What would the world look like if men were afraid of women rather than women being afraid of men? Science fiction has long questioned the conventional exercise of power between the sexes, from the utopian dreams of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, through the wild speculations of Joanna Russ and subtle inner journeys of Ursula Le Guin, on to Margaret Atwood’s dystopias and out to the seamier shores of pulp. Through exaggeration and reversal, many books have set out to illuminate inequality or open up new vistas of possibility. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen the status quo inverted to such devastating effect as in Naomi Alderman’s fourth novel.
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.”
Related: Naomi Alderman: ‘I went into the novel religious and by the end I wasn’t. I wrote myself out of it’
The novel is constructed as a big, brash, page-turning, drug-running, globetrotting thriller
Continue reading...via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2e10ANO
0 comments:
Post a Comment