A world without men

Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

Somehow, i had managed to miss reading this very wonderful book before. I knew about it, of course - it's one of the books always mentioned when the talk turns for feminist science fiction and especially to feminist science fiction that speculates on what societies might be like if there were no men.

There are several ways to "read" books about hypothetical woman-only societies. One way is to see them as thought experiments exploring how women might see themselves and their potentials in a world without the possibility of gendered roles and gendered positions of power - the range of female abilities and behaviours possible when all the positions are totally open for women to occupy, and when power has no relation to gender and all the possible kinds of power are accessible to women.

Ammonite is the story of a woman, Marghe, from a culture that has traditional assumptions about gender roles and behaviours, not unlike our own, who is sent to the planet Jeep, which is inhabited solely by women. This planet, originally colonised centuries ago,is home to a virus that killed off all the men in the original settlement party, and subtly changed those women who survived in several ways, one of which makes parthenogenesis possible. Jeep, a lost and rediscovered colony, has been quarantined due to the presence of the virus - but it is also a planet with resources that could be exploited to great profit if it were possible to eradicate the virus or nullify its effects. Marghe's task is two-fold - to study the society that has developed on Jeep, and to be a test subject for a vaccine that, it is hoped, will make it possible for Jeep to be opened up for development.

Marghe's transition from observer to participant in the social fabric of Jeep is fascinating as a personal journey and thought-provoking as an examination of a non-gendered society. The book also weaves in additional themes of living in balance with the world - a kind of intuitive ecological feminism - and of the consequences of colonialsm on an indigenous people.

The actual mechanism through which women on Jeep are able to reproduce is (as in Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines series) somewhat of a parthenogenesis McGuffin - completely unrealistic but necessary to the creation of the society the author wishes to explore, although it may also have roots in a certain variety of New Age feminist mysticism. But somehow it does not bother me, in either Griffith's or Charnas' work, because the point of these books is to look at woman-only societies, and if one posits a low-tech world, some other form of intervention is required to enable such a world to exist and flourish.

I'm glad I finally got around to reading Ammonite.