No one missed the arrival of that masterpiece "Power" by an author as surprising as Naomi Alderman. nor to his great supporter Margaret Atwood nor to the Amazon Prime series platform. In both cases with great success and repercussion.
The thing is that already in 2006, long before "Power", Alderman was already pointing out ways in his mission to tell the world from a point of view that was at least disruptive in substance and form. Committed arguments and first-person presentations to gain more power in the story and the experiences of his characters.
Disobedience already came loaded with a lot of ammunition to make his literary career worth considering. But chance is like that and only a decade later, in 2017, a remarkable official recognition via an award as remarkable as the Women's Prize for Fiction, precipitated that due recognition.
Surely the works that arrived in the interim from the beginning to stardom will be translated into more and more languages. At the moment we can enjoy what has already been done internationally in its juicy bibliography…
Naomi Alderman's Top Recommended Novels
the power
A feminist slogan like: women to power, takes absolute force in this novel The Power. But it is not a social claim, or a wake-up call to achieve equality. In this case, power happens to be an evolutionary improvement of women, a kind of turn of destiny whose future, suddenly, happens to be determined by a new power in the hands of women. This is the idea that develops Naomi Alderman.
Science fiction always has a transcendental point. Under fanciful premises, behind the imagination towards ingenious scientific, technological or biological assumptions there is always an underlying question, a concern, a surprising existential approach.
Reading this novel offers us a future panorama, where different women from very distant places suffer from well-known situations already in the present. Abuse, mistreatment or even murder.
But something happens at a given moment, a click in the reading that transforms that scenario into something quite different. In its wisdom, in its quest to survive, a species can develop a new genetic virtue. Some women, four specifically, begin to discover a power for their defense. A world without women would be doomed to extinction. In the face of threat, evolution endows women with this power.
Women capable of discharging electricity, like some marine species. A kind of defense system suddenly granted to preserve the lives of women, without whose gestation capacity the world would be doomed to extinction. The dilemma will be to know if this power will be used to achieve that desired equality or if, on the contrary, it will be used as a millennial revenge.
In short, this is how this novel is announced, a singular feminist science fiction work, a utopia or dystopia, depending on whether the ending leads us to a better society or, on the contrary, it transforms the world into absolute chaos. And so far I can say ...
The future
Dystopias always point to self-fulfilling prophecies against the idea that human beings are incapable of utopia. The recognition of guilt and sin towards that unpromising future goes a long way in writers of all conditions. In the case of Alderman, it is a buried claim, a remote hope among the ashes of the end of the world. It's just that an awakening of the general conscience is necessary to avoid disaster... and that's always difficult.
The future, as the richest people on the planet have discovered, is where the money is. The future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with luxurious secret bunkers.
The future is private weather, technological prophecy, and highly deniable weapons. The future is a handful of friends - the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, a visionary ousted from Silicon Valley, the worried wife of a dangerous CEO and an internet famous survivor - hatching a daring plan. It could be the biggest heist in history. Or the catastrophic end of civilization.
The future is what you see if you don't look back. The future is the only reason to do anything, the only object of desire. The future is here.
