Published in 2016, Naomi Alderman‘s The Power attempts to answer a fundamental what-if: what if something happened to give women a physical advantage over men?
In this case, it’s a chemical added to the water supply in WWII that, over a generation or so, creates power in women similar to that in electric eels: the ability to generate an electric charge at will.
There is a framing device of a future several thousand years down the road, where an inverted society has evolved–one where women’s role in the birth process is a rationale for the increased violence and aggression of women over men, while men’s comparative weakness (turns out shooting lightning from your hands trumps brawn every time) makes them natural nurturers.
But the core of the novel covers the time from the first emergence of the ability through its impacts, focused on three primary characters: a young girl who emerges as the prophet of the movement, another whose abilities are stronger than anyone else’s, and a male journalist who covers the global events spawned by these abilities.
These characters–and others–are well constructed, and their fates matter, making the book successful as a page-turner. There are some issues with simplicity–for example, a women’s revolution in an Arab state is conceivable, but certainly neither simple nor inevitable, given the book’s assumptions–and the envisioned future could be more nuanced.
Perhaps the most creative details involve how the archaeology of the future misinterprets the relics of the past: the novel does a great job at underscoring how arbitrary our assumptions around sex and gender are and how easy a different frame leads to a different interpretation.
It’s all very neatly done, and given the attention the book got, probably in pre-production as a major motion picture as well.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Alderman does a really good job simplifying a narrative that is explicitly global to a story told through the eyes of small handful of characters. That’s necessary if you don’t want to write many thousand pages, labyrinthine fiction and, even if–as I do–you lean that way, remembering that there are more direct, concise alternatives is quite important.