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Ammonite 3: The Cultures
Nicola Griffith spends a fair amount of time describing several cultures and groups- the Company with its several divisions, the Echraidhe, the community of Ollfoss, the seafarers. Were they different enough from each other? Was this variation interesting or important to the story? Credible?
Comments
The idea that people can be all different types, even if they are all women, was well done. A little heavy handed perhaps, but with all of the stereotypical alpha male vs submissive women tropes in SF, I was okay with something different. I definitely think that given enough time that this type of depth of differences would occur - though of course you have to assume that they would be able to have spontaneous baby making to not go extinct.
I've seen some mixed ideas on how fast language might change, including dialects. I think they had been on the planet for a couple hundred years so maybe that part was plausible. I'd need someone more educated on the topic than myself to weigh in.
I suppose Griffith would prefer you to think that people can be all different types BECAUSE women ARE people - not in spite of the fact that the people happen to all be women. I certainly had no trouble believing that women could fill all roles (they already do here on earth, right? We're just conditioned to think some roles are female and some are men, despite the evidence before our eyes). I was a little less convinced by the language. The evolution of language isn't what I found unconvincing, so much as the expression of this in the names of people and things just felt more made up to me than evolved.
It wasn't credible as SF / Fantasy because I think the novel is straying closer to allegory than world-building, but the variations etc. worked for the socio-political critique that the novel is a cover for. In other words, they weren't original, but more stereotypical in order to make a point. It was like a story that is used as a basis for a sermon - the sermon drives the narrative choices, not the other way around.
The cultures all seem believable, mainly because they are heavily based on real-world cultures. I'm not sure there was anything "alien" about them. But, as Barner says, the novel was essentially a sermon, so it suits Griffith to show that women can take on traditionally-male roles and you don't really notice the difference.
One thing I got rather confused about though was some worldbuilding in it. How long had Jeep been isolated before the current crop of Company-type newcomers had appeared? It didn't seem to be very long, but the cultures seemed to be ones that had developed over centuries.
(There were also smaller gaps, like where the nomadic folks got their metal from, but that's really not the point of the book, I think.)
I found the cultures, and their interaction believable. I am interested in the way the totally male-oriented viewpoint here might differ from a female-oriented viewpoint.
> I found the cultures, and their interaction believable. I am interested in the way the totally male-oriented viewpoint here might differ from a female-oriented viewpoint.
It would be interesting to read a short story by the same author postulating an all male environment, but I we take her at her word, it might not be a lot different. Despite her idea that women should represent the full gamut of society, my wife would be the first to say the men and women think very differently and interact differently. Even I am forced to agree, though I push back gently at times (until she says ‘how come you can never agree with me’).
But would a really all women society look like a group of women on earth? Or would it be quite different without the influence of men? And vice versa with a male society?
The all male environment I was talking about was here. This book club. Because we are all male, by chance, we lack a female viewpoint to say what they might think.