I've finished the second draft of "Sex Doll, Rocket Summer" and I'm more or less happy with it, even if it does feel as though something's missing. I have people reading it and generating feedback. Or dreams, whichever. I suspect the something-missing might be the Murakami Haruki effect, where I prevented narrative climax. Or I tried to. Or it could be the vast emptiness I was trying to put into it.
Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods is good. It isn't great, but it's very good, although you won't like it if you don't already like her work. It's a touch didactic. The pieces don't all fit together into a seamless stream, but it's not supposed to work like that. She's playing with the idea of repeating worlds and stories -- she's a much gentler Kathy Acker. It reminds me of The Powerbook to a large extent and Art & Lies to a smaller. If you're just starting with her, I can not recommend The Passion highly enough, a traipse through Napoleon's Europe and Venice in particular. Everybody raves about Written on the Body but it doesn't feel quite as rich to me.
The Stone Gods starts as science fiction, stops being science fiction in favour of being historical fiction, starts up as a different science fiction story, but actually it's the same one, and maybe they're all pieces of the same thing. The "maybe" is a bit of a waggling eyebrow. The sections in the Seventeenth Century didn't sell themselves to me, which is a bit of a stumble. But I didn't really like the war scenes in McEwan's Atonement either, where he's just showing us his long, thick Hemingway.
Sorry, I'm all strung out from the story and still cranking out silly sex references -- it's cockeyed smutty, and will take a night's sleep to recover.