A lot of things have become visible now, things that we need to address. I was probably responding to the same thing that #MeToo is responding to. You can look at men’s forums, where men talk about how much they hate women, want to rape them, overpower them. I think the internet is a big part of that awareness. Now I think it’s very horrifically obvious that that is not the case. When I was a teenager in the 1990s, it was a common thing among young women to say that feminism’s battles are won. Are the social and sexual upheavals that gave rise to the #MeToo movement something you could have seen coming? Your book, which reads at the outset like a particularly satisfying revenge fantasy, seems prescient. Alderman discussed the upside of power and its underbelly the sources of her own energy and her seemingly preternatural facility for seeing into the future. Speaking by telephone from her home in London, Ms. Alderman warned: “This imagined dystopia is terrible, but the reality would be far worse.” When she reviewed Leni Zumas’s “Red Clocks,” which posits a near future in which abortion is illegal again, Ms. Alderman is, not surprisingly, given to pondering the alarms her works and others have raised. The film version, released last fall, was produced by and stars Rachel Weisz. Her 2006 novel, “Disobedience,” about the fallout when an Orthodox Jewish woman revives a romance with another woman, was adapted for the screen. Alderman’s earlier works also found receptive audiences. (Margaret Atwood, the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” was Ms. Published last year by Little, Brown, it was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017 and has been described as “The Handmaid’s Tale” for a millennial generation. Her novel, first published in England, has resonated with American readers. Alderman, 42, conjures hellish scenes in which rampaging females roam the countryside, maiming and killing, she writes, “because they can.” Given that kind of control, how would they act? Would they harness their energy to create a world envisioned in books like “Herland,” the 1915 feminist fable in which a treacherous male-dominated universe gives way to a matriarchy of peace, justice and empathy?
Lodged within a strip of muscle running along their collarbones, it can produce a deadly electrical charge that renders them able to zap men at will, enfeebling or exterminating them, or just jolting them for sexual kicks.
The “power” of the title is embedded in young women. “The Power,” Naomi Alderman’s recent work of speculative fiction, tackles a freighted question: What would happen in a conventional society if the roles of men and women were flipped, so that women were the aggressors?
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