Ammonite

I picked up Ammonite directly after completing Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. I stated in my review that I like Le Guin's Hainish novels better than I like A Wizard. Therefore, I guess my mind was on Le Guin's Hainish novels as I read Ammonite. It does seem very much like a novel that Le Guin could have written—there's a alien community based upon Earth models (herding mongol-like cultures, farming communities, etc); there's the outsider anthropologist who comes in to study the cultures; there's capture, escape, treks through desolate stretches of land; I could go on for a while equating plot points to Hainish novels, but I won't. What I will say is that while Ammonite has the earmarks of Le Guin's social science fiction, it lacks Le Guin's evocative writing. I'm not saying that the book is badly written. It is not. The writing is serviceable. It communicates the plot and limns the characters. Yet, at no point, did I want to go back and re-read a sentence (as I often to with Le Guin); at no point, did I think "'she really enjoyed writing that section" (as I recently thought as I came to the end of one of Neal Stephenson's masterful info dumps in Cryptonomicon).

I enjoyed the book. It is good social science fiction, which is one of my favorite types. It has strong concepts, good characters and an emotional plot. However, it did not trill me as I hoped that it would.