Ammonite (1992)
416pp, Fiction
Notes
2014-09-18
‘A Knockout’ says Ursula Le Guin on the cover and it’s not hard to see why she’d like this book: An anthropologist studying, becoming stranded on and eventually assimilated into a recently rediscovered planetary colony where all the men have been killed hundreds of years ago by a plague (how they procreate is one of the big mysteries driving the story). It’s strange reading a book where everyone is a woman how often I had to stop, esp. at the start, and correct my mental picture to get rid of incidental men – you know the person refuelling the transport, the chef, whoever, given the ease with which I accept all male casts esp. in this kind of scifi/ adventure novel. I was surprised/ not surprised, I mean it’s easy to see eg. how in the absence of a deliberate approach to inclusivity the most well intentioned video game designers might accidentally populate their creations with people who look like them or reflect the existing media biases in terms of the type of people the represent.
Tangent: I’ve notice when reading books to my kids with ostensibly sexless animal protagonists e.g. curly the pig in the Apple Tree farm books ( that is to say their sex is not mentioned and not determinable via. visual cues ) we often unthinkingly default them to male – since noticing this I’ve been running a quota system (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD!!!!).
Other stuff to mention. The whole thing felt a bit hippieish, but in a very 90s way, also a bit X Files, very 90s. Perhaps not surprising seeing as it was first published in the 90s. I would have liked a map, this kind of book really should have a map. The book owes an obvious debt to Ursula Le Guin’s Ekumen books but the influence flows both way with The Telling having obvious echoes of Ammonite.