Ask Nicola Archives
Ammonite
March 18, 1999
I am writing a book on emergent mythologies and rhetoric of the virus. I read with great interest your book Ammonite. I would really like to enter into a correspondence with you about how you decided to link the viral theme into your work. However, if you are very busy, an short email would be great too. I am particularly interested in the relationship between death and reproduction in your use of the viral, as well as the vision of the ammonite. Thank you.
Some of the information you need can be found in my essay, "Writing from the Body," in which I discuss the genesis of the virus idea in Ammonite. One thing I don't talk about in that essay, however, is how I've always been fascinated by viruses. These tiny packets of RNA are brilliantly designed, more efficient in their way than a shark or a crocodile, animals so superbly adapted that they haven't changed significantly in millions of years. For something so small, they have a huge impact on our lives: where would we be, for example, with mitochondria, the cellular powerhouses many believe to have originated as invading viruses? And think of the power of Ebola or any of those other crash-and-bleed-out varieties: something so small you can't see it without massive magnification can change a living, breathing human into a sack of blood and dissolved tissue in twenty-four hours. Amazing.
As for death and reproduction, the two are utterly entwined in my mind: biologically speaking, the price of sex is death. Those species that simply divide to reproduce are, in a sense, immortal. Species that reproduce sexually die. In addition, for some reason (probably something dark and psychological <g>) I've always pictured viruses as looking rather like the chromatids which result from chromosome duplication during mitosis and meiosis. They're just connected in my head. It seemed a simple step to imagine a virus that might act on the reproduction phase as powerfully as the maybe-once-viral precursor of mitochondria did and still do in the production of cellular energy.
The vision of the ammonite comes from somewhere else; I'm not sure where but, again, I suspect it has some visual link to chromosomes and viruses--their snakelike appearance.
If you have more specific questions, please feel free to contact me via Dave Slusher. Send him your name and email address (it seems you chose the anonymity option on the Ask Nicola form so I can't contact you directly) and he'll forward it to me, and I'll get in touch.
I don't think you should call your books science fiction. Ammonite was all magic and New Age crystal stuff.
Well, it's not exactly a question but I'll answer it anyway because you're not the only one to accuse me of being an anti-science New Age channeler (or whatever). Before I do, however, let me make it clear that I have absolutely nothing against those who believe in crystals and so on; it's just that I don't.
Ammonite and the things that happen in it are based as closely as I can get on what is Known to Be Known. I think the thing that most people have a really hard time with in the book is the modified parthenogenesis; the idea of soestre. (Which, for the that person who wants to know how to pronounce things, I pronounce SEE-stray; I made the word up from "sister" and "oestrus.") But what *would* happen if alien DNA invaded our chromosomes? How many different ways would that change us? What would we be able to do if we could directly perceive and occasionally influence the electromagnetic field of ourselves and/or others? Just look at the profound change something like mitochondria have made to our development, then tell me that what I'm proposing is magic. Yes, of course there's a certain amount of hand-waving: if all this stuff actually was possible, then it would be being done, and it wouldn't be SF. The same could be said of faster-than-light drive.
And if you want to read something of mine (if you weren't utterly disillusioned by Ammonite) that you'd consider "real" SF, try Slow River--unless of course you think chemistry isn't real science, which many people *do* think, especially when it's written about by a woman....
