If the best speculative fiction offers up new ways to see our culture, then Naomi Alderman's The Power (winner of the U.K.'s Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction) is destined to be a classic. Imagine a world where women are physically more powerful than men. Then just when you are comfortable with that—or maybe think, hey, it's about time—imagine everything that could go wrong.

The Power tells the disconcerting story of what occurs after a genetic mutation gives teenage girls the power of electricity. At first, they just shock each other for fun, but they quickly learn to harness it, first to protect themselves, then to maim or even kill. The power is transmitted to older women, and eventually, all baby girls are born with a so-called skein of electricity that runs beneath their collarbones like an extra muscle.

Alderman explores the power's trajectory through the lives of three women: Roxy, the daughter of a British mobster; Margot, an American mayor with political aspirations; and finally Mother Eve. Raised in a series of foster homes, Eve, born Alison, uses the power to free herself from an abusive stepfather and reinvents herself as the charismatic matriarch of a female-centric religion. A young Nigerian photojournalist, Tunde, follows the power from country to country, risking his life and offering the important perspective of an outsider.

Speculative fiction has long been a genre where gender roles can be explored—think of The Handmaid's Tale or even back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. But Alderman goes beyond her predecessors with a narrative that wonders how long before absolute power corrupts absolutely. Alderman is both a novelist and a co-creator of a smartphone audio adventure app called Zombies, Run!, and it may be this expertise in the world of gaming that brings such a fearlessly creative approach to her storytelling. Both a page-turning thriller and timely exploration of gender roles, censorship and repressive political regimes, The Power is a must-read for today's times.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Naomi Alderman for The Power.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

TOP PICK
Set in the not-too-distant future, The Power is a chilling sci-fi novel expertly executed by award-winning British author Naomi Alderman. In Alderman's alternate world, women have recently gained the ability to release waves of electricity through their fingertips—and the jolts can kill. Their lethal facility grants them physical supremacy over men, altering the fabric of society. The novel focuses on a few central characters, including Margot, a politician who learns through her young daughter that she, too, has the power; Allie, an orphan who falls in with a circle of nuns and begins touting a new religion; and Tunde, a would-be journalist whose video of a woman unleashing electricity goes viral. Alderman's convincing and disturbing vision of the future has been compared to The Handmaid's Tale. Selected as a best book of 2017 by NPR and the New York Times, this hypnotic novel offers futuristic thrills even as it explores important questions of gender and identity.

 

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This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Alderman's science fiction novel, set all over the world, was awarded the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Sometime in the near future, young women discover they have within them the ability to unleash skeins of electrical current that can maim and kill. One of them, an abused American foster child, joins a group of nuns, reinventing herself as the healer Mother Eve. She promotes a new religion in which Jews look to Miriam, Muslims to Fatimah, Christians to Mary. Her ally is an English crime lord's daughter named Roxy, whose skein is warrior strong, and whose violent family has global connections. Meanwhile Tunde, an opportunistic photojournalist, manages to break the news of several women's revolts across the world. The first upheavals are in Saudi Arabia and Moldova, places where women have few rights. But the woman who rules Bessapara, the first nation of the new world order, is unscrupulous and afraid, and she creates further instability by stripping men in her country of all rights and implicitly threatening world war. Roxy runs into trouble trying to keep a lid on this international situation, while Mother Eve convinces herself it might be for the best to start the world anew. Margot, an American politician taught to tap into her skein by her daughter, rises to power in the States, her message becoming more hawkish as she gains influence. But she is corrupted by her addiction to power over her male rivals, and she, too, plays a part in the endgame. Alderman tests her female characters by giving them power, and they all abuse it. Readers should not expect easy answers in this dystopian novel, but Alderman succeeds in crafting a stirring and mind-bending vision. (Oct.)