In Ammonite, I often found myself forgetting that everybody in the book is female (and that all the people in this world are lesbians, if that word has any meaning in a world where everyone’s forgotten that men ever existed) but when I remembered, it was incredibly refreshing to read something where I don’t have to constantly think about the structural power conferred upon men and straight people by patriarchy.

But it also looks forward to SF such as Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice,where biological sex differences remain but the sociological significance of gender has been eliminated. A centrepiece of the novel is the time Marghe spends in the freezing northern wastes of this planet, reflecting the journey that Le Guin’s narrator undertakes across a frozen sea.

Marghe is using an untested vaccine to avoid becoming infected herself, but as she walks deeper into the unknown, she is drawn to the cultures she encounters in ways that she hadn’t anticipated.Īs this all suggests, Ammonite draws heavily from Ursula Le Guin’s classic The Left Hand of Darkness not only philosophically – Le Guin famously depicts a society where biological sex is mutable and often absent – but spatially. Centuries ago, this planet was affected by a mysterious virus that wiped out all the men and conferred upon the women the power to reproduce asexually, although they are able to scramble genetic data so they don’t simply give birth to clones of themselves (Griffith emphasises that there is a mystical aspect to how this takes place, so getting hung up on the science would be, I think, to miss the point of this novel). Marghe, trained as an anthropologist, is about to land on a distant planet inhabited by a migratory strand of the human race. (I’m ashamed to say that I’m yet to finish it, although I’m determined to give it another go – the complexity of names, allegiances and relationships defeated me, even when I tried to make my own notes as I went along! Fans of this novel, any tips?) Ammonite, her 1993 debut, starts in a rather different space.

Nicola Griffith first came to my attention with her novel Hild (2013), which follows the life of a significant female figure in seventh-century Anglo-Saxon Britain, and which many of my favourite bloggers absolutely loved.

Ammonite griffith