You also meet Allie, a young girl who uses her power to escape an abusive foster home and eventually establishes a new type of religion, and Roxy, the daughter of a London crime boss, who’s already tough even before she develops her power.Įarly on, you see these and other women dealing with men’s growing fear of their new abilities. For example, Margot is a budding politician with a teenage daughter, Jocelyn, who initially tries to hide her abilities so she doesn’t endanger her mom’s career. The novel switches back and forth between several characters, all but one of them female. (The word “power” in the title has multiple meanings.) In doing so, she reveals a lot about how power and gender work today.

What would the world be like, Alderman asks, if all the women on Earth suddenly developed the ability to discharge massive electric shocks from their bodies? She takes this single idea and explores how it changes the dynamic between men and women, and among women. Elsewhere on Gates Notes I’ve written about The Ministry for the Future, which is all about the effects of climate change and efforts to limit the damage.Īnd at the suggestion of my daughter Jenn, I recently read The Power, by Naomi Alderman, which finds a clever way to look at gender roles. Today, of course, sci-fi writers are taking on a wider range of subjects. Or if it did, I didn’t pick up on the message. Climate change wasn’t something people worried about then, and I can’t think of any science fiction I read or was aware of as a kid that looked at the role of gender in society.

and the Soviet Union, so it makes sense that authors were dealing with those subjects. That was the early days of the robotics industry and the time of the space race between the U.S. Growing up in the sixties, I read a ton of sci-fi, and most of the novels involved either robots or space travel and life on other planets. One thing I love about science fiction is the way it can reflect what is on people’s minds.

The power by naomi alderman 2016