Ammonite 1: The Story
Did you like it? Were you convinced?
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Comments
I thought it not bad. Pretty hand wavy with some of the ways that the world operated and it made it feel like a mashup of science fiction and fantasy because of that. In that sense I had to suspend disbelief a bit more. The essentially spontaneous pregnancy was a let down. I was hoping for a much more interesting explanation of how it actually may have been possible. I thought she built an interesting world with some characters that I cared about, but the main character had motivations that seemed kind of all over the map. A solid book, but not one that would have been looking for more of hers to read.
I thought it was pretty good overall. It was trying to achieve something that I thought was a noble goal, and something I've always been interested in reading, which is to say a novel about women and women's issues. The audio version I listened to had an afterword from the author explaining why she wrote it - because nobody else ever does. She was tired of novels that basically tried to empower women by having token women in a novel take on male attributes (i.e. by making female action heroes) and given them men's motives. And she was tired of novels that relegated certain characteristics to women - she wanted to show that absent men, women would basically do everything in society and be any kind of person. About aliens who are really women, or women who are really aliens. I thought in that regard it was pretty successful. Most of the novel is there to serve that goal. Apart from this, she people would take away some impressions of the alien environment, a sense of wonder at the society, or wonder if a virus really could enhance our senses.
The novel won some awards, though mostly in the gender exploration category, not as much as an overall fiction work. It became part of the SF Masterworks series early on, though I wonder if this was because they padded the ranks of the Masterworks with authors they already had the rights to. I'm not convinced this book is a 'masterwork' (nor the works of Lucius Sheppard or Tricia Sullivan - who I mainly only hear of spoked about in the context of Masterworks - i.e. they don't really get mentioned based on their own merits). But awards and accolades aside, I thought it was a good book. And I still do think all Masterworks are worth picking up and reading (including this one).
I have another book of hers on my shelf, which I've heard good things about: Hild.
I'm reading Hild at the moment but it's very long (well over half as long again as Ammonite) so I am working my way through it in easy chunks along with other reads. HF rather than SFF and I am finding it a fairly convincing view of that era (7th century).
I became disappointed as the story progressed. A bit busy now, and I'll say more later, but like @kcaryths I thought that it wasn't as tightly focused as it should have been, and thought that was because the main character wasn't established. For that reason I thought it was more YA than SF / Fantasy.
Probably worth recalling that Ammonite was Nicola Griffith's debut novel - what would we make of Frank Herbert's The Dragon in the Sea if we read that?
I thought it had an interesting premise, and lots of potential, but I got bored with it. I think mainly due to the main character not being engaging. She didn't come across as a top-flight anthropologist.
The story didn't seem to be going anywhere, on the level of narrative. People were sort of wandering around the landscape, finding vaguely interesting things to look at and do, and that was about it. I'm not sure the story was trying to say anything (beyond what's said in the afterword that the novel proposes "women are people").
I'm afraid this is a book I didn't finish.
What did you think, @RichardAbbott ?
The other thing I didn't like about the book was that the main character was a pretty rubbish anthropologist. Why didn't she just ask people, "Where do babies come from?" and "What does 'soestre' mean?" But that would have removed the artificial mystery from the story.
I really liked it
Specifically, I found both setting and development compelling and liked the particular spin on human development, especially that it was biofeedback-based and not drug-induced. (To be fair to Frank Herbert, the narrative surrounding the Bene Gesserit has them doing most of their stuff with biofeedback as well, with the spice simply providing shortcuts and unlocking what you might call higher levels... but the overall impression left by the book is that spice is the only real way to do Cool Stuff).
The writing style and structure (especially the rather loose ends she left herself in the closing chapter) seem to me pretty good for a debut novel. I was intrigued by the gender stuff, going off as it did in a different direction from Left Hand of Darkness, and a lot of the diverse relationships between the characters (both constructive and destructive) convinced me.
I may be in something of a minority here judging by comments so far!
1) It seemed to me that the kinship structures were everywhere the same as for a society with two sexes. What I mean is that if there are no men, why would anyone consider themselves a woman? Wouldn't the society become sexless? And why would a sexless society continue to assign gendered roles? Names?
2) If people are reproducing for many generations, how can it be a mystery? Taboo, sure, but a mystery? I was also left wondering if all the natives were biofeedback people, and if they all were, why would it be a secret?
Of course, all this is based on my well known idiosyncrasies that consider an idea the main driver of the SF genre. I thought this sex question would be the main idea, but by the end I thought it was mainly about a character growing up to be an important person, i.e. YA genre.
I don't see why a lack of men would then eliminate the desire to still be viewed as a woman. It wouldn't eliminate sex, but it certainly would create some diversity in terms of gender roles, which I felt like she was touching on a bit in this book.
I didn't like the mystery of spontaneous childbirth in the book though. I guess I can see that they may never really understand exactly how it worked though. Particularly if their society is not really fully embracing something like the scientific method to try and figure out the answer - which I didn't get the sense they were.
I think you summed it up well with your last part there though @BarnerCobblewood .This was a bit of a missed opportunity. Now, to be fair, this was written 33 years ago and a LOT has changed since then in terms of our own understanding of these issues, as well as how society engages with them.
I can see where you're coming from but am not convinced, largely because I don't think I understand your magic vs science dichotomy. The development techniques in this book were, surely, eminently social rather than personal, in that people were taught or trained in particular techniques to achieve particular techniques. So there was, if you like, a kind of theory behind the practice. If you're meaning that there is no mathematical structure that was considered the underpinning of it all (a kind of "theory of everything" which might realise itself into specific techniques) then yes, I agree, there isn't. But the absence of that doesn't (IMHO) mean it's magic... simply that the practitioners didn't have a particular interest in mathematical underpinning.
Marghe - who among other things does have scientific training - seems to be constantly seeing how the experiential techniques of the Jeep inhabitants mesh with other practices she has encountered, and doesn't seem ever to have a "it doesn't make sense and it must be magic" response.
So far as we can tell, the nonhuman inhabitants of Jeep are gendered - at least, there's no reason to suppose they aren't, and nobody ever says to the contrary - so there's an obvious contrast "why aren't we the same as everything else?" question, immediately followed by "there are the males of each species... where are ours?" It's pretty clear that the society is far from sexless - it is built around same-sex relationships rather than opposite-sex ones, for obvious reasons, but sex itself is seen as an important and enjoyable pursuit, and one which is a normal activity for most people. Names, I think are largely based on ones from a variety of languages from the remote past, accessed by the coming-of-age deep-search processed, and it seems reasonable to me that such names would tend to end up female-gendered much of the time because of identification with a long-ago female ancestor.
I'm not sure that reproduction was a mystery from the people embedded in the society - they talk casually about it using their own specialised vocabulary with Marghe long before she has an inkling what the words signify. My impression was that most people in that society knew about the same amount about sex and reproduction as most people do in ours! Possibly a whole lot more detail, in fact. The only mystery here, surely, is on Marghe's part as she struggles to understand what the term soestre means. She assumes, naturally enough, that it is a particular kind of kinship among the Echraidhe, and only gradually comes to learn that it is a) universal across the various groups and b) isn't really to do with kinship.
@RichardAbbott - here's one who totally agrees with you! I found it fascinating and enjoyed it so much, I immediately read Spear, which is her take on the Peredur/Parsifal legend, which I also found excellent. I also did not feel that the female-female conception was fantasy. As you mention the people talked about it in front of Marghe long before she was in a position to understand what they were talking about - she was learning the subtleties of the language by inference - and the concepts involved were radically different. My impression was that it was a mystical experience rather than a magical one, and coming in from her Earth-based culture, she had to grope her way toward understanding. Thus the 'mystery' of female-female conception is more akin to a religious 'mystery' rather than a scientific 'mystery'.
I'm not distinguishing magic from science, but from tech. Tech is premised on the user not requiring to care for the self - it works, no matter who operates it. See Mickey in Disney's Sorcerer's apprentice for an example. Magic is grounded on being usable only by those who care for the self working: Discney's Sorcerer. Clarke's remark about tech being indistinguishable from magic refers to the Enlightenment ideal of not having to care for the self to become superhuman.
Of course magic makes sense.
That's my point. This is typical of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Enlightenment stance that humans are distinct from the rest of "creation," but as I understand it, at this time scientific understanding is that "creation" is not the way things come about. If the other species are two-sexed, any scientist worth their salt would think, "This virus cannot be native to this planet, because it depends on an invasive species." The idea that humans are differentiated from the rest of creation is not scientific - there's just no evidence for it, and theories of it become incoherent when confronted by what is the case.
The relationships are examples of coupling, which is not the same sex, e.g. almost all fish don't couple, but they do reproduce through two sexes. Coupling has been selected because it provides for care of young, not for sexual activity. I have read suggestions that sexual pleasure is selected because it supports coupling, not the other way around.
As for gender in language, language is mutable, and so vistiges of gender might remain, but wouldn't the language evolve into neuter forms? The non-native "natives" on Jeep perform the function of "Orient described by Said in Orientalism - they provide a static other by which the dynamic modern can identify herself as individual and different. This is the essence of YA genre.
I don't understand how you're using kinship here. Kinship is a system that distinguishes insiders from outsiders based on "family." This story is all about finding a new family, an important part of adolescent development towards specie-al reproduction.