Will I love Ammonite?

As part of my exploration of science fiction, particularly works that deal with gender in that genre, I read “Ammonite” and found an engaging story with a broad array of female characters filling all sorts of roles in their respective societies. Marghe, the protagonist of this speculative fiction novel, is an anthropologist sent to the planet nicknamed Jeep to study the “native” population, the descendants of colonizers hundreds of years earlier. As in the envoy “The Left Hand of Darkness,” she is an outsider looking into a society; and like him, she barely survives her journey. This is a well… show more.

Ammonite starts in space and lands on an alien world but brings plenty of Earth’s history along with it. Human settlers that lost an age ago, transformed by a virus that only women survive but allows them to reproduce, have spread across this world. Anthropologist Marghe Taishan faces down nomadic horse archers and gets lost in pastoral folkways both new and familiar. She deconstructs her future and rebuilds herself out of the past. Ammonite’s new world shows us how our world might have looked if different paths were taken.