The Skein Was Always the Easy Part

Naomi Alderman's thought experiment was never really about electricity. The Power hands women a biological weapon — a skein of electrostatic force coiled across the collarbone — and then watches, with the patience of a naturalist, as the world reorganizes itself along exactly the same brutal lines it always had, just with the polarities reversed. Published in 2016, the novel arrived in the last months before a particular American election result made its themes feel less like speculative fiction and more like a diagnostic manual. Ten years on, the book reads differently again — not because its central thesis about the corrupting nature of power has been disproven, but because the specific mechanisms of corruption it imagined now look both eerily precise and strangely quaint.

What Alderman got right, she got right at the structural level. The NorthStar camps, where young women are militarized under the guise of safety training, prefigure the steady normalization of paramilitary aesthetics in civilian life we've watched accelerate through the 2020s. The Glitter drug trade — a substance that enhances the power, manufactured in unstable post-Soviet territories and smuggled through collapsing borders — maps neatly onto the real-world entanglement of synthetic drugs, failed states, and supply chains that don't respect sovereignty. The libertarian forum chapter, with its paranoid users connecting dots between government surveillance and charismatic religious movements, could be a screenshot from any number of platforms that have flourished and fragmented since 2020. Alderman understood that the infrastructure of radicalization is ideologically agnostic; it serves whoever plugs in. The novel's interstitial documents — SMS exchanges between officials, archived advertisements for "Personal Defender" devices, propaganda films — anticipated the way institutional communication itself became the story during COVID, during every subsequent crisis. The medium was always the evidence.

But the book's blind spots are revealing. Alderman imagined power shifting through bodies — through biology, through physical confrontation, through the literal capacity to hurt. The power is somatic. What she couldn't fully see, writing in 2016, was how decisively power would shift through information architectures instead. The novel has no real analogue for algorithmic amplification, for deepfakes, for the way AI-generated content would make the very concept of "photographic evidence" — which Tunde risks his life to collect — functionally meaningless. Tunde's role as a journalist-with-a-camera, bearing witness and trusting that documentation equals accountability, now reads as almost heartbreakingly optimistic. The novel also assumes that state power remains the relevant unit of analysis; Bessapara's descent into authoritarian matriarchy follows the grammar of twentieth-century regime change. It misses the diffusion of power into private platforms, into corporate entities that operate across and above nations. The framing device — a male author submitting his manuscript to a female literary establishment five thousand years hence — is clever, but it relies on a gender binary that even by 2026 feels like an incomplete map of the territory it claims to chart.

What hits hardest now is not the violence but the speed. Alderman compresses the timeline from emergence to global upheaval into roughly a decade, and critics at the time called it implausible. It no longer seems so. We have watched norms dissolve in months. The passage where Margot, newly elected, realizes that the entire architecture of governance was built on assumptions about who could hurt whom — and that once that assumption shifts, everything shifts — reads now less as science fiction and more as a plain description of how quickly institutional legitimacy can evaporate when the underlying threat calculus changes. The novel sits in a lineage that runs from Ursula Le Guin's thought experiments through Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and forward into the boom of feminist dystopias that followed it — Alderman herself was mentored by Atwood, and the debt is visible in the archaeological framing, the layered documents, the long view of history. But where Atwood's Gilead is a cage, Alderman's world is an inversion, and the argument is colder for it: the cage doesn't change shape when different hands hold the key.

The question the book raises now, which it could not have raised in 2016: if the power that actually reshaped the world turned out to be not biological but computational — not a skein across the collarbone but a model trained on the sum of human language — then who, exactly, is holding the current?