Ammonite
★★★★★
The colony on Jeep fell when a virus killed most of the colonists and all the men. Centuries later, the colony is rediscovered and a quarantine established when an expeditionary force is all but wiped out. The anthropologist Marghe Taisan is dispatched to test a vaccine and uncover how the colony is seemingly thriving without men.
There’s lots of potential in the stories of the trapped outpost, the vaccine, and the hostile company. But a narrative that began with the promise of multiple viewpoints quickly narrows to Marghe’s personal story. The wider politics of Jeep become backdrop as Marghe journeys into the wilds, shedding her colonial identity and technological crutches to uncover Jeep’s epistemological secrets. I’m reminded of Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth — that deep sense of place, culture, and a central redemption journey.
This is first-class anthropological SF, emphasising the lived experience of an alien society over its wider external politics. Jeep is technologically primitive but vividly embodied with a sensory physicality — smell, light, weather. It’s populated by tribes and families who’ve been biologically and socially manipulated — their history and traditions dictated by virus-enhanced ancestral memory, their reproductive control re-imagined.
Regarded as a feminist work, it feels to me more about the dismantling of gender — like Le Guin’s work it’s a society where it’s absent, where professions are genderless, reproduction is symmetrical. Narrated more mystically and spiritually than scientifically, Griffith refuses the technocratic reveal, highlighting the conceptual gap between the secular colonisers fighting for a cure and the spiritual natives who have embraced and been transformed by Jeep and its virus.
Marghe is undone and remade by the planet, its people, and the virus, finding peace within the native society. Her intimate story is book-ended with a harder SF plot, but if you come for that you’ll be disappointed. For me, it’s a personal story about a woman searching for meaning in her life and finding her place.
