Book Review | The Power by Naomi Alderman

All over the world women are discovering they have the power. With a flick of the fingers they can inflict terrible pain—even death. Suddenly, every man on the planet finds they've lost control.

The Day of the Girls has arrived - but where will it end?

***

In the periphery of The Power, a series of seemingly meaningless scenes shine an ultra-bright light on the core concerns of Naomi Alderman's astonishing new novel. These blink-and-you-might-miss-'em moments lay bare the working relationship between a pair of daytime television presenters whose respective roles reflect the devastating developments depicted in greater detail in the rest of the text.

Tom and Kristen are ineffably familiar figures, at first—as is their dynamic as a duo. The former is a moderately handsome middle-aged man who wears expensive suits and steers the show's serious segments; the latter is an improbably beautiful young woman dressed not to impress so much as to suggest whose most significant responsibility is to introduce the weather on the ones. In short, Tom is the host with the most, and Kristen is his sexy sidekick.

But when man's dominion over the wider world wanes, the parts our presenters have played to date are recast. Unwilling to accept this essential reversal, Tom has a live-on-the-telly tantrum. He's promptly replaced by Matt, a great guy, apparently, who's "a good ten years younger than Kristen." Matt laughs attractively and silently suffers "a gentle hand on his knee" while Kristen—now in less clingy clothes and finally wearing the glasses she's needed all these years, if only to give her gravitas—downright dominates their conversations.

The Power isn't about any of these people, particularly, but their changing situation effectively illustrates the revolution that results from the discovery of an organ of electricity in women.

To start with, there were confident faces on the TV, spokespeople from the CDC saying it was a virus, not very severe, most of the people recovered fine, and it just looked like young girls were electrocuting people with their hands. We all know that's impossible, right, that's crazy—the news anchors laughed so hard they cracked their makeup.

Crazy as the idea may be, it seems to be real. The first few viral videos of the eponymous power in practice are followed by hundreds and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands of others that aren't so easily explained away. The aforementioned organ of electricity—"a strip of striated muscle [named] the skein for its twisted strands"—isn't even exceptional, it appears. Every girl in the world has it, or will have it, and it can be "woken" in every older woman.

A multinational group of scientists is certain now that the power is caused by an environmental build-up of nerve agent that was released during the Second World War. It's changed the human genome. All girls born from now on with have the power—all of them. And they'll keep it throughout life, just like the older women do if it's woken up in them. It's too late now to try to cure it; we need new ideas.

Mayor Margot Cleary, one of The Power's four principle perspectives, thinks she might have them. She starts a private military corporation—ostensibly to train women in the ways of using their skeins sensitively, but if she so happens to end up with an army afterwards, then so much the better. An army might be hella handy in the coming months, especially if the men who see the power as a problem do what some of them are threatening to and declare war on women.

Book Review | Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King & Owen King

All around the world, something is happening to women when they fall asleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed, the women become feral and spectacularly violent...

In the small town of Dooling, West Virginia, the virus is spreading through a women's prison, affecting all the inmates except one. Soon, word spreads about the mysterious Evie, who seems able to sleep—and wake. Is she a medical anomaly or a demon to be slain?

The abandoned men, left to their increasingly primal devices, are fighting each other, while Dooling's Sheriff, Lila Norcross, is just fighting to stay awake.

And the sleeping women are about to open their eyes to a new world altogether...

***

On the back of the broadly brilliant Bill Hodges books, a succinct and suspenseful series of straight stories that only started to flag when their fantastical aspects filibustered the fiction, Sleeping Beauties sees Stephen King up to his old tricks again. It's a long, long novel that places a vast cast of characters at the mercy of a speculative premise: a sleeping sickness that knocks all the women of the world out for the count, leaving the men to fend for themselves.

Of course, the world is not now, nor has it ever been, King's business. Standing in for it in this particular story, as a microcosm of all that's right and wrong or spineless and strong, is a small town "splat in the middle of nowhere," (p.30) namely Dooling in West Virginia. There, tempers flare—and soon explosively so—when it dawns on a dizzying array of dudes that their wives and daughters and whatnot may be gone for good. It's Under the Dome part deux, in other words, except that this time, the Constant Writer has roped one of his sons in on the fun.

The author of an excellent short story collection, a gonzo graphic novel and an overwritten love letter to the silver screen, Owen King is clearly capable of greatness, but—rather like his father—falls short as often as not. I'd hoped to see him at his best here, what with the help of an old hand, however it's hard to see him at all, so consistent is the Kings' collaboration. But as tough as it is to tell where one King ends and the other begins, Sleeping Beauties is such a slog that it hardly matters.

Book Review | The Glorious Angels by Justina Robson

Mixing science fiction and fantasy with elements of horror and erotica, as well as the weird, The Glorious Angels is Justina Robson's first non tie-in novel since Down to the Bone—the conclusion of the Quantum Gravity quintet—fully four years ago. I don't mind admitting that I had high hopes it would represent a return to form for the oft award-nominated author, but despite its dizzying ambition and a few glimmers of brilliance, to be blunt, it doesn't. A syrupy slow opening sees to that from the start.

The first few hundred pages of Robson's cross-genre odyssey take place in Glimshard, a magnificent city of crystalline stems and spires at the very tip of which sits the Empress Shamuit Torada, who has in her infinite wisdom waged a war of sorts against the Karoo, a strange and essentially alien race "from so far away they were considered beyond civilisation, as elusive as the two-headed wolf of legend," (p.21) and at least as dangerous, I dare say.

As to why she's set her sights on such a terrible enemy when her people are pitifully unprepared for conflict of any sort beyond the wars of words fought in coffee shops across the capital... well, some among the citizens of Glimshard wonder as we do, and some among them think they've arrived at an answer: in brief, because the Karoo's territory takes in a dig site beneath which several surviving scientists have seen evidence of something special; something which the Empress desires so dearly that she's ready to risk the survival of all her beloved subjects to recover.

The exact nature of this purported prize is an enigma wrapped inside of a riddle—buried, to boot, fathoms below the surface of the world—even to Tralane Huntingore, Professor of Engineering at the Glimshard Academy of Sciences.

You Tell Me | The Women's Prize for Fantastic Fiction

Just a quick one today, to point you all in the direction of yesterday's edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus, in which I proposed a new award called the Women's Prize for Fantastic Fiction.

Why?

I'd have thought the answer would be obvious:

As a community, we’ve cried out again and again for better representation of the “invisible women” working in the male-dominated genre fiction industry... but crying out, however loudly, clearly isn't going to cut the mustard. So let’s do something about it, damn it! Let’s you and I put our heads together and figure out a speculative fiction friendly version of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Kind of like the Not the Booker Prize that The Guardian has. 

A word to the wise: this isn’t going to lead to some seismic shift in the industry. Publishers may or may not change their ways, and whenever they do, if ever they do, they’ll change at their own pace. But if that’s the case, why wait? 

If any woman writing genre fiction in English — whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter — is eligible, then who and what would our nominees be? The only caveat I'd add is to keep our nominees to books published this year, please.

Do click on through to read the entire article, and leave your nominees in the comments.

Let me start you all off with a fantastic five of my own devising:

• The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord 
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson 
• The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker 
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie 
• The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough 

So what am I missing? What would your nominees be? You tell me!