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Naomi Alderman, The Power (Penguin, 2016, 352 pp, £8.99)
Winner of this year's Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction, The Power is a 'what if?' novel that explores the question that every woman will have asked herself (quietly) at some point in her life: what if, somehow, the social and physical balance of power could be reversed between women and men? The Power offers one possible sf iteration of this by allowing women to access electrical power from their bodies, and zap whoever they want in a multiplicity of fine-tuned ways. Such a power needs training, because it's not a skill that turns on and off like a tap, and it's exhausting. Alderman neatly explains the Power as a latent chromosomal advantage that has been enhanced accidentally, and globally, by chemical means in the recent past, and she embraces the possibilities of chromosome irregularities, blurring the male-female power binary among her characters as it is blurred by genetic chance. This is not an Amazonian plot where all the women can zap all the men, because the labels of 'women' and 'men' don't map onto all the chromosomal arrangements. The Power is also not just about physical domination, though the ramifications of this are explored magnificently in political, economic and theological directions.
The Power is a rolling narrative told through the stories of four people, three women and a man. These stories wind themselves in and out of each other's narrative paths, and give the reader four stratified accounts of the world as it changes after the emergence of the Power. Wrapped around this plot is an apparently self-indulgent frame narrative, in which the anxious and ingratiating Neil tries to persuade Naomi, a much more successful and influential author, to read and comment on his novelised history of the Cataclysm of some 5000 years earlier, during which period...