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fffriday, where we review or rec fiction, fanfic, or other F/F things every Friday. This review is linked from there.
A re-read. This vivid and satisfying science fiction novel, Griffith’s first, has no male characters in the entire book.
Anthropologist Marghe Taishan arrives on Jeep, a planet owned by the sinister Company that seems to control everything, willing to give up everything for the chance to study its people and cultures. The Company’s first expedition found that Jeep was entirely populated by women, and only belatedly discovered why when all its men and 20% of its women died of a plague. The remaining women were quarantined there until a vaccine could be found, and have spent the last five years avoiding meaningful contact with the locals and trying to preserve their existing culture untouched by change.
Marghe has taken an experimental vaccine which may or may not work, and only lasts for six months even if does. She sets out to discover what became of her missing predecessor, and finds that when you look into other cultures, they may also look into you.
Though aspects of the plot are a bit wobbly and there’s enough loose ends that I wonder if a sequel was intended but never materialized, this is a very enjoyable book if you like detailed cultural worldbuilding. (I sure do.) Though character is somewhat secondary to worldbuilding, Marghe’s outer and inner journey is satisfying and her eventual romance with a local woman is believable. She also has an interesting relationship which is neither sexual nor romantic, but otherwise similar enough to a ton of heterosexual genre romances popular at the time that I have to wonder if Griffith was doing a deliberate take on the problematic nature of captive-to-lover romances.
And, of course, if you want to read a book where all the characters are women, there still aren’t many and this is a good one. There’s multiple societies involved, all female and all different and not one partaking of any stereotypes of how women are or how all-female societies would be better or worse than the ones we have. They’re societies. They’re people. No more, no less.
This concept is still neither dated nor much imitated; gee, I wonder why...
Ammonite
fffriday, where we review or rec fiction, fanfic, or other F/F things every Friday. This review is linked from there.A re-read. This vivid and satisfying science fiction novel, Griffith’s first, has no male characters in the entire book.
Anthropologist Marghe Taishan arrives on Jeep, a planet owned by the sinister Company that seems to control everything, willing to give up everything for the chance to study its people and cultures. The Company’s first expedition found that Jeep was entirely populated by women, and only belatedly discovered why when all its men and 20% of its women died of a plague. The remaining women were quarantined there until a vaccine could be found, and have spent the last five years avoiding meaningful contact with the locals and trying to preserve their existing culture untouched by change.
Marghe has taken an experimental vaccine which may or may not work, and only lasts for six months even if does. She sets out to discover what became of her missing predecessor, and finds that when you look into other cultures, they may also look into you.
Though aspects of the plot are a bit wobbly and there’s enough loose ends that I wonder if a sequel was intended but never materialized, this is a very enjoyable book if you like detailed cultural worldbuilding. (I sure do.) Though character is somewhat secondary to worldbuilding, Marghe’s outer and inner journey is satisfying and her eventual romance with a local woman is believable. She also has an interesting relationship which is neither sexual nor romantic, but otherwise similar enough to a ton of heterosexual genre romances popular at the time that I have to wonder if Griffith was doing a deliberate take on the problematic nature of captive-to-lover romances.
And, of course, if you want to read a book where all the characters are women, there still aren’t many and this is a good one. There’s multiple societies involved, all female and all different and not one partaking of any stereotypes of how women are or how all-female societies would be better or worse than the ones we have. They’re societies. They’re people. No more, no less.
This concept is still neither dated nor much imitated; gee, I wonder why...
Ammonite
is sf on the perennial theme of stranger in a strange land, in this case a woman who comes to a planet where a virus has killed all the men, but society survives. I have read a lot of “society of women” stories. With a few exceptions, when men write them the societies are fascistic, ant-like, and often prostrate themselves with gratitude at the arrival of male saviors. When women write them the societies tend to be individualist and bad-ass, or cooperative in an appealing, non-insectlike way. Griffith’s is cooperative in some ways, not in others, and has a strong streak of bad-ass. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys worldbuilding sf with a focus on made-up cultures a la Ursula K. Le Guin or Eleanor Arnason. 
I don’t recall terribly well except that it managed to hold my interest despite the fact that a lot of the plot involved, if I recall correctly, sewage treatment or something equally industrial and unpromising. 
, 
, and 
are a set of character studies masquerading as suspense thrillers about Norwegian-American Aud Torvingen, ex-cop, self-defense instructor, carpenter, and private investigator. Aud, who is practically perfect in all physical ways, is also a strange and closed-off person, beautifully attuned to the natural world and her own body but perpetually one beat off the rhythms of normal human interactions. But not so much so that she doesn’t have a love life. Both The Blue Place and Always feature sexy and romantic romances.
