The Power is a 2016 science fiction novel by Naomi Alderman, based around the premise of women having the ability to use electricity from their hands. As a result, the world is quickly upended as our four protagonists watch society change.
A Prime Video series adaptation starring Toni Collette, Auli'i Cravalho and John Leguizamo premiered on March 31st 2023.
Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: Allie's foster parents are both abusive. Her foster father beats and rapes her as "punishment", while his wife knows of this but does nothing, as she approves (she'd also psychologically abused Allie by threatening her with Hell for supposed misdeeds). Later it turns out that her foster mother was the instigator of him raping Allie as "punishment for her sins", making it even worse. Allie's horrified to learn later that she's now running a children's home, where it's strongly implied more abuse is ongoing.
- After the End: The Framing Device is set in a future matriarchal society that's millenia after our civilization was destroyed by nuclear warfare.
- All of the Other Reindeer: Jos is slowly ostracized by society for her dislike of the power. Her short-lived boyfriend counts as well, rejected for being a man with a skein.
- Ambiguously Brown: Allie is described as mixed race and has dark skin, but her background is not specified.
- Apocalypse How: The main focus of the story is how women becoming the more physically intimidating sex upends the world's social order. The framing device makes it clear that a Class 2 is on the way, eventually revealed to have caused humanity to regress to the Stone Age. The actual mechanics of said apocalypse is hinted at early, then described explicitly at the conclusion.
- Artistic License – Biology: Bioelectric discharge is a real ability found in nature (the electric eel being the most famous example), but in real creatures, the organs required take up large parts of the internal anatomy (rendering transplantation to an organism which doesn't possess them impossible) and have inbuilt limits on the frequency and distance with which they can be used (the most powerful electric eels can stun horses, but only once every few hours, and only via direct contact). An analogous human ability subject to the same limits would certainly provide an advantage, but not enough to enable its possessors to completely overthrow all existing social structures.
- Asshole Victim:
- Saudi Arabia and Moldova are the first countries to fall after the Power is awakened, Saudi Arabia being the world's most repressive regime toward women, and Moldova being the world capital of sex trafficking.
- Darrell Monke has a very ugly death that he very much deserved.
- Allie electrocutes her foster father while he's raping her.
- Asskicking Leads to Leadership: Portrayed as the root of misogyny and human gender roles. For most of human history, this trope combined with men being physically larger than women meant that most societies defaulted to patriarchy. The emergence of the Power means that, in places where violence was still a daily fact of life, the tables rapidly turn. It's why the destruction of civilization at the end of the book causes most of the world to become a matriarchy.
- Attempted Rape: Tunde is nearly raped by a woman in Delhi, but luckily three other women arrive and stop her.
- Author Avatar: Neil, the book's In-Universe author from the Framing Device, lays out Alderman's message in his discourse with his editor, a woman who engages in "playful" sexual chatter with him and dismisses his arguments with fairly sexist logic dressed up in the language of science. (Incidentally, this chauvinistic woman is herself named Naomi.)
- Beware the Superman: The development of electricity powers in (cis) women and girls (plus a few intersex males) destroys civilization, with first many setting up oppressive matriarchies then human society being blasted into the Stone Age again when men fight back.
- Bodyguard Babes: A gender-flipped version with Tatiana, who is noted as being accompanied by two very buff men in very tight shirts who fulfill a very similar role.
- Breeding Slave: The few (10%) of men left in Bessapara are used as "studs" to impregnate the ruling women, with no other purpose.
- Burn the Witch!: Early on, some people burn girls with the Power as witches. Sister Veronica at the convent also proposes doing so, but she's killed before anything can happen.
- The Caligula: What Tatiana Moskalev becomes as her reign over Bessapara grows ever more extreme. Her mental stability disentegrates as she starts to lose power.
- Charm Person: Some of the people who have the Power learn how it can be used for affecting others' brains and thus doing what the user wants.
- Chekhov's Skill: Darrell is paralyzed by a well-placed zap in a fight with the women who inflicted a Crippling Castration on his older brother. That's how he knows how to do it to Jos once he's stolen Roxy's skein.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Many of these attempt to explain what happened when the Power emerges, among them UrbanDox, an online blogger. He blames this all on a secret cabal within the government planning to kill off most men, roping in the Zionists too.
- Crippling Castration: This is done to Roxy's brother, to the extent that he remains permanently in a state of shock and in no position to inherit the crime family.
- Cycle of Revenge: Defied by Roxy. She lets her father Bernie live, despite having just found out that he had her mother killed, because she doesn't want to start one of these that would inevitably come back around to her. Instead, she forces him to give up his control over the crime family and sends him off to retire in a nice, warm-weather place. Too bad he doesn't return the favor.
- Cursed with Awesome: For the women who prefer not to have the Power.
- Daddy's Girl: Played straight with Roxy and Bernie, until she learns that he had her mother killed.
- Dirty Old Woman: Margot, as she gradually gains power, starts objectifying the men around her.
- Distant Finale: The framing device shows that Mother Eve's plan worked.
- Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Averted. Hard. Female-on-male rape is horrifying, graphic, and absolutely not sexy. The author mentioned in an interview that she made the scenes as horrific as possible, to hammer in the point that rape is about power and humiliation, not sex.
- Electric Torture: As a mafia boss' daughter, Roxy uses this method.
- The Extremist Was Right: The framing device shows that, at the cost of a five-thousand-year Dark Age, Mother Eve's plan to remake society succeeded, despite Roxy insisting the cost was too high. However, it just created the same society in the end, with all of the violence and violation and discrimination throughout the ages, but with men as the victims this time around.
- Eye Scream: Several women are blinded in an attempt to control them.
- Fantastic Drug:
- Roxy makes her fortune on "Glitter," a drug that boosts Power reserves of the women who take it.
- A less flashy example is the medicine Darrell takes to force his body to grow the nerves required to use Roxy's skein after it's been transplanted.
- Fatal Flaw: Roxy is far too trusting of her male family members, despite more than one betrayal. See Karma Houdini for the most glaring example.
- Faux Shadow: The many artifacts scattered about the book allude to events thousands of years ago, supporting the theory that women once had skeins but lost them due to evolution. It's the book itself that's thousands of years into the future, with the artifacts being closer to the present day, after the collapse of civilization back into the Stone Age.
- Female Gaze: Deliberately compared and contrasted with the Male Gaze. Many of Tunde's scenes involve a woman looking at him in a way that uses an implicit balance of power that would usually signify the Male Gaze. All of this comes around to show the book's overall theme of gender stereotypes having a lot more to do with power imbalance than biology or social roles.
- Feminist Fantasy: A rather harrowing Genre Deconstruction, one that takes the idea of "what if women were on top and treated men the way they do women?" and runs with it all the way to "The Handmaid's Tale in reverse", the message being that the problems with the patriarchy stem from the existence of gender roles in general and that merely inverting them would accomplish little beyond inverting the persecution rather than getting rid of it.
- Fetish:
- It's acknowledged that certain chromosomal abnormalities can result in a person who is biologically male but possesses a skein. In-universe, Jos dating one such person is perceived as a fetish. Allegorically, it seems similar to real-world fetishes for dominant and physically imposing women.
- Additionally, it comes up repeatedly that a large number of men enjoy some playful zapping during foreplay and sex.
- In the distant future, male soldiers are seen as such, to the point where the editor thinks the readers might find the idea of armies of men pornographic rather than threatening.
- Foregone Conclusion: The framing device is from a far future where women have become the socially dominant sex, with men being repressed. There are interludes with excerpts from an audio guide from a "Museum of Pre-Cataclysmic Artifacts." Each chapter begins with a countdown. You can see where this is going.
- For Want Of A Nail: A chemical weapons defense agent from World War Two was carried around the world by the jetstream and made its way into the water table. Since no chemical weapons were employed during the War, it was forgotten about...until it turned out that 80 odd years later, it had caused a mutation in human females that would ultimately set the destruction of human civilization into motion. Oh, and said mutation had become quietly latent in almost every woman living.
- Framing Device: The story is bookended by a (male) novelist in the far future explaining the events of the novel as his recontextualization of the known past as a piece of historical fiction. We get to hear his (female) editor's thoughts at the end of the novel.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: All three female protagonists, plus Tatiana Moskolev. Roxy goes from a gangster's bastard daughter to one of the most powerful people in Europe. Margot goes from a big-city mayor to one of the most influential members of Congress. Mother Eve goes from an unwanted runaway to the world's most prominent religious figure. Tatiana goes from being a trophy wife to the supreme leader of a nation with a cache of WMDs. And each of them has a role to play in ending the world.
- Future Imperfect: Five thousand years after the Cataclysm which ended civilization (one just like ours, aside from the Power existing), the majority are skeptical that patriarchies ever existed, ignoring and reinterpreting archeological or other evidence which shows it did. They also don't know the meaning of the "bitten fruit" symbol (Apple's logo) that is found on some ancient artifacts, used as a base (old iPods repurposed).
- Gendercide: Men's Rights Activists start predicting this almost immediately after the Power emerges. About a decade later, Bessapara puts it into practice, killing 90% of their male population and only keeping the remaining 10% to stud.
- Gender-Restricted Ability: The electricity-generating skein organ is apparently linked to having double X chromosomes, as only cisgender females plus a few intersex males get it.
- Groin Attack: After humanity was bombed back to the Stone Age, a form of genital mutilation was invented that made it impossible for a man to get an erection without skein stimulation, and make ejaculation painful, with clear allusions to real-life female genital mutilation. There are cave paintings of this practice, and it's still practiced in several European countries in the modern day of the novel.
- Hand Wave: The World War II-era anti-chemical-weapon agent Guardian Angel is blamed for the development of the Power. Exactly how the chemical could so drastically alter the biology of cisgender female humans—and some intersex males—is neither explained nor particularly relevant to the plot. However, it is theorized this might have just activated dormant genes.
- Handicapped Badass: Roxy while she and Tunde are on the run in Bessapara, after her brother stole her skein.
- Healing Hands: Allie learns to heal many ailments using the Power, and uses physical contact to do this.
- Hearing Voices: Allie hears a voice that counsels and guides her, which calls her "daughter". She calls this "mother" in turn.
- Heel–Face Door-Slam: At the last minute when she realizes that her foster mother was just as responsible for her abuse as her foster father, Allie considers not listening to the voice and not upending civilization. Ultimately, though, she goes through with it.
- He-Man Woman Hater: Deconstructed rather aggressively. The book portrays ideas about male and female strength, fragility, and suitability flip-flopping within just a few years. The Distant Finale shows that many of this trope's trappings have become flipped entirely in the intervening Dark Age.
- High Priest: Allie founds a new religion whom she's the head of, based on Goddess worship.
- Holier Than Thou: Allie's foster parents make a big deal about them being good, upstanding Christians, her mother even congratulating herself over their charitable act of taking her in. Yet although they both believe they're better than other people, they're also horribly abusive to Allie, and use their religious beliefs to justify this for themselves.
- Human Sacrifice: Tunde witnesses a group of women ritualistically kill a man in the forest in a cult-like manner.
- Just Before the End: The framing device and chapter openers make it clear that the modern world and the Power are not destined to coexist.
- Karma Houdini: Bernie fucking Monke. He kills Roxy's mother, undermines her rule, and has killed countless others....and at the end, Roxy still lets him off.
- Kosher Nostra: The Monkes are a Jewish crime family in the UK. Roxy, the daughter of the gang's leader Bernie, uses her connections to them to help fund Mother Eve, which naturally leads to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories claiming that the Jews are using Mother Eve to destroy Christianity.
- Lady Land: Tatiana turn Bessapara (the former Moldova) into a brutal matriarchy, killing 90% of men with the rest used as breeding slaves.
- Mafia Princess: Roxy, whose father is the boss of a Jewish crime family in the UK. She lives a comfortable life due to her dad's business and is fully aware of it, seizing control from him later.
- Make It Look Like an Accident:
- Roxy and Darrell lampshade this before they kill Newland. They make it look accidental as a "favor" so his family could get life insurance.
- The Power can also be used to do this in general, as a jolt of electricity to the heart will kill many people, with it indistinguishable from a normal cardiac arrest.
- Matriarchy: The inevitable result of the power balance shifting. Bessapara is a straight up No Man's Land, and other governments are starting to shift towards women in military and power positions. Five thousand years in the future, it seems to be close to a gender-flipped version of modern-day patriarchy with a few exceptions, like the fact that male soldiers are almost unheard of.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: No explanation is given for Allie’s voices, and it's up to interpretation whether it's a manifestation of some mental illness or a really supernatural occurrence.
- Mother Goddess: Allie reinterprets Christian beliefs with Mary being God in Human Form (technically she says the divine is neither female nor male, but appearing as the former now to balance things out, but it works out this way). She encourages other religions to follow her example, seeking out female counterparts to male prophets.
- Mr. Fanservice: Tunde, a handsome young man, gets increasingly sexualized and aggressively hit on by women as the gender norms shift to the point that his obituary mentions it.
- The One Guy: Tunde is the only male POV and main character, the other 4 main characters are all women.
- Parody: The Framing Device explicitly parodies debates about gender roles being innate or learned, along with alleged ancient matriarchal societies, but all the roles have been reversed, so this is now about if men are innately less violent, inherently nurturing etc. or a patriarchy ever existed, as it takes place in a future matriarchy.
- Persecution Flip: Women find themselves the more physically dangerous sex and slowly but surely oppress men, in minor and major ways. And with the world bombing itself back into the Stone Age and forcing humanity to start over, essentially all of human history has been repeated but with men as the victims rather than women.
- Power Corrupts: The theme of the novel, as women slowly institute the same systemic oppression on men that they've suffered as women when they find themselves the more physically dangerous sex.
- Power Incontinence: Experienced by some women who first discover their powers or those under stressful conditions.
- Power Loss Depression: After her father and half-brother steal her skein, Roxy falls into quite the funk over the perceived loss of her ultimate Action Girl persona.
- Psychic-Assisted Suicide: Allie uses the Power to control Tatiana's mind into killing herself with a letter opener.
- The Queenpin: Roxy, a Mafia Princess starting out, turns into this after taking control over the crime family her dad runs by force.
- Rape and Revenge: Allie fatally electrocutes her foster father the latest time he rapes her.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Roxy goes off against the people involved in her mother's death and the girls who injured her brother.
- Sex Slave: The Bessaparan Revolution in the former Moldova starts with trafficked women murdering their masters. They later return the favor and enslave the fittest 10% of men to use as breeding stock, while killing the rest.
- Shock and Awe: This is the titular power, which (cis) women and girls develop, along with a few intersex males, due to an electricity-generating organ they grow.
- Slut-Shaming: Allie is angrily beaten and raped by her foster father because she hung out with boys, letting some at least feel her up in the past.
- Strong, but Unskilled: Darrell when he uses the skein he stole from Roxy.
- Weak, but Skilled: Mother Eve's Power reserve seems to be pretty average, but she has a fine control the likes of which is unrivaled. The framing device implies that women like her are more common in the distant future.
- Wham Line: When Newland reveals, under torture, that it was Roxy's father who had her mother killed.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: We never learn if Jos survived her injuries or not.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Margot's home city is never mentioned, though various clues imply it to be Boston, or at least somewhere in New England.
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Tatiana becomes mentally unstable when she starts losing.
- Womb De Plume: The Framing Device establishes that the book was written by a male author who used his female editor's name to break out of the "men's literature" genre. And probably stole the credit.
- Women Are Wiser: No, they aren't, no matter how much some of them try to claim otherwise. In fact, the entirety of the trope is deconstructed by the author and editor in the closing comments (albeit with a gender flip). The editor argues that the partial patriarchies of the past (obviously a stand in for historical matriarchies) were kinder and more peaceful regimes as proof that men are the kinder, more moral gender. The author fires back that this was only because, as the weaker sex, any system that favored men had to be a system not built on violence. Therefore, women are wiser because they lack the ability to seize power through violence and must find it through other means. And as the book demonstrates, once that caveat is gone, they're just as evil as men were.
- World of Action Girls: Most of the female characters, due to getting electrical powers, start using them against men (whether for self-defense, torture, murder or rape), and this extends over the entire world, with society being turned upside down because of it. It's a dark example, at the very center of the book, being the titular power (plus the social control it gives them).
- Wrong Genetic Sex: The Power draws a rather stark line between male and female. Jos's boyfriend Ryan is an example of how biology isn't quite so clear. Despite being overall male in biology, along with identifying as such, he has a chromosomal abnormality that means he also has a skein. In-universe, this is seen as an abnormality that is also grounds for a particular fetish.
