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Naomi Alderman's The Power, first sci fi novel to win Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction


SpaceChampion

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This novel sounds hilarious.  And it's just won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Quote

It starts with teenage girls. At 14 or 15, the age when in our present world girls are waking to an awareness of their own sexuality tangled up in all the ways society will seek to stifle or exploit it, Alderman has them come alive to the thrill of pure power: the ability to hurt or even kill by releasing electrical jolts from their fingertips. “Something’s happening. The blood is pounding in her ears. A prickling feeling is spreading along her back, over her shoulders, along her collarbone. It’s saying: you can do it. It’s saying: you’re strong.”

Footage of girls electrocuting men floods the internet; uncontrolled individual outbursts swell into the knowledge of collective power as more girls learn how to harness this strange new ability, and show older women how to awaken it too. Men start to give teenage girls a wide berth on the street; boys are segregated into single-sex schools for their own safety. The phenomenon is blamed on nerve gas, witchcraft, an anti-male conspiracy, a mystery virus; it’s assumed that an antidote will be found and the “normal” balance of power restored.

But every individual exercise of power contributes to power relations as a whole, and change is unstoppable. The victims of sex traffickers turn on their assailants. There are revolutions in Riyadh and Delhi. Oppressed women assume that divine intervention has saved them from the hell-on-earth of their previous existence, and a new religious leader is ready and waiting to feminise faith: “Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses ... Muslims: look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.” Armies become female, to harness and exploit girls’ natural aggression; sexual violence flows in the other direction now. Drugs are developed to heighten the power, and porn created to fetishise it.

 

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It's a strange premise (though one in a long line of suddenly appearing gender-based differences). I don't understand why the author believes this would cause the kind of changes mentioned in the article though. A small number of people (e.g. the traffickers mentioned in the quote) would get what is coming to them, but, for the most part, nearly all societies have abandoned (and, in most situations, forbidden) personal violence as a means of conflict resolution. The largest and strongest do not get to physically injure the smallest and weakest without severe repercussions. Why would giving half the population a kind of built-in taser change that? Or, if it does change for some reason, what would prevent the violence from flowing outside the boundaries of what one can do with the body alone?

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