This document provides a summary and analysis of Nicola Griffith's 1993 science fiction novel Ammonite. It discusses how Griffith uses the concept of the "alien" to estrange familiar aspects of reality and examine what it means to be human. The novel is set on the planet Jeep, where the human characters encounter alien beings and cultures that are vastly different from their own world. This creates a sense of unfamiliarity and cognitive estrangement that allows the reader to view human nature in a new light. By the end of the novel, the main character Marguerite has spent enough time on Jeep that she becomes acclimated to the alien world and integrated into its society.

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Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite: Aliens in Disguise
Ashutosh Potdar
The alien is considered as alius or, ‗other than‘ human being. One of the
enduring themes of Science Fiction, the alien is deeply sensed and largely
consumed in different shapes and forms by Science Fiction writers. The present
paper seeks to evolve a critical engagement with the theme of alien in Science
Fiction. The primary focus in this paper is to seek a response to a question of why
does a Science Fiction writer need the alien in Science Fiction. Modestly, in a
response to the question, we are going to argue that existence of the alien in
Science Fiction enables studying ourselves. The existing literatures on debates
about the existence of the other worlds of alien or of the extraterrestrial beings
have been of significant help in advancing our knowledge and our understanding
of human nature. In imagining a meeting of aliens and humans, a Science Fiction
writer gives serious exploratory thought to the existential anxieties of human
beings. Particularly, the paper is an attempt in investigating Science Fiction of
Nicola Griffith to address the quintessential questions like: What is it to be
human? How does the human world connect itself with its alien counterpart for
the self study? Through a series of reconfigurations of the existential concerns of
human beings, as it will be demonstrated this paper, the literary endeavors of
Griffith offer important critical insights in a response to these questions to explore
what it really means to be human in techno-cultural contexts. In this regard, the
paper has identified patterns characterising the alien as a whole in Nicola
Griffith‘s Ammonite (1993), bracketing specific questions of historical and
cultural concerns for methodological reasons. The crucial focus in this paper has
been to analyse how social changes, historical compulsions, political propellants
are perceived and processed at the level of creatively imagining the alien and are
given a new narrative form and substance. The examination of features of the

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human-alien contacts —hypothetical, metaphorical, or imaginary—would help us
shed light on why the theme of alien is so helpful to the fictional enterprise.
Novum of the Alien World
The analytical framework in the present paper is informed by critical study
of textual aspects that define Nicola Griffith‘s Science Fiction: structures and/or
narrative devices and, themes and approaches. We have identified the textual
aspects such as estrangement, confrontation of systems or perspectives offered by
genre of Science Fiction that are otherwise restricted by a realist narrative. This
also involves implications of new set or norms that result in spatial, temporal and
the geographic displacement of identity formations that create, as Darko Suvin
puts it, novum. The Latin phrase for new, novum is a reflection of some difference
between the world of the fiction and what Suvin calls the empirical environment
or the real world outside. Suvin, while talking about the novum, clearly states the
nature of Science Fiction as:
I want to begin by postulating a spectrum spread of literary subject matter
which extends from the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author‘s
empirical environment to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a
novum.1
According to Suvin‘s argument, novum in Science Fiction is rational, as opposed
to the supernatural intrusions of marvellous tales, ghost stories, high fantasy and
other genres of the fantastic. In Science Fiction, the novum might be a material
object like a spaceship, a time machine or a matter-transportation beam; or it
might be something conceptual, such as a new form of gender, or a wholly new
way of organizing society. As claimed by Suvin, the worlds depicted in the
Science Fiction novum are not ‗that‘ different from the world we live in, Science

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Fiction is not so far from reality as it may seem. While portraying different worlds
from our own, the Science Fiction genre offers a new point of view in dealing
with real world. There are other forms such as myth and fantasy, these are also
alternate but what makes these forms different from Science Fiction is the idea of
cognition. In Suvin‘s postulation, we can see that a Science Fiction text may be
based on a novum, such the character coming from another world through the
Faster than Light travel. More usually it will be predicated on a number of
interrelated nova, such as the varieties of futuristic technology found aboard the
planet of Jeep in Ammonite, or strange aliens talking to human beings in the coded
language. Clearly, the novum does not have to be the super-natural or a piece of
technology so as to be a part of Science Fiction. It may be, as in Ammonite, the
novum could be a different model of gender, although there are other, more
technological nova in novel, including the virus. These nova are grounded in a
discourse of possibility, which is usually science or technology, and which
renders the difference in a material rather just a conceptual or imaginative one. A
novum functions as a kind of trigger: it alerts the reader to the fact that she cannot
take things for granted, cannot assume that the text she is reading reproduces the
world in which she lives. A novum puts us in the position of rewriting the reality
(with which we are familiar) and reconstructing a different reality. The more
expertly a novum is deployed, the more thorough the imaginative encounter with
the difference can be. We are going to look at one such novum: the alien. Nicola
Griffith‘s main interest lies in the fact that the novum of alien world engages the
reader in the experience of alienation and gives newness to the existing the body
and the space through fictional narrative. In her work, especially, Ammonite, the
novum of alien is an extra-terrestrial being living at the planet Jeep or a new
‗alien‘ setting or landscape from the ‗other‘ world of a planet like the earth. The
alien world also includes new idea of civilisation followed by different social
structures as part of the new setting. In short, the creation of an alien world in

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Ammonite involves attempt of making the reader feel that a concept, a sight, an
object depicted in Science Fiction are not of this Earth as we now know it.
Against this background, the literary research of the select Science Fiction
is based on the conviction that the notion of alien is sufficiently flexible to allow
for shaping the narrative world of Science Fiction. To this extent, we rely on the
genre‘s conceptual matrix of cognitive estrangement; the typology of the alien in
Science Fiction that we are proposing is an attempt to articulate associations
between Science Fiction and the alien. In this regard, the focus of the study is to
critically reflect on the significant role the alien plays in giving unfamiliar or an
estranged view of the familiar position within the Science Fiction narrative and
shape its narrative strategies. Also, our aim is to go beyond simple description in
order to explain the ways in which the alien-ation works and meaning(s) it creates
and, how the ‗alien‘ narrative empowers and nurtures newer understanding of
realities within the broader framework of human discourse. Moreover, it offers an
excellent vantage point from which the notion of genre itself can be questioned,
and from which the links between human selves and contemporary cultural
manifestations can also be explored. Therefore, the research has argued that it is
necessary to consider the alien as a ubiquitous figure present in different cultural
manifestations rather than as a figure shaped by a particular genre.
Familiar/Unfamiliar
While Science Fiction is a creation of novum, it experienced as unfamiliar,
different, in varying degrees, from the empirical reality that is familiar and shared
by the author and the reader of a novel. Therefore, the empirical reality provides a
plausible grounding for the novum through the commonplace knowledge of the
world, including science, history, stories and myth. Suvin explains the process as:

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SF is distinguishing by the narrative dominance of a fictional novelty (novum,
innovation) validated both by being continuous with a body of already existing
cognitions and by being a ‗mental experiment‘ based on cognitive logic.2
Hence, to understand the novum of alien, at this stage, it is imperative to know the
‗existing cognitions‘ that Griffith has represented her fictional work. Like several
other Science Fiction writings that came forth in the post 1960s, Nicola Griffith‘s
writing has depended on Science Fiction‘s improbable of ‗what if‘ to reflect on
the contemporary world and speculate the world she would dream within the
modes of thought and social organisations of the contemporary time. Science
Fiction, as a cultural form and a set of literary protocols, became the paradigmatic
model for creating fiction while exposing it the possibilities of how fiction can
change social perception and influence the interpretation of physical knowledge.
As she bears, ―A Science Fiction novel not only excites me about the world but it
also excites us about ourselves, how we fit within the systems that govern our
universe, and excites, paradoxically, about our potential to change the world.‖ 3
In
this sense, the key concern underlying in Griffith‘s work is to address what it
means to be human and she pursues the concerns through Science Fiction since it
has changed the discourse on what it means to be human.
Griffith realised that Science Fiction can offer a writer a particularly
useful narrative form to construct imaginative resistances to the limitations of
gender representation. In strategic way, ‗science‘ in Science Fiction took a back
seat and it became one of the devices for the Feminist Science Fiction writers to
speculate ‗their‘ world free from the patriarchal exploitation. This relates to the
ability of Science Fiction to estrange aspects of the ‗real‘ in ways which indicate
its contingent and arbitrary nature, and which, at the same time, can both
challenge and criticise the structures of the ‗real‘. For them, then, Science Fiction
provided with a space to construct female subjectivity and it allowed unlimited
freedom in settings and situations. An act of speculation has been seen as the most

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effective strategy of threading realities together. Accepting science and
technology, the established facts have considered as major resources of
extrapolation in creating a new situation, new framework for human action.
Speculative Science Fiction being the most closely tied together to the present
apparent reality also became an imaginative figuring of reality. Marleen Barr
looks at ‗Speculative Science Fiction‘ as, ‗political appropriation of genre
conventions‘ and it is not only ‗a potential, but a conscious practice‘.4
Barr has
used the image of two horses pulling together and observers that ―Feminist theory
and Speculative Science Fiction appear in the critical arena pulling together as a
team.‖5
Barr claims to have a link between feminist theory and Speculative
Science Fiction, so both works together against the limiting and restrictive social
roles of women within the patriarchal societies. In this background, we would like
to argue that Speculative Science Fiction offers a potential platform on which
issues related to such diverse fields as technology, science, social theory,
reproduction and ecology combine with feminist concerns to call into question the
social and ecological policies of patriarchy. Feminists have recognised the
political implications of the genre and increasingly employed Science Fiction
narratives to explore social relations. Griffith, therefore, considers Science Fiction
a primary tool that, in her opinion, ―introduces us to the notion that the nature of
body and mind are mutable through tall tales of human cloning, prosthetics,
genetic engineering. … The more we change our story of ourselves, the more we
change.‖ 6
Further, Griffith, in Pamela Sargent‘s words, explores ―what we might
become if and when the present restrictions in our lives vanish‖.7
Embracing Aliens
In the light of the analysis of ‗a degree zero world‘, we will turn to novum
of the alien in that is instrumental in creating unfamiliar world. At any rate, the
communicative and speculative zone between ‗a degree zero world‘ and ‗the

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novum of alien‘ would allow a writer to construct a possible world and then,
provide with a new, distanced perspective on the consensual world. Therefore, it
would be apposite to investigate process of creation of the alien world as observed
in Griffith‘s fictional work. She makes it clear in the preface to Yaguara that
Much of my work is about the interaction of people and their places.
People, fictional and not, are largely the products of their particular time
and culture. So what I tend to do is pluck an unfortunate character from
her familiar surrounds, drop her somewhere strange—to herself, and
sometimes to the reader—and watch with interest while she struggles to
deal with an alien milieu. The type and degree of alienness—time, space,
culture—don‘t matter as long as the details are made utterly real to the
character and, through her, the reader.8
Within the narrative world of Ammonite, the ‗degree zero world‘ refers to
Earth and its habitants and the world that is novum and therefore unfamiliar is at
the planet of Jeep. In this, ingredients that generate novum are alien beings at the
Jeep as well as setting or ethos at Jeep that is unfamiliar to consensual reality
referring to the ‗degree zero world‘. Ammonite is set at ‗Grenchstom‘s Planet‘
(GP-Jeep) and the planet is affected by a deadly virus. The novel has the main
character, Marguerite Angelica Taishan of SEC (Joint Settlement and Education
Council) whose identity is ‗an ID flash sealed to her shoulder: Marguerite
Angelica Taishan, SEC‘. She is assigned by Durallium Company‘s team (referred
to as ‗Company‘ in the novel) on Jeep to deal with virus. Sara Hiam, Marghe‘s
physician and the creator of the FN- 17 vaccine to stop spread of the virus would
help her in getting at Terragin, a transportation device to travel to Jeep. For the
‗Company‘, Jeep is a lucrative planet for its leasing operations and the Company
team consists of security personnel, known as ‗Mirrors‘, engineers, surveyors and
anthropological personnel. There has been no movement on or off the planet since
the discovery of the virus, or rather, since the virus discovered them and killed all

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the men and some of the women in the Company‘s team. The Company personnel
who have survived are now considered contaminated and exist in isolation on
their working base called ‗Port Central‘. Not only is the planetary team in
isolation from their own people (off planet), but by their own choice, they exist in
isolation from the native population as well. Marghe is the first person to proceed
to the planet since the virus was discovered and she has decided to go there as she
thought that the Jeep is the professional opportunity of a lifetime for her.
An important technique in exhibiting unfamiliarity in Science Fiction lies
in establishing different atmosphere(s) in the fictional worlds. Griffith uses setting
and places in Ammonite that are different from each other to create mood of
unfamiliarity. For instance, the narrator in Ammonite goes on describing two
worlds:
A wirrel shrieked. Marghe went very still. This was not Earth; this was
Jeep, a planet of alien spaces, a place where the human template of dual
sexes had been torn to shreds and throws away.9
The ‗atmosphere‘ at Earth and Jeep are comprised of different landscapes of two
distinct worlds and the fictional world they inhabit is invariably a game of shifting
between the two ‗atmospheres‘. Interestingly, the two worlds: ‗this world‘ and
‗that world‘ are referential to each other as, and they constitute, as Mari Kotani
puts it, ‗network spaces.‘10
Each one provides clues to enter into the alien-ness of
the other and demystify the world within that world making Ammmonite
remarkably complicated. The interface between the terran representatives of Earth
and the non-terran alien representatives from Jeep is dominant form in Ammonite.
Marghe in Ammonite visit new world, ‗alien‘ to them, and later, embrace it.
Invariably, she experience different world in the light of her experiential world of
Earth and this allows her to get alienated or estranged perspective.

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This was something new. She knew these people had evolved cultures
resting on bases very different from those of any Earth people; she did not
know whether that made these women human or something entirely
other….She shook herself. The question, What was humanity? Was as old
as the species, one she never expected to answer. She resumed her walk
through the trees, but more slowly, thinking and occasionally making
notes.11
Marghe spends time with habitants of Jeep, and then one day she becomes
one among them. Griffith‘s fiction undergoes what we have discussed in the first
chapter, ‗defamiliarisation‘ and ‗refamiliarisation‘, the making strange of the
familiar and remaking unfamiliar familiar. The defamiliarisation is an artistic
technique which removes an object from habitualisation and presenting it in an
estranged manner. Ammonite is set in the quasi-tribal context at Jeep. It is
systematically and rigorously made unfamiliar to human world of Marghe.
Prolonged exposure to such worlds bestows upon the reader an estranged
perspective. It not just a perspective with creation of physical space but with a
new set of eyes. Through creating the ‗alien‘ mode of being at the planet of Jeep,
the reader is distanced from everyday reality in order to heighten the awareness of
conventions and codes which are usually taken for granted. While ostensibly
located in the futuristic and techno-world, both the novels are inextricably bound
to present in its extrapolations and analogies. In other words, the narrative world
created at the imaginative territory of the novels draws on the reader‘s recognition
of the conditions of the world as they know it, transposed into a world which at
first seems radically discontinuous from it in both time and place. While offering
an interesting dynamic between terrestrials (from Earth) and extraterrestrials
(from Jeep) especially when an experience of being alien is reversed at Jeep, the
main character, Marghe becomes ‗alien‘ as she has to accommodate herself with
the world which is outside her domain. Therefore, Ammonite is not just a story of

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encounter between aliens and humans. All characters, humans and aliens are
subjects in their own ways who form relationships with other equal subjects and
this enables seeing a story of ‗becoming‘ different.
What is ‘really’ alien?
Ammonite is not the ‗alien novel‘ in strict sense of the term. Then, the
question we would like to raise is: What makes the novels ‗alien novels‘? We
have to look for the answer in Griffith‘s creative conjunction with feminist
ideology. Griffith‘s work is qualified as the ‗alien fiction‘ as it proposes the
world that is drastically different from what is considered in traditional ways.
Ammonite is Griffith‘s response to patriarchy and it addresses the feminist
concerns of the 1960s when the genre was shifting from an orientation of ‗male
values‘ addressing scientific changes to include explorations of social change.
Griffith appropriates the ‗female only world‘ theme to create imaginary world of
alternative social realities based on in her reaction to ‗insanity and greed and
indifference‘ as follows,
A women-only world, it seems to me, would shine with the
entire spectrum of human behavior [sic]: there would be
capitalists, and collectivists, hermits and clan members, sailors
and cooks, idealists and tyrants; they would be generous and
mean, smart and stupid, strong and weak; they would approach
life bravely, fearfully and thoughtlessly. Some might still
engage in fights, wars and territorial squabbles; individuals and
cultures would still display insanity and greed and indifference.
And they would change and grow, just like anyone else.
Because women are anyone else.12

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Science Fiction, for Griffith is a mode of exploring feminist arguments
and ideas and, imagining social realities that might be familiar for the feminist
understanding but is certainly ‗alien‘ within patriarchy. Not only is that it a
response to patriarchy but also a repudiation of the negative representations of
women that has existed within the patriarchy. With this newer understanding,
Ammonite has introduced role-reversal through construction of aliens to imagine
positive representations of women challenging existing social roles. The main
character of Marghe disputes the simplified understanding of gender roles that
are based on the existing system of dichotomous arrangement of gender roles of
male and female. Griffith contests the representational alignment of ‗man‘ with
mind and ‗woman‘ with the ‗body‘ that has existed in the conventional gender
construction. In fact, Griffith‘s contestation of the conventional understanding of
the human body descends from her personal experience of breaking ‗professional
biases‘ as she observes,
I have always enjoyed my body. I grew up using and pleasuring it hard. I
played tennis, did gymnastics, competed on the track. I worked as a
laborer with pick axe, shovel and wheelbarrow at an archaeological
dig…The fiction I wrote was physical: explosions, travel through space
and time, fantasy figures rescuing fairy tale characters, and so on.13
Against this background, Ammonite is a way of circumventing the dominant
systems of communication which constraints women‘s own speech. The ‗female
only world‘ at Jeep does not depend on what appears before them. But, the live
beings at Jeep persist in communicating with each other and their environment in
ways which a ‗normal‘ character with usual human types might not find
possibility of comprehension, and so they been interpreted as alien.
Thus, creation of the alien characters is Griffith‘s attempt towards
subverting the conventional notion of body that typically reduces differences to

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appearance. Conventionally, ‗appearance‘ is an important concept that privileges
the static appearance of human body. In this, as Iris Marion Young observes,
women are aware that their bodies are constructed as ‗objects‘ gazed upon by
men.14
Similarly, as Silvers has argued, ―embodiment represents the fact that in
patriarchal Western culture women‘s bodies have functioned as objects that are
possessed and controlled by men.‖15
In this way, the awareness gives self-
consciousness to women about their own bodies that are entirely based on
appearance. At the deeper level, this confirms the dichotomous views of
perception of male and female bodies in which the ‗masculine‘ and ‗feminine‘
attributes are socially fixed to their ‗appropriate‘ biological sex and that is
presented as an opposition to each other.16
The attributes are socially fixed to the
point that they appear to occur ‗naturally‘. Thus, ‗masculine‘ gender is the result
of male sex and ‗feminine‘ gender is the result of female sex. In contrast,
characters in Ammonite dispute the idea of appearance to establish the gender
roles.
Griffith views Science Fiction as a challenge to the gender dichotomies
and to the discourse on what it means to be human. Science Fiction ―introduced
us to the notion that the nature of body and mind are mutable through tall tales of
human cloning, prosthetics, genetic engineering.‖17
For instance, in her Science
Fiction novel, Slow River (1995), the protagonist, Lore is an amalgamation of
biological and technological material containing a human soul or ‗ghost‘. The
female cyborg, Lore, part technology and part biology stands at the center of a
creating ‗alien Other‘ while cutting through the existing notion of gender roles.
The ‗female‘ cyborg of Lore, like the alien, can be seen as either less than or more
than human, because it is not controlled by entirely human matter blurring
boundaries of being human and machine, of human and animal, and of the real
and the unreal. Similarly, Ammonite disrespects dichotomies that have mainly
formulated the traditional narratives. Griffith excludes the male sex from her

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novel to emphasise on tight assumptions about behaviour and the fixed gender
roles in the contemporary western society. Griffith, through Ammonite explores
what bodies can do when genitalia become irrelevant and this is the foundation
for Griffith in re-construction of aliens. Acting Commander Danner in Ammonite
is not ‗masculine‘ in her approach towards the issues of command nor is she
‗feminine‘ in her uncertainty about whether she does a good job. Aoife is not
‗masculine‘ when she beats Marghe into obedience, nor ‗feminine‘ when she
patiently teaches Marghe the ways of the tribe, the ways that will ensure her
survival. Nor is Leifin ‗masculine‘ because she feels no compassion for the
animals she hunts and has the capitalistic tendencies but ‗feminine‘ when she
rocks and feeds her children. Similarly, Marghe is not ‗masculine‘ when she
stands as strong as a ‗mirrored glass ball‘ in front of Danner at their first meeting,
nor is she ‗feminine‘ when she cries because her snow encrusted glove cracks
open her mouth and makes it bleed. Thus, these characters are human in their
differences and commonalities and display attributes – desires, emotions, skills
and so on – that are available to them all, within their unique capacity to do.
These attributes are not hierarchical oppositions but simultaneously physical,
mental and emotional responses specific to the context of the events they are
engaged in. In this regard, while commenting on Griffith‘s ‗female only world‘,
Gwyneth Jones says that the way Griffith is able ―to make the lack of men such a
non-issue is by populating the world (Jeep) with women who are humane in
entirety.‖18
Thus, the alien in Ammonite is neither a figure that leads an existence
separate from humankind but it is a critical reflection on the inner self of the
human and the collective anxieties of the contemporary woman and the society to
who the alien is addressed.
Notes:
1. 10. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven CT:
Yale University Press, 1979.
2. Suvin, 1978.

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3.. 56, Garbowicz, Margaret (ed.). Sci-fi in the mind’s Eye: Reading Science Fiction through Science Fiction, Open Court,
2007.
4. xii, Barr, Marleen. ―New Incarnations of Psyche: World-Changing Womanists‖, in Alien to Femininity: Speculative
Fiction and Feminist Theory, 61-82. Conneticut, USW: Greenwood Press, 1987.
5. Ibid., xxi.
6. Ibid., 78.
7 .x, Sargent, Pamela, ―Introduction: Women and Science Fiction.‖ In Women of Wonder (ed.) Pamela Sargent, New York:
Vintage Books, 1974.
8. ii, Griffith, Nicola, Writing Her Body: Short Fiction, Aqueduct Press, 2004.
9. 69, Ammonite.
10. 161, Kotani, Mari. ―Across the Multiverse: How Do Aliens Travel from ‗Divisional‘ space to ‗Network‘ space?‖ The
Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13, 2002.
11. 69, Ammonite
12. 376, Ammonite
13. Griffith, Nicola. Sci-fi in the Mind's Eye: Reading Science Through Science Fiction, (ed.) Margret Grebowicz, Open
Court, 2007 (http://nicolagriffith.com/sfidentity.html)
14. Young, Iris Marion, On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays, Oxford University Press,
2005.
15. Silvers, Anita. ‗Disability‘ In ACompanion to Feminist Philosophy, (eds) A M Jaggar & I M Young, 330-340. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000.
16. Cranny-Francis, A, W Waring, P Stravropoulos, and J Kirby. Gender Studies. Terms and Debates, Hampshire, UK:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
17. Griffith, Nicola. Writing from the Body, Dykes and Disability, Seal, 1999. (http://nicolagriffith.com/body.html)
18. http://bdg.feministsf.net/archives/bdg_ammonite.txt