Gods has been frequently analysed as, if not outrightly a text about the Anthropocene, one that critiques the destructive behaviour of humanity as a species at a planetary scale. Winterson’s ‘love’ is broadly interpreted as a symbol of hope and change not only in ecocritical debates about the possibility of historical change but also in discussions of concepts such as techno-escapism, queer transhumanism, or sustainability. Few of these analyses, however, have looked into what the novel actually says about human agency in the face of total environmental destruction. Specifically, can people intervene meaningfully in the trajectory toward ecological collapse?