The Power

Bah. Putting this onto the bookshelf for recent mainstream sci-fi books that are topical and ham-fisted and irritate me. i.e. American War, Underground Airlines, to some extent Exit West. Oof.

This one bothered me as much as the others - maybe even more so. It takes the raw anger and challenging discussion from our current renegotiation of gender norms (to quote Howard Dean from this) - that is, #MeToo - and reduces it to a gimmicky, reductive fantasy. The gimmick is that, one morning, women wake up with Sith lightning at their fingertips, and men must fear walking alone at night, etc. This necessarily (!?) leads to a civil war in Moldova, the founding of a new woman-centric version of Christianity, and a sudden and un-subtle reversal of many gender stereotypes: the “bimbo” news host (now a man), the corrupt and lecherous politician (now a woman), the organized crime boss (now a woman) defending the honor of her maligned/assaulted family member (now a man). Yep, the patriarchy gets supplanted by an equally oppressive matriarchy in about 5 years.

The thing that bothered me so much about this was how unbelievable the mutation's fall-out was, how caricatured the characters and their problems felt, and how heavy-handed the message was (power corrupts!). Throughout my reading, I compared it unfavorably to Y: The Last Man, which ALSO explores gender norms via a fantastical mutation (in that case, all Y-chromosome-havers except one suddenly die one day), but does so with a much defter hand. Where Y: The Last Man felt clever and enlightening, this felt ham-fisted and even patronizing. Remember when 1970s feminism was happening, and there were lots of “battles of the sexes”, like that tennis one, etc. Yeah, this book is a literal battle of the sexes. I kept googling “Manichean worldview” to try to articulate why I found this so reductive.

Also, wtffff the “barbaric Moldovan hill people” stuff?!? As a fellow East European hill person, I was like, OH COME ON.

The author, Alderman, name-drops a few titans of gender-aware spec fic in the afterword's first para: Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin (RIP), and Karen Joy Fowler. And how they personally/in personal exchanges helped make the book better etc etc. As a hill person, I must protest again, COME OONNNNNN.