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 ...
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