First impressions review: Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith
Contrary to what you might expect from the title, this book involves neither paleontologists nor any ancient creatures. Instead, it follows anthropologist Margherite Taishan, who has been sent by a powerful company to a planet it owns that is infected with a strange virus that kills all male off-world humans and about 1 in 5 women. The native (or, rather, naturalized) human population is 100% female, but has somehow been reproducing just fine for several centuries. Marghe’s job is supposed to be to A) test a new vaccine1 against the virus and B) find out more about how the locals are surviving. But her impatience leads her mission off-script remarkably quickly. Meanwhile, Danner, the leader of the local military installation, is having doubts about whether the Company ever plans to let them go home.
This 1992 book paints a vivid picture of the women-only societies of the planet and is a good portrait of a woman healing from past trauma and discovering her own strength. It also explores the need to accept change, both personal and societal. Marghe’s budding romance with a local woman is fine, if a little dull. However, the virus doesn’t make any sense, the reasons for and implications of the sex-selective action of the virus aren’t actually explored, and the conflict with the main potential antagonists is never resolved. These factors combined left me a bit unsatisfied with the story. I will break down each of these points, but it will require some **spoilers**, so hop off now if you don’t want that.
1. Technically it should be called a “prophylactic”, because instead of giving permanent immunity, you have to keep taking the pills every 10 days (like the malaria pills that are only taken by travelers because they are too expensive or toxic for residents of the tropics to keep taking all the time).
The world of Grenchstom’s Planet (AKA GP, AKA Jeep) is inhabited by a variety of realistic low-technology cultures. The details given in a short amount of space about how people dress and eat, how they count time, what rituals are important to them, etc. reminds me of Ursula LeGuin’s writing - meaning I really enjoyed it! I did notice when reading this that Jeep’s female-only cultures feel different from LeGuin’s world of Gethen, where there is no permanent sex or gender. The local women fill all the roles in their societies just fine and do not have any concept of men, but as a reader I felt a slight lack or gap that I didn’t feel when reading about Gethenians, who are both and neither. I’m at a loss to explain why – what inherent "maleness" was missing2 - but certainly both authors collectively did their job in evoking the difference between a single-gender society and an agender society!
2. It certainly wasn't something like "capacity for violence" or "focus on physical skill", because we do see women on Jeep exhibit both. Maybe it was the lack of a certain hearty confident-swagger personality type? I can’t think of any characters who are like that, which is actually odd, as I've certainly known women who exhibit a version of it. Or is it that no one is particularly hairy or square-jawed, whereas some Gethenians have a more masculine physique (especially during kemer)? I'm just not sure.
Marghe is the most ridiculously impatient anthropologist I’ve ever encountered – insisting on traveling to a plateau where one of her predecessors probably died within days of arriving, heading into winter at high elevations, rather than taking some time to gather local intel – but it kind of works for what Griffith does with her character. Marghe has been traumatized by her mother’s death and by a severe beating she previously received while on the job for the same employer. The base leader, Danner, says she doesn’t agree with the psychologist’s evaluation that Marghe may be running from this past, but to me her rather erratic decisions say otherwise. Indeed, she eventually admits that she was using her profession to distance herself from people, examining them like shells on a beach rather than building relationships. She eventually decides that she doesn’t want to do that anymore.
Marghe’s plan to explore the plateau gets her kidnapped by a nomadic tribe who somewhat resemble the Mongols. She later escapes, and nearly dies crossing the snowy plain before reaching the outskirts of Ollfoss, the oldest settlement on the planet – her initial intended destination. She loses a couple of fingers to frostbite but is nursed back to health by a local family, who are able to help her put together the last pieces of how the virus works and how it is linked to these people’s reproduction. Marghe also falls in love with a member of the family who is a viajera – a sort of explorer/bard/scholar who travels around between cultures. She decides (in her typically hasty way!) that this is where she wants to put down roots. Marghe stops taking the prophylactic, survives the virus, and learns how to trigger a synchronized pregnancy with her new lover. At the same time, Danner is more reluctantly making plans for local survival for the members of her base, since she is increasingly convinced that the Company will never actually pay for their “decontamination” and might just kill them all if the vaccine doesn’t work.
The virus is said to incorporate itself into the genome of the host cells where, if the host survives, it somehow enables the person to be more in tune with the electromagnetic frequencies of their own body and thereby enter into trance states and control the functions of that body to a higher degree than usual. That is how these women reproduce; while in a trance state, they trigger their own eggs to be released and to undergo a truncated form of meiosis that results in an embryo with the proper chromosome number3. That would be more or less OK as far as it goes – there are, after all, lizards who can lay fertile eggs without males - though I’m not sure why it would somehow allow the women to access ancestral memories. No matter what ‘Dune’ tells you: Detailed visual memories are NOT encoded in our DNA! However, what bothered me more was the implication that because the chromosomes cross over, this would somehow result in offspring who were significantly different from their mothers. If chromosome A has allele 1 and chromosome B has allele 2 and a crossing over event happens…the individual still has one copy of allele 1 and one of allele 2. This would not allow recessive traits to become visible, nor would it introduce any new variation. Apart from some slight differences arising from new mutations or which X chromosome is silenced, daughters would be near-clones of their mothers. There are actually a wide variety of chromosomal/cell bio mechanisms that can allow for asexual reproduction, but while some PRESERVE genetic variation, none are good at increasing it. I was hoping that – since there is a big focus on doing this as pairs in a trance – that there was some way of transferring genetic material from one partner to the other. But…nope. Not the way the process is described!
3. Though since meiosis happens WAY before the egg is mature enough to be released, the timeline of events is a bit off here.
It is also never addressed why the virus kills males. Given that the population of the base was in the thousands initially then, even if it targets the Y chromosome somehow, statistically at least one or two of the survivors ought to have been men…but the existence of trans men (or women) is never brought up! But if it did target something associated with biological maleness, then why do so many women get sick? And why are other earth mammals, like horses, not affected at all? Despite this example - which you'd think would make them wonder - the locals don’t have a concept of multiple sexes or genders. The recent arrivals from earth do, yet is never addressed how those women feel about the absence of men. Many are very likely to be grieving (especially if they lost a partner or friends in the plague), some (if they had bad past experiences) might be relieved, while others and others might feel a more complex blend of emotions. We are never told what earth’s attitude to gender and sexuality is in the period in which this is set. Presumably there is a higher level of equality of employment than 1990s earth, given how many female military officers there were. It is also likely that Marghe already identified as either bisexual or lesbian, because she isn’t surprised to find herself in love with a woman. But not every surviving woman on the base would be! Is sexual frustration not an issue at all? And, in the local population, are there women who on earth would be straight but here identify as asexual because they’ve never met anyone they are attracted to… or is the book assuming that desire is redirected toward whoever is around who fits the bill most closely? You could potentially make an argument for either, but the story doesn't bother. These issues are why I feel that the book shouldn’t really be described as an “exploration of gender”; there are just too many questions that the author doesn’t even seem to have considered!
Thenike, Marghe’s love interest, should be an interesting character. As a viajera, she’s clearly an adventurous soul and she’s seen a lot of this world. But since, in practice, she serves as a source of exposition and of endlessly patient support for Marghe, she ends up feeling flat. I was a bit surprised when they got together because there wasn’t any obviously flirty banter and only a minor bit of sexual tension that Thenike herself diagnosed as an effect of Marghe’s body coming back to itself as the toxic prophylactics left her system. Even then, I had my doubts about whether Marghe actually loved Thenike, or if she was just symbolic of the groundedness and connection that Marghe craves. They even encounter an old lover of Thenike’s, which I thought might trigger some sparks of jealousy, something to liven this dynamic up…but no. Not that jealousy is good mind you, but I kind of wanted to see Marghe struggle with the knowledge that Thenike wasn’t just hers by default.
The relationship I wanted to see more of was that between medic Lu Wai and communications officer Letitia Dogias. Their differences make their dynamic interesting: Letitia mischievous and adventurous, Lu Wai worried about Letitia’s physiological sensitivity to the planet’s electromagnetic storms but clearly trying to rein in her protectiveness so as not to stifle her partner. It is rather lovely! So why is it that Marghe and Thenike get four times as many words and I feel half as much? The sisterly dynamic between Marghe and the family’s younger member Gerrel is also far more fun:
Gerrel, Marghe saw, was trying hard not to stare at her. Her face. She touched it gently. “What does it look like?” “Like you ran into a tree,” Gerrel said. She appraised Marghe frankly, shook her head. “Like you ran into a tree twice.” “Well, it could be worse.” Gerrel’s expression said she doubted it.
Why could we not have a bit more liveliness and teasing between our main pair?
The sub-plot about Hannah Danner would also have been more compelling if given more time. Danner ended up commander of the base by default when those who ranked above her died, though she was a rather inexperienced lieutenant. She’s held the place together for 5 years and, prior to that, was the officer who sided with the natives who wanted reparations for burn damage to their lands. Because of that, the Company doesn’t trust her, and she (along with Dogias and Lu Wai) end up hunting out some spies in their midst. I did enjoy watching Danner’s struggle to break away from military thinking and accept interdependence with the natives, which is mirrored by a similar struggle among the nomadic tribeswomen. But we don’t really know enough about the Company’s goals – Are they after metals? Do they want to land colonists to farm sheep? How exactly do they want to make a profit from this world? - to form our own hypotheses about how they might act. And when the spies are caught they are people that Danner knows but we, the reader, have barely been introduced to…so I didn’t feel that punch of betrayal. There’s also another sub-plot about an endangered indigenous species of yeti-like creatures that is potentially interesting but goes absolutely nowhere. A sequel could allow more space to explore both that and the Company, but I don’t think one exists.
At this point, you are probably wondering: What’s with the title of the book, then? The ammonite is a metaphor. Marghe dreams of picking up an ammonite fossil on the shore and having it sink into her hand. In another dream, her mother tells her that the shell was named after the Egyptian god Amun, traditionally depicted with curling ram’s horns. Amun was a solar and fertility deity, but later fell out of fashion. Marghe thus connects the ammonite to the idea of change.
Overall recommendation: I can't help thinking that the target audience for this book is "cottage-core lesbian who dreams of running away to the woods with your wife and baking pies and not having to interact with men at all even as sperm donors". Which is valid! However, if you are hoping for a thorough and realistic follow-through on questions like“what if something killed off all the men?” or “what if humans could reproduce asexually?” you might find it a bit disappointing. (These are, of course, not mutually-exclusive demographics)
