Ammonite

Author
Nicola Griffith
Publisher
Del Ray
Year
1992
Collections
Fiction
The canon
Buy this book
Bookshop

Marguerite (“Marghe”) Taishan is about to step foot on the planet Jeep when she receives a warning: if she goes on, she will never come back. But she’s come too far, and worked too hard, and Jeep is too interesting for her to turn back now: across its continents lives a scattered human colony, forgotten for centuries, but apparently thriving. Which might be unremarkable except for the fact that all the people are women. Marghe’s job is to investigate how they have survived, and to test a vaccine against the virus that killed the men. But her own survival, and the planet’s, are more precarious, and more intertwined, than she predicts. Nicola Griffith’s first novel is about making a home, and remembering the past, and the impossible beauty and danger of knowing women are human.

Reading notes

The other side

In Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, an anthropologist named Marghe arrives on the planet Jeep in order to research a lost human colony. When she stumbles into sacred territory, she is taken hostage by the Echraidhe, a people who live an isolated and difficult existence in the cold northern climes. Against the odds, Marghe escapes, and later meets Thenike, a viajera—one who travels from place to place, serving as storyteller, news bringer, healer, negotiator, and more.

Marghe had asked Thenike why the Echraidhe were so inflexible, so bound by tradition.

“Because they are so few,” Thenike had said. “Because their sister’s mothers are also their choose-mothers’ sisters. They’re born too close. All their memories interlock and look down the same path to the same places. Each memory reflects another, repeats, reinforces, until the known becomes the only. For the Echraidhe, it’s not real if it can’t be seen elsewhere, in their mother’s memory, or their mothers’ mother. For them, perhaps, there is no such thing as the unknown.” Thenike shook her head. “It’s a danger to all who are able to deepsearch into their memories well, or often.”

Griffith, Ammonite, page 200

To “deepsearch” is to enter a trance-like state, one in which a person travels back among the memories of their ancestors, seeing and experiencing what people who lived before them saw and experienced. Thenike continues:

“You can see so much of the world through others’ memories, places you’ve never been, faces you’ve never seen and never will, weather you’ve never felt and food you’ve never tasted, that sometimes it’s hard not to want to just feel, taste, see those familiar things over and over. Truly new things become alien, other, not to be trusted. There are those who know their village so well, through the eyes and hearts of so many before them, that they can’t leave it to go somewhere else. They can’t bear to place their feet on a path they have never trodden, on soil they have never planted with a thousand seeds in some past life as lover or child. Some become unable to leave their lodge or tent, or can’t sail past the sight of familiar cliffs. Many who can deepsearch powerfully enough to be a viajera end like this.”

Griffith, Ammonite, page 200

The danger of deepsearch is that of nostalgia: a wistful longing for the past that never was exactly as we remember it. However real and strong a memory is, it is still an echo, still a reflection, not the experience itself. The women of the Echraidhe have become enthralled to that reflection, such that they cannot see what’s ahead, cannot imagine anything changing. And so they become unable to see the change that is already underfoot, the way the winters are getting longer and colder, their children sicker, the tribe smaller and weaker.

In this way, nostalgia can be a kind of toxin, a poison that keeps us forever walking backward, gaze directed at our footprints while our feet step awkwardly into a future we scorn to see. Communities which are hardened to outsiders—which refuse trade and companionship from other people (as the Echraidhe refuse), which demand that nothing changes even as the seasons pass and the rivers shift and new mountains form—begin to rot from within, to eat themselves because there is nothing outside to eat. Like an AI training on its own output, each generation disintegrates further into madness.

“And you?”

Here Thenike had smiled, though Marghe saw memories of bitter times written on her face. “I’m fortunate enough to have the memories of a thousand different foremothers, some clear, some not. Fortunate, too, to become bored with the past and eager to sail over the horizon or walk over the crest of the hill and see what’s on the other side.”

Griffith, Ammonite, page 201

Because the other side is where the life is. To live is to accept the discomfort—and pleasure—of a future that is undiscovered, undetermined, uncertain. Unknown and unknowable. But alive, alive as only that which changes can ever be.