"The Stone Gods" by Jeanette Winterson; Harcourt ($24)

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In many ways, Jeanette Winterson remains a fearless writer. Like few modern literary novelists she pursues her unfashionable but characteristic subject - romantic love - even when the quest leads to fundamentalist religion, as in her award-winning autobiographical debut, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit"; the Napoleonic wars, in "The Passion"; or the intrigue surrounding the 16th-century tulip trade, in "The PowerBook."

Combined with a lyrical yet forceful prose style and a disarming bent toward the fantastic, Winterson's persistent focus on romantic love - or perhaps, more precisely, the romance (the glamour, the magic, the transcendence) of love - allows her to deliver the kind of rare pleasure found only in works of equal skill and unfettered imagination. Isak Dinesen's "Seven Gothic Tales" comes to mind.

Alas, as exemplified by her latest novel, "The Stone Gods," Winterson does seem to have one phobia, shared by all too many serious writers: fear of genre, of telling a story so well in, say, the form of science fiction, that it risks being considered less than a work of literary art. Her counterstratagem, also shared by too many serious writers, is that long since tiresome exercise known as metafiction.

More's the pity, for the first half of "The Stone Gods" is a fully realized dystopian sci-fi tale, brilliantly conceived and deftly constructed.

On the planet Orbus, a corporation, MORE, rules the former first world in benevolent tyranny, distracting its subjects from the collapsing natural environment with reality television shows and the fruits of higher technology, such as universal cosmetic surgery, robot traffic police and personal pollution filters. The globe's remaining territory is divided between an Islamic power known as the Eastern Caliphate, and the SinoMosco Pact, comprising the former Eurasian communist territories.

It is, naturally, our own planet, plausibly described a century or two hence, when it likely will be succumbing to pollution, global warming and the "benefits" of advancing technology. The heroine, Billie Crusoe, is that familiar type, the rebellious government agent. She works for Enhancement ("It's my job in Enhancement to explain to people that they really do want to live their lives in a way that is good for them and good for the Community. Enforcement steps in when it doesn't quite work out"), but she also bucks the system, and even hides members of the Resistance from time to time.

Fed up with Billie's attitude but unable to prove anything, MORE smacks her with $3 million in bogus traffic fines. She's given the choice of arrest, or joining a trip to a newly discovered blue planet, where humanity hopes to relocate for a fresh, more eco-friendly start. She accepts the space mission, where her principle companions are the dashing Capt. Handsome; Pink, a woman who won the trip on a reality show; and Spike, a beautiful woman of the species "Robo sapiens."

Their mission is to sling an asteroid at the new planet, thereby killing off the dinosaurs, so inconvenient to human habitation. Along the way, each character gains new shadings - even Pink, at first an airhead, proves resilient and likable - and Billie falls in love with Spike, who has developed an ability not found in her original programming. She can feel emotions.

The power and depth of the society Winterson creates overshadows the two following sections, one set in another culture dying of ecological abuses, 18th-century Easter Island, the other in an advanced civilization that mirrors the first, and thus our own. Reading about Billy, a marooned sailor who falls in love with a native man named Spikkers, or another version of Billie, this time in love with a robot named Spike who consists of only a head, is pale work after the narrative energy and imaginative verve of the first 93 pages.

In the last section, especially, Winterson allows ideas to overwhelm narrative. It's chock-a-block with lines like: "Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was." Or "A quantum universe - neither random nor determined." "Love is an intervention. Why do we not choose it?" The message throttles the medium.

Besides, Winterson's big idea - humanity, given the chance, would ruin one planet, island or life, after another, endlessly - is fully developed in the beginning section. While she labors mightily throughout the rest of the book to deliver something literary and meaningful, Winterson gains little, having already achieved her loftiest aims in the mere sci-fi dystopian satire she begins with.