The wonderful aspect about science fiction books is that they toy with our perception of reality and fiction. The lines between both confuse lazily and realistically when we immerse ourselves in great works of science fiction and fantasy. One such book, a frightening and yet intriguing literary work, is the Power by Naomi Alderman. Hailing praise from the mistress of science fiction herself, Margaret Atwood, Alderman’s book presents us with a simple concept: what if women woke up one day with the natural capacity of electrocuting, much like electric eels? Alderman’s novel tells a story within a story: a male author submits his manuscript to a female author almost 5,000 years after the ‘power’ emerges and turns the world into a matriarchy. In his manuscript, he imagines, through the story of five main characters, the chaos and the tumultuous social and political changes which occur once women develop the power to emit electricity from their hand through the activation of a main, fictional muscle. Alderman describes “Margot reads a report from a team in Delhi who are the first to discover the strip of striated muscle across girl’s collarbones which…
What If Egyptian Women Had the Supernatural Power of Emitting Electricity?
October 21, 2019
