“This Is Our Time”

A Timescape Perspective on the Anthropocene Event and Its Representation in Narrative

This section fulfills a triple task. First, it traces the discursive shift from designating the Anthropocene as an epoch to understanding it as an event. Second, it discusses timescape as a cognitive protocol that sharpens focus on the temporal complexity of the interactions comprising the Anthropocene. Third, it expands timescape into an analytical model that combines the chronotope with elements of situated narratology.

Until recently, geologists tended to define the Anthropocene in epochal terms. They sought to establish its historical onset by finding a stratigraphic marker in Earth’s geological record. Famously, Will Steffen et al. identified nineteenth-century industrialization as a watershed, noting “the enormous expansion in the use of fossil fuels, first coal and then oil and gas as well” (616). Similarly, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin pointed up globalization, dating it to 1610, when “colonialism, global trade and coal brought about the Anthropocene” (177). Albeit insightful, these attempts to historicize geology face both conceptual and ideological criticisms. Their proponents assign geological significance to the events of Western modernity. They assume that the Anthropocene began uniformly worldwide. The resulting interpretations stray close to grand narratives that resemble origin stories. In them, identifying the precise moment of the fall implicates all of humanity in becoming “a force of nature in the geological sense” (Chakrabarty 207).

In recent years, significant opposition has arisen against designating the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. Instead, Philip Gibbard et al. propose to understand it as “an ongoing ‘anthropogenic event,’ akin to biotically driven events in deep geological time” (395). A graph in their study illustrates that human impacts unravel unevenly across time and space as anthropogenic activity has occurred gradually and at different rates. This temporal and spatial heterogeneity is evident in varied human-induced changes, such as deforestation, industrialization, and biodiversity loss, which did not begin simultaneously or progress evenly around the planet. Comparing the Anthropocene to past geological transformations like the Great Oxidation Event, the authors emphasize that such events are not confined to a single moment but span extended periods with diverse regional effects. These conclusions characterize the Anthropocene as “a diachronous, heterogeneous, and socially differentiated process” (Gibbard et al. 397–98).

Reconceptualizing the Anthropocene from an epoch to an event entails a cognitive shift that can be elucidated through Alain Badiou’s theory. In Being and Event (L’être et événement), he argues that “there is no event save relative to a historical situation, even if a historical situation does not necessarily produce events” (179). Events arise only in historical situations that contain an “evental site,” a space that dominant knowledge and power structures render invisible. For Badiou, natural processes count only as facts. They become events when a subjective intervention “retroactively” qualifies them as such (179). Along these lines, the Anthropocene does not begin with early human activity, such as fire making or hunting. It turns into an event when the prevalent view of Earth as a stable and self-regulating system is disrupted. This rupture produces a cognitive break, urging a rethinking of human-environment interactions through the void it exposes.

Indeed, the Anthropocene challenges the conventional notion of event. Whether through climate crisis, habitat depletion, or radioactive pollution, anthropogenic activity affects Earth’s biophysical systems that have evolved over millennia. Once altered, said systems exhibit a deranged temporal logic. For example, wildlife extinctions happen much faster than the pace of evolution, while radioactive isotopes take far longer to break down than typical biological and geological processes. So far, two influential concepts have attempted to summarize such human-caused events: Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects and Rob Nixon’s slow violence. Hyperobjects occur at vast spatial scales, including climate and radiation (Morton 3, 7). Slow violence, on the other hand, suggests a gradual and frequently imperceptible unfolding of human actions over time (Nixon 2). Timescape brings together both ideas. In cognitive terms, it links the dispersed human-environment interactions central to hyperobjects with the cumulative effects characteristic of slow violence.

Conceptually, timescape ought to be distinguished from other cognate forms, such as landscape, seascape, blindscape, soundscape, and dreamscape. Said terms denote either perceptual objects (land, sea) or sensory modalities (vision, touch, smell, hearing, dreaming). To that end, they share a common denominator: the subjective experience of spatial perception, of constituting space through available senses. The idea of such space-making leads back to the German Landschaft, where -schaft derives from the verb schaffen, “to create” (Cosgrove 21; Mitchell 51). By contrast, timescape shifts the focus to how time operates in space and how space changes in time. It seeks to register the workings of time beyond its socially ratified uses, whether using clocks, calendars, or other similar systems. Such a perspective decenters human activity and perceptions, folding them into a dynamic reciprocity with Earth and its environments.

The timescape perspective on the Anthropocene stems from the work of Barbara Adam. In Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards, Adam outlines timescape as a cognitive instrument by which to make sense of the temporal complexity of human impacts on Earth. This approach permits her to foreground the tensions between the progressivist logic of Western modernity and the damaging effects it leaves behind. In Adam’s view, timescape overcomes the human-centered limitations of modern systems of thought, such as Renaissance perspective, Cartesian subjectivity, and Newtonian mechanics. Time constitutes more than a background against which humanity progresses: “A timescape perspective stresses the temporal features of living. Through timescapes, contextual temporal practices become tangible” (Adam, Timescapes 10). Timescape underscores the uneven and heterogeneous nature of anthropogenic effects on the planet. It shows how human activities do not take place uniformly but instead generate consequences that resurface in unpredictable time lags and loops. Such temporal dislocations resist the linear narratives of progress, exhibiting a multitemporality where past, present, and future interact in complex and often destabilizing ways. In a more recent piece, Adam has construed timescape as having the capacity to disclose how anthropogenic activity transgresses time. On a timeline running from past to future, human-induced impacts accumulate so much that they “reach everywhere on this earth and extend into an unimaginably distant future” (Adam, “Futures” 125). These extensions can transcend the human and affect those who “may not be human; they may not even be born yet” (“Futures” 128). For Adam, timescape is essential to rethinking environmental praxis and creating more “sustainable futures” (Timescapes 10).

In addition to manifesting the temporal complexity of the Anthropocene, timescape holds further cognitive value. It does not purport to map out the Anthropocene in its entirety. Such an enterprise would probably require an other-than-human, if not other-than-Earthly way of knowing and being. Rather, the timescape perspective supplies some sense of orientation in an event that is largely disorienting. In doing so, it gains understanding from Frank Kermode’s interpretation of apocalyptic narratives. In The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Kermode placed apocalypse at the core of temporal experience, both lived and narrated. For him, apocalypse implied an ongoing process because of its dual meaning as an end and a revelation. Kermode drew on Saint Paul and Saint John, whose writings suggested that the end is “happening at every moment,” making it appear immanent rather than imminent (25). In that sense, one always already exists in anticipation of an end, or in Kermode’s words, in its “middest”: “Men in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (17). Undoubtedly, the Anthropocene defies the coherence of an apocalyptic narrative. As stated above, the story of human impacts on Earth lacks a definitive origin, as that origin is nearly indistinguishable from humanity itself. However, if one accepts that the Anthropocene signals the end of Earth’s biostability over the past 12,000 years, one will find oneself amid a revelation that happens in all its practical urgency.

Beyond its cognitive function, timescape offers a way to make the Anthropocene event more knowable through literary narrative. To achieve this, it must be developed into an analytical model that integrates Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Gérard Genette’s theories of time. In “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics,” Bakhtin defined the chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (243). This definition enabled him to discuss how narratives generate meaning through specific configurations of time and space. He distinguished between two types of chronotopes: generic and motivic. Generic chronotopes contribute to the formation of literary genres, as in the case of the abstract time-space of the Greek romance, the reversible time-space of the adventure novel, the miraculous time-space of the chivalric romance, the generative time-space of folklore, and the cyclical time-space of the idyll (Bakhtin 110, 120, 154, 207, 225). Motivic chronotopes, on the other hand, recur across literary history and may also influence genre, though Bakhtin traced them diachronically. They include the road, the parlor, the private room, and the threshold. The road symbolizes life and history, where time “fuses with space and flows in it (forming the road).” The parlor holds in itself the defining moments of a historical period, while the private room highlights the “everyday details” of a setting where time “drags itself slowly through space.” The threshold refers to the transitory spaces of “crisis and break in a life” (Bakhtin 244, 247, 248). These motivic chronotopes become central to the timescape perspective, particularly because of their capacity to repeat and change across different settings.

In Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Genette examined how narrative time is structured through three main categories: frequency, order, and duration (32). Frequency refers to how often an event is narrated: once, repeatedly, or once to represent repeated actions. Order describes the relationship between the chronological sequence of events in the story and their arrangement in the narrative, often defined by devices like flashback and foreshadowing. Genette placed particular emphasis on duration, which he called the “rhythmic system of novelistic narrative” (112). Duration involves four key modes: ellipsis, pause, scene, and summary. They determine the relationship between story time and narrative time. In ellipses, narrative time stands still; instead of progressing, it unfolds through pauses. In contrast, scenes show a balance between story time and narrative time, while summaries compress story time, allowing it to exceed narrative time (Genette 95). The timescape perspective falls back on narrative discourse as it highlights how different settings acquire narrative form.

At first glance, the Bakhtinian chronotope and Genettian narrative discourse seem strikingly incongruent. While Bakhtin prioritized the historical and cultural embeddedness of texts, Genette concentrated on their universal structures. Yet this apparent divergence holds valuable potential for the timescape perspective. When brought together, the chronotope and narratology reveal how literary narrative represents human-environment interactions both in its treatment of time and space and in its broader sociocultural significance. Even so, timescape requires adjusting chronotopes to the geosocial situations characteristic of the Anthropocene and expanding narrative universals to account for their environmental resonance.

To that end, I rely on two strands of situated narratology: Erin James’s “Anthropocene narrative theory” and the contextual narratology of Susan S. Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. Both strands stress the importance of situating narrative in wider contexts. James argues that “we not only better know the current state of the world and our relationship to it by engaging with narrative but also better know narrative and how it functions by placing it within the context of the Anthropocene” (4). At the center of James’s argument is the idea that the Anthropocene presents a “pseudo-singular event.” It involves a “larger sequence whose duration is incompatible with narrative representation” (97). Making sense of this kind of temporality requires forging connections “between one timeline and another, between one narrative’s world and the broader, nonnarrative world” (103). Similarly, Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan address the “ideological operations of form.” They maintain that blending Bakhtin’s socially embedded chronotopes with Genette’s formal categories “enriches our ability to theorize the situatedness of textual forms” in relation to culture and historical realities (Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan 431). Together, these strands of situated narratology emphasize that narrative is not a closed system but one existing in dialogue with its external ecologies.

The timescape perspective addresses the challenge of understanding the Anthropocene event by turning theory into analytical practice. Grounded in the integrated framework of the chronotope and situated narratology, it treats the mutable configurations of narrative as cognitive coordinates. It heightens the role of narrative temporality in making the complexity of human-environment interactions more comprehensible and therefore urgent.

Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods from a Timescape Perspective

This section explores the analytical potential of the timescape perspective in relation to Winterson’s The Stone Gods. It proceeds in two stages. First, it considers how the novel contributes to the notion of the Anthropocene event through the manipulations of narrative frequency and order that resist closure. Second, it scrutinizes the geosocial situations at the heart of Winterson’s novel, showing how their distinct narrative articulations convey the persistence and liminality of the event.

Critical responses to The Stone Gods have brought considerable attention to its experimental narrative structure and engagement with the Anthropocene. Susana Onega, Nicole Merola, Mahlu Mertens, Stef Craps, and Marco Caracciolo all read the novel as a recursive, mise-en-abyme text. Across its four parts, stories occur within stories, intertwining themes of historical repetition and environmental emergency. However, scholarly opinion differs on whether Winterson’s cyclical renderings of time suggest the Anthropocene’s inevitable destruction or its transcendence. Onega argues that the novel’s structure reflects a compulsive return of past mistakes, aligning the narrative with trauma theory. She views Winterson’s use of “circularity and juxtaposition” as emblematic of history’s tendency toward repetition (Onega 277). For Onega, the novel also entertains the possibility of change in that “recurrence does not condemn human beings to the endless repetition of the same mistakes” (279). Merola takes a bleaker stance, viewing the novel as a testament to how humans destroy Earth. She maintains that The Stone Gods depicts “the past’s pollution of the present and future and the commingling of human and geologic time” (Merola 122). For Merola, the novel presents a vision of “dark ecology,” where humans cannot escape the destructive cycles of their own actions (130). Mertens and Craps extend their critique to the novel’s anthropocentric focus on identity and textuality. They assert that its portrayal of the Anthropocene lacks geological accuracy, rendering it more symbolic than realistic. This alleged oversight limits the novel’s capacity “to get people to care about climate change” (Mertens and Craps 151). By contrast, Caracciolo sees the novel’s strength in how it explores human-nonhuman entanglements. He indicates recursive metaphorical loops between them: “The universe is an imprint. You are part of the imprint—it imprints you, you imprint it” (Stone Gods 105). For Caracciolo, such examples of chiasmus suggest ontological symmetries in which the human “seeps into, and is at the same time shaped by, the nonhuman realities of geology and the cosmos” (153). Overall, these readings offer insight into the peculiar temporal poetics of The Stone Gods. Yet they fall short of a more comprehensive account of the novel’s representation of the Anthropocene event. A timescape perspective can bridge this gap.

Toward the novel’s end, Winterson’s protagonist narrator Billie ponders the following: “You can change everything about yourself—your name, your home, your skin colour, your gender, even your parents, your private history—but you can’t change the time you were born in, or what it is you will have to live through. This is our time” (Stone Gods 237). Marked by a tone of resignation, this reflection puts human identities, places, and histories into the broader canvas of the Anthropocene. It intertwines them with a vast, inescapable event that constitutes “our time.” However, Billie’s generalization about “our time” does not imply that the novel treats it homogeneously.

From the timescape perspective, the Anthropocene appears as a pseudosingular event that recurs and ramifies in the novel. Each section of The Stone Gods places human impacts in changing historical and cultural contexts, showing how patterns of destruction return through crises that differ in scale, form, and consequence. The novel thus establishes a recurring narrative frequency that connects the Anthropocene to successive manifestations of colonization, deforestation, extractivism, and radioactive pollution. Part 1 introduces Orbus, a hypertechnological planet that has run “out of planet” (Stone Gods 4). In response to environmental collapse, the elites resemble the Martians in H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), who cast their greedy eyes on Earth. Billie discovers that they justify their decision to colonize Planet Blue using egalitarian rhetoric: “A new planet means that we can begin to redistribute ourselves. It will mean a better quality of life for everyone—the ones who leave and the ones who stay” (Stone Gods 5). Yet this reasoning hides a clear inequality as only the wealthy can afford to escape. In contrast, part 2 shifts to Easter Island, a site of localized ecological devastation: once lush, it is now “stripped and bare, with few trees or shrub-bushes of any kind” (118). While Orbus’s elites mobilize to survive, Easter Island’s inhabitants remain trapped. Billy’s observation, however, flattens social disparity into a universal fatalism: “Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself” (132). This leveling of difference reaffirms the Anthropocene as a singular event, even as the narrative works to debunk such perceptions.

Parts 3 and 4 relocate the recurrence of the Anthropocene to a near-future world fractured by inequality. The narrative contrasts Tech City and Wreck City, two environments that emerge in the aftermath of World War III. Together, they stand for the differentiated outcomes of global catastrophe. Here Billie confronts the MORE Corporation, a totalitarian business regime that embodies the perfection of capitalist extractivism: “In Post-3 War economics, Capitalism has gone back to its roots in paternalism, and forward into its destiny—complete control of everything and everyone, and with our consent” (167). While Tech City prospers on absolute access to resources, Wreck City exists as a postnuclear backwater where “you want to live when you don’t want to live anywhere else” (179). The physical destruction remains visible: “the bomb damage hasn’t been cleared. . . . People live in the shells of houses and offices, and they build their own places out of the ruins” (179). Such divided geographies illustrate how environmental crises recur unevenly across economic and spatial boundaries. Through the narrative frequency of a pseudosingular event, The Stone Gods deals with the Anthropocene as a recurrent phenomenon, varied in its ramifications yet continuous in its pattern.

The timescape perspective opens up the time-transgressive character of the Anthropocene through the novel’s manipulation of narrative order. Flashback and foreshadowing play a central role, yet their function extends beyond temporal displacement. These techniques reinforce the novel’s recursive narrative structure in which past, present, and future continuously fold into one another. In part 1, Billie, Spike, and their fellow astronauts arrive on Planet Blue only to realize that they have landed in Earth’s deep geological past, when humans “hadn’t been expected for millions of years” (91). Their attempt to accelerate evolution by deflecting an asteroid paradoxically anticipates a future “strikingly similar to our own planet, sixty-five million years ago” (36). What seems like a new world thus reproduces an old one. In part 4, Billie traverses a postnuclear landscape. She discovers a crater that fuses the sulfuric residue of deep history with the radioactive waste of the present: “The soil itself was poisoned,” and “[f]eeding on the leaves and stems were five or six rabbit-like animals—hairless, deformed” (201, 202). Spike, too, gains cross-temporal experience when she intercepts a signal from part 1: “It is one line of programming code for a Robo sapiens” (240). In such moments, the novel turns narrative order into a temporal loop, where flashbacks and foreshadowings register the continuity of the Anthropocene across multiple and intersecting temporalities.

In The Stone Gods, narrative order also operates through intertextual allusions. These echoes enable the narrative to conceive the Anthropocene as more than a recurring cycle of destruction, revealing within it latent possibilities for transcendence. As the novel’s narrative time moves back and forth, it revisits earlier works and anticipates later ones. Such an oscillation prepares an ending that defies closure. First of all, The Stone Gods evokes Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence, expressed originally in The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft): “The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust! . . . Do you desire this again and innumerable times again?” (194). For Winterson, Nietzsche’s question becomes an ethical imperative for humanity to alter its course. Intriguingly, a call to intervention arises from Spike: “All you can do is intervene” (Stone Gods 75). This plea foreshadows an intervention that could transform the Anthropocene. It also leads back intertextually to Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, where she posits the possibility of multiple choices. Expelled from her foster mother’s religious home for her nonnormative, lesbian love, the narrator imagines a multiverse of realized and unrealized potentialities: “All the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn’t make, for a moment brush against each other” (Oranges 163). The Stone Gods expands this idea to a planetary scale, where time follows branching trajectories rather than a linear path. As Billie observes in part 1, “Not the stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, but the stories that began again, the ones that twisted away, like a bend in the road. . . . Like the universe, there is no end” (Stone Gods 106). The novel thus constructs an intertextual timescape in which texts and temporalities endlessly overlap. This timescape recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (“El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”), with its “growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times” (85).

The Stone Gods aligns narrative order with intertextuality to envisage the possibility of transcending the Anthropocene through disembodied consciousness. In doing so, it makes transcendence appear as one scenario among many in a multiverse of potential developments. In part 1, after making love with Billie, Spike sheds her body “like a piece of armour.” To conserve energy, she retains only her head, which Billie perceives as a continuation of life: “Now she is what she said life would be—consciousness” (Stone Gods 111). By parts 3 and 4, Spike exists solely as “a perfect head on a titanium plate” (158). Her condition is at once ironic and generative. On one level, the novel treats technology as an object of human appropriation. In part 4, Spike performs oral sex, embracing it in line with her algorithmic pursuit of “new experiences” (209). Yet technology also becomes a source of transgressive possibility. Spike’s disembodiment enables a metafictional turn. At the novel’s end, Billie claims authorship of The Stone Gods, the manuscript she reportedly found on the Tube, and entrusts it to Spike: “The book isn’t finished, but this is as far as I could go. . . . Read it. Leave it for someone else to find. The pages are loose – it can be written again” (242). Here flashback and foreshadowing converge in a recursive loop where writing folds into reading. By positioning Spike as both reader and writer, the novel grants agency to a posthuman consciousness capable of moving narrative beyond the limits of embodied human experience.

The novel’s vision of transcendence anticipates Winterson’s later exploration of similar concerns. In Frankissstein: A Love Story, she dramatizes the tension between embodiment and disembodiment. Here the transgender Dr. Ry Shelley upholds the value of embodied existence while Dr. Victor Stein pursues transcendence through artificial consciousness. Stein ultimately achieves his goal yet leaves behind his Ouroboros signet ring. A symbol of eternal recurrence, the ring casts doubt on whether his transgression entails liberation or simply another cycle of repetition. The novel’s final lines ask ambiguously, “Shall we begin again? The human dream” (Winterson, Frankissstein 344). For human-environment interactions to change meaningfully, consciousness, organic or artificial, must produce narratives that surpass repetition. This idea echoes Donna Haraway’s warning: “It matters wherehow [sic] Ouroboros swallows its tale, again” (118). Similarly, Winterson cautions in a 2023 commentary in The Guardian that disembodied consciousness risks reinforcing patriarchal power and economic inequality. Yet she also rethinks AI as “alternative intelligence” vital to human evolution beyond biological limits. In Winterson’s own words, “I would like to see a transhuman, eventually a post-human, future where intelligence and consciousness are no longer exclusively housed in a substrate made of meat. After all, that has been the promise of every world religion” (Evaristo et al.). This later desideratum looks back on the transformative stakes already present in The Stone Gods, where narrative form stages a cross-temporal interchange between repetition and transcendence. Flashback and foreshadowing lay bare the persistence of a destructive pattern, while intertextual echoes direct these temporal loops toward alterity. Read through the timescape perspective, the novel’s interplay of narrative order and intertextuality turns recurrence into alterity. It envisions futures in which narrative and consciousness intervene to change the recursive cycles of the Anthropocene.

Most tangibly, The Stone Gods engages with the Anthropocene event across four geosocial situations that constitute its narrative rhythm: the spaceship (part 1), the forest (parts 1 and 4), the cave (parts 1–3), and the threshold (parts 1–4). In part 1, Billie and her fellow crew travel aboard a spaceship and arrive on Planet Blue, where they explore a pristine forest. Later, Billie and Spike seek refuge in a cave during the asteroid deflection triggered by their mission. In part 2, Billy and Spikkers remain largely inside a cave on Easter Island. They share stories and invoke ancestral memory while the island’s society competes over its last remaining trees. In part 3, Billie rides the London Underground, a moving anthropogenic cave where her personal past resurfaces alongside a fractured world outside. In part 4, the forest returns as a site of ecological disaster where Billie and Spike witness survival in the face of crisis. This alternating narrative rhythm links recurrence to the possibility of transcendence. The spaceship appears only once. Instead of salvation, it carries human exploitation into a new world. Featured in the novel’s first and last parts, the forest frames human-environment interactions within a cycle of destruction and renewal. The cave recurs throughout the narrative as a site where humanity finds its existential limits. Each section ends at a threshold that promises another beginning. Unlike the Bakhtinian chronotopes of the parlor, the road, the private room, and the threshold, Winterson’s settings assume disjointed narrative durations. In doing so, they give rise to the four distinct timescapes examined below.

In part 1 of The Stone Gods, the timescape of the spaceship functions as an enclosed and immersive setting reminiscent of an eighteenth-century parlor. Real-time narrative scenes unfurl as Billie narrates, Pink McMurphy searches for champagne, Captain Handsome tells stories of distant planets, and Spike frequently remains observant. Such scenes take place in transit between a dying planet and the uncertain hope of a new one, imbuing ordinary conversation with cosmic significance. Winterson interweaves the scenic mode with compressed summaries that allegorize planetary destruction. One of the most vivid examples involves the Crypt on Planet White, “stacked with the carcasses of planes and cars that continually melted in the intense heat and then re-formed into their old shapes, or shapes more bizarre” (Stone Gods 63). The scene evokes the idea of the crypt in which Jacques Derrida saw a repository of encrypted trauma (xiii). It haunts the characters across time and space, just as the grotesquely reshaping vehicles haunt the landscape. These temporal ruptures accompany what Timothy Clark describes as a derangement of scale. They serve both as a warning and as evidence of a distorted perception that informs the human tendency to adopt a “god’s-eye view” of the planet (Clark 30). Ursula Heise attributes the emergence of such a perspective to the Earthrise photograph from the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, which helped to popularize the image of Earth as a unified home requiring stewardship (25). Winterson challenges the hubristic confidence that undergirds this worldview. In her narrative, the spaceship’s mission is driven not by care but by exploitation. As Handsome speculates, “My theory is that life on Orbus began as escaping life from the white planet—and the white planet began as escaping life from . . . who knows where?” (Stone Gods 68).

Against such vast summaries of destruction, Winterson inserts a narrative pause. Billie reflects, “There was a pause. A long one. I had no idea what to do or what to say. My life had tipped upside-down. . . . In space it is difficult to tell what is the right way up; space is curved, stars and planets are globes. There is no right way up” (Stone Gods 74). Here, the physical curvature of space becomes a metaphor for existential uncertainty, upsetting both Billie’s personal orientation and any linear notions of progress. The episode concludes with a different scene, shifting from human to cyborg. Billie watches Spike recite the lines of John Donne’s poem “The Sun Rising” (1633), which presents Earth as a female body. Spike’s remark “Love is an experiment” (Stone Gods 81) foreshadows not only her evolving relationship with Billie but also her different attitude toward the environment. Such an anticipatory scene counters the recursive death drive behind Handsome’s stories. Through the alternations of scene, summary, and pause, the episode configures the spaceship into a microcosm of the Anthropocene. In this geosocial situation, deep time condenses into lived experience, and human hubris reverberates across the cosmos, only to meet its limits.

While the spaceship provides a setting for conversation and discussion, the timescape of the forest drives the novel’s sense of adventure. It enables the characters’ direct encounters with the planet they first explore and then inhabit. The narrative marks a sharp contrast between two such developments. In part 1, Billie and her companions enter a pre-Anthropocene jungle teeming with life and possibility. By part 4, the same forest has deteriorated into a toxic, irradiated wasteland. The novel draws on the forest’s long-standing symbolism as a site of alterity to modern civilization, one that also exposes the consequences of its destruction. In this timescape, Winterson traces a temporal arc from ecological wonder to grotesque survival.

In part 1, the forest’s vitality comes to the fore through scenic narration. Billie and her company encounter hybrid lifeforms, “mammals with fins and fish with legs and birds with double wings like angels, and heads without bodies, and bodies that seemed headless” (Stone Gods 84). Such images disturb anthropocentric models of evolution and suggest life that exceeds comprehension. The explorers’ sense of wonder deepens in the following scene, where poetic hyperbole accumulates to surreal effect: “a frog the size of a shed,” “a leaf the size of a tennis court,” “[d]ragonflies the size of dragons,” and “[m]ammals in fancy dress, some wearing ruffs, others in helmets, some with spurs at their heels” (86–87). Through amplified and unexpected juxtapositions, the narrative creates a carnivalesque vision of the planet as abundant, alien, and strange. The forest functions as more than a backdrop for human adventure as it takes on an autonomous role.

The narrative tempo changes abruptly when the asteroid arrives “four days early” (90), propelling the episode into a summative mode. The transition from wonder to catastrophe forms an ellipsis that reflects the disorienting speed of ecological collapse. Striking, chaotic imagery captures the scale and violence of the event: “feet, hoofs, claws, paws, cartoon-size, city-size, thudding and lifting, pushing and raising, running and pausing” (90). Following this breakdown, the narrative slows into a pause. On a planet now changed beyond recognition, Billie and Spike take shelter with a “hog-hippo hybrid” (99). Although they share the same environment, their response to survival diverges. As the “Three Horn is struggling” (101), Spike adopts an evolutionary perspective: “All these life-forms will evolve and alter. Almost all will disappear to make way for something better adapted. Nature will work with what we have done” (99). Billie, by contrast, senses irreversible loss, describing the planet with a disturbing finality, one “that could never be night” (102). Together, Spike’s detached assessment and Billie’s emotional premonition anticipate the condition of Earth encountered millions of years later.

In part 4, the forest becomes a site of anthropogenic ruin, embodying the slow violence of environmental degradation. As in part 1, the narrative relies on a scenic mode, but instead of evoking wonder, it confronts the reader with shock. Here Billie encounters the inverted jungle through unsettling rhythmic imagery: “Coming in on all fours, coming in on crutches made from rotten forest wood, coming in ragged, torn, ripped, open-wounded, ulcerated, bleeding, toothless, blind, speechless, stunted, mutant, alive” (232). A later scene expands the timescale, portraying the mutants as “creatures on another planet—from another planet, lost on this one, as though a line of creatures long extinct had resurfaced through shale layers of time, and come here, accusing, a witness of what should not be” (234). By invoking deep time, the narrative repositions the forest as a realm of uncanny survival where the mutants are not merely victims. Rather, their deformed bodies come across as signifiers of endurance and adaptation to radioactive pollution. They actively oppose their exploitation by celebrating survival after “the aerial bombing and fire-clusters” (234). Albeit macabre, their carnival opposes their oppressors’ tanks: “The bodies that can say nothing have the last word” (234). In this scene, the forest bears the hallmarks of both ecological trauma and defiance. It exhibits what Phoebe Wagner identifies as the “environmental grotesque,” a type of “transformative tactic” that subverts Western modernity and embraces “cooperative survival with nonhumans” (912, 913). Across parts 1 and 4, the narrative builds contrasting portrayals of the forest through vivid scenes while abrupt ellipses and reflective pauses simulate the disjointed tempo of ecological catastrophe. These narrative arrangements not only disclose the material and emotional toll of the Anthropocene but also foreground life as an ongoing entanglement with a damaged planet.

By constituting a dynamic presence in the narrative, the forest broadens the scope of environmental encounters with the human. By contrast, the timescape of the cave makes these encounters feel more spatially confined but temporally extended. The cave also evokes Plato’s allegory, problematizing the notions of knowledge and truth. From a Bakhtinian perspective, it resembles a private room, where time seems to slow down for introspection. In part 1, a deliberate slowing of the narrative tempo defines the timescape of the cave. After Billie and Spike take shelter from the environmental disaster, the narrative moves into a scenic mode to show how they gather wood, cook, and wait while snow falls outside. These mundane activities gradually give way to an intimacy that develops through interlinked scenes and pauses, especially as Billie and Spike near the edge of survival. When Spike transcends the limits of her synthetic body, their bond intensifies, culminating in a scene of tender impossibility, when Billie hears a heartbeat: “‘You don’t have a heart.’ ‘I do now’” (110). As the boundaries between human and cyborg melt, the cave takes on a womblike quality, which heralds a new beginning. This change crystallizes in the chiasmic line “Kiss me. Your mouth is a cave. This cave is your mouth” (111), where intimacy merges with spatial metaphor. The subsequent pause suspends the characters in deep time, poised on the cusp of becoming the planet’s geological imprint.

While part 1 presents the cave as the convergence of human and nonhuman divisions, part 2 interprets it primarily in terms of interpersonal human intimacy. The episode develops mainly in a summative mode. It includes a moment of queer love between Billy and Spikkers, whose relationship parallels the interspecies bond between Billie and Spike. As Adeline Johns-Putra notes, such intimacy resists “heteronormativity, technological aggression, and narrow visions of the future” (115). Inside the cave, the characters find temporary refuge from the island’s escalating destruction. Although the narrative condenses their six-month relationship, it conveys emotional depth through fragmented details, such as drawings “on the cave wall in charcoal” (Stone Gods 128). The summative mode translates into a pause that delivers a stark revelation from Billy: “The island trees and all of this good land were sacrificed to a meaning that has now become meaningless. To build the Stone Gods, the island has been destroyed, and now the Stone Gods are themselves destroyed” (136). Occurring just before the island faces ultimate destruction and Spikkers dies, the reflection challenges the authority of external reality as it breaks into the privacy of their cave. In a later pause, Billy inverts Plato’s allegory: “I have shrunk this pod of an island further and made our cave an everywhere” (138). Rather than seeking truth outside the cave, he compresses it into a message in a bottle. This compact imprint is meant to transport the cave’s intimacy into a world estranged from ecological entanglements.

In part 3, the cave reappears in the form of a human-made tunnel. As Billie rides the Tube, its relentless motion fractures narrative time into elliptical fragments. They resemble those desultory stretches between stations as the train moves underground. Despite its public setting, the journey offers Billie a sense of privacy, enabling her to sink into memory. While reading her manuscript of The Stone Gods, she gradually recovers submerged fragments of her own life. Flashbacks surface up from the metaphorical cave of body and mind: her birth, abandonment, and adoption. These memories radically distort narrative continuity, forming a pattern of “torn-out years and fractured lines” (150). In a reflective pause, Billie admits, “I am a lost manuscript” (153), identifying herself with her text and the broken world it represents. A subsequent ellipsis allows private reflection to spill into public awareness, marked by mounting signs of environmental crisis: “There was a polar bear stranded on an ice-floe. There were hurricanes, flooding, melting, landslides. There were rows about carbon quotas, carbon capture, carbon trading” (158). Prompted by futile debates over climate policy, her recollection of World War III signals the end of her subterranean journey. As she steps out onto the street, Billie leaves behind a modern Platonic cave where passengers sit in half-lit darkness, traveling alongside their projected realities while remaining largely detached from the world beyond. Across parts 1, 2, and 3, the timescape of the cave reimagines Plato’s allegory not only as a symbol of illusion and ignorance but also as a site for connection and transformation in the Anthropocene. Each part explores such possibilities through different uses of narrative duration. In part 1, a pause captures a reciprocity that has yet to leave an imprint in deep time. In part 2, a similar pause distills a lost connection into a potential historical imprint. In part 3, rapid transitions and ellipses break the temporal flow, isolating the narrator and deferring any lasting imprint until part 4.

Unlike the cave, the timescape of the threshold heightens crisis in every part of the novel. It delineates a liminal geosocial situation whose potentialities are merely suggested and remain open to interpretation. For Bakhtin, thresholds signify critical transitions in which time is “essentially instantaneous” (248). In The Stone Gods, however, these moments take a different form. As Emily McAvan observes, Winterson structures the novel so that “every ending [becomes] another beginning” (161). Such thresholds not only indicate breaks in human-environment interactions but also disclose their temporal duration.

Part 1 ends at a threshold moment that both reflects on the ruination of one world and anticipates the emergence of another. This moment unfolds during a narrative pause as Billie imagines future scenes: “someone will make a painting in a cave, someone will make a statue and call it God. . . . Someone sits at a table, writing a book. He goes to the window and looks through his telescope at the stars” (Stone Gods 111). Such reflections prefigure the events of parts 2 and 4, where life continues under new anthropogenic conditions. The episode concludes with the lines “Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. . . . This is one story. There will be another” (113). The narrative moves between present crisis and alternate temporalities, ending in ellipsis. This structure creates a sense of suspended time. It maintains anticipation and invites the reader to imagine what lies beyond the immediate ending.

Part 2 deepens this threshold logic by extending the connection between narrative pause and anticipation. As Spikkers approaches death, he dreams of Amsterdam, his home city. Billy enters the dream and uses Spikkers’s Delft tile to evoke a familiar Dutch scene. Their shared vision foreshadows the final threshold in part 4: “‘Go in,’ I say to him. . . . [H]e must make ready till I have finished my business here and come back to him” (140). Framed as a narrative pause, the episode opens a liminal space where the tile, being an imprint, transports the characters into a different temporality. The closing line, “[a] white Bird opens its wings” (140), suggests a metaphysical release into a disembodied existence that has yet to become a new story. Like part 1, the episode ends in ellipsis, but here it links transcendence to another beginning, enabled by the surviving imprint of the Delft tile.

In part 3, the threshold takes on spatial form. After kidnapping Spike’s head from the MORE Corporation, Billie prepares to leave behind the artificial safety of Tech City. Her exile is self-imposed. She turns away from the symbolic gate of her Eden to face the destruction of Wreck City. In a narrative pause, Billie reflects, “We went and stood in the liminal opening. . . . I had a strange sensation, as if this were the edge of the world and one more step, just one more step” (176). The episode ends in mid-motion, holding Billie and Spike between two versions of the Anthropocene: one enclosed and shaped by technological control, the other exposed and ruined by its effects. The final line comes from Spike: “Where are we going, Billie?” (176). This elliptical ending deepens the sense of narrative suspension, offering no further prefiguration except perhaps through Spike, who is there to act as an imprint. Unlike in parts 1 and 2, the narrative withholds the promise of another temporality, as if waiting to continue anyway.

In part 4, the threshold becomes both literal and figurative. After being shot by the military, Billie assumes a disembodied state and moves through a wooded valley toward the house depicted on the Delft tile from part 2. A narrative pause allows her to think, “I know this track, this stream, I’ve been here before, many times it seems, though I can’t say when” (245). Another pause occurs at the gate, where she falters: “I have my hand on the gate, but I hesitate for a minute because when I go through I can’t come back” (246). On the other side, Billie sees “you,” who comes out to greet her, eliciting her response “I knew it would end like this” (246). Billie’s transcendent, dreamlike state brings her home, to a place she has long imagined but never reached. The figure of “you” may imply her lost mother, a lover, or even a broader collective of readers, interpellated into a shared vision of transcendence. This liminal site performs a utopian gesture, echoing Ernst Bloch’s notion of “homeland” in The Principle of Hope (Das Prinzip Hoffnung): it is “something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no one has yet been” (1376).

However, the novel complicates any sense of an ending with its final line: “Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was” (Stone Gods 246). Winterson’s concluding ellipsis questions the idea of home as purely redemptive. Though disembodied, Billie navigates an environment informed not only by intertextuality and metaphor but also by the persistent and liminal unfolding of the Anthropocene. Her home emerges among the ruins, built on recurring anticipatory imprints that present themselves in an elliptical pattern. Billie enters what Badiou calls an “evental site.” Hovering at “the edge of the void” (Badiou 175), this threshold setting propels the human into a transformative mutuality with both the planetary and the cyborgian. It signals the emergence of a different way of knowing and being, one that may surpass the looping hyperobject of the Anthropocene.

A timescape analysis of Winterson’s The Stone Gods immerses the reader in the Anthropocene as an event that continually restarts, accumulates, and transcends itself. The novel disrupts conventional Bakhtinian chronotopes by reconfiguring familiar narrative settings. The parlor becomes a spaceship, where conversation and discussion compress cosmic scales into personal experiences. The road extends into a forest, where the environment emerges as an active force in its encounters with the human. The private room turns into a cave, where connection and transgression occur across the boundaries of human and nonhuman life. The threshold opens a critical passage into a narrative loop, pointing toward a different temporality. It also constitutes a potential site of rupture that remains elliptically unresolved in transit. Each of these geosocial situations functions as a distinct timescape, revealing how environmental emergency, social inequality, and existential uncertainty intersect across multiple scales. The novel’s experiments with narrative duration enhance the chronotopic disjunctures of the Anthropocene. Scenes embed environmental encounters. Summaries position human actions against the vastness of deep time. Pauses generate reflection and imprint, suspending time physically, psychologically, and cybernetically. Ellipses withhold action and postpone resolution. Elsewhere, I argue that “time refuses to end” in narrative pauses that constitute threshold situations (Shadurski 22). Here I maintain that ellipses enact an even more radical break, resisting closure and pointing toward alterity. Such narrative disruptions displace the reader into a nonlinear temporality, where thresholds multiply alongside recursive textuality and unnarrated, elliptical endings.

Conclusion

The timescape perspective provides a critical instrument for reading literary narrative in the Anthropocene. First, it connects narrative form to Anthropocene discourse, showing how configurations of time and space illuminate the complexity of human-environment interactions that define the event. Second, it shows how narrative frequency and order heighten the urgency of the Anthropocene by foregrounding its uneven, heterogeneous, and time-transgressive character. Third, it reveals how these insights relate to specific geosocial situations where distinct temporal rhythms express the Anthropocene as a persistent and liminal event. Together, such steps make timescape both a cognitive tool for understanding planetary crisis and a reading model for analyzing its narrative concretizations as variable timescapes.

The timescape perspective extends beyond the science-fictional and dystopian parameters of Winterson’s The Stone Gods. It can be applied to other genres whose narratives address the Anthropocene in different ways. In social realism, variations in narrative duration and perspective disclose how environmental crises affect communities unevenly. Pastoral and eco-realist works evoke cyclical or disrupted relations between humans and nature. Apocalyptic and flood fictions expand narrative settings to link catastrophe to renewal. In fantasy and horror, the Anthropocene appears through mythical recursivity and the return of damaged ecologies. The timescape perspective allows readers to confront this ongoing event by dwelling in uncertainty, imagining alternatives, and actively engaging in the making of time itself.