What is it like to witness the oppression you have endured applied to someone else? That’s the conceit of The Power, or it will be, at least, for the women reading it. “I am so grateful you could spare the time.” It’s a device that we are to understand as an act of fictional intellectual property theft, as it’s Alderman’s name that’s ultimately on the novel. His letter to Naomi is postmarked accordingly from an organization unrecognizable to us in the real world: something called “The Men Writers Association.” “Thank you so much for this,” he gushes in a cover letter that resonates with any woman who has sent off her own fawning letters to men of influence. We can call Neil a “man author,” like we do so often with “women authors,” because, in the future Neil lives in, he’s the one who is cautiously writing against a tradition that excludes his sex. Or, rather, it’s the world of Neil Adam Armon, a fictional author who has sent a historical novel called The Power to a writer named Naomi Alderman for an early read. This happens to be the world of Naomi Alderman’s new novel, The Power. These complaints seemed to come from a future era, in which men have forgotten that, for the last few millennia, they were, in fact, the ones methodically creating spaces where only, then mostly, men could be. They claimed that if the same theaters had attempted to host an all-male screening of, say, Thor 3, no one would allow it. Last year, Collette was brought in to replace Mann, and all her previously filmed scenes had to be re-done.Earlier this year, groups of men were up in arms about a series of women-only screenings of Wonder Woman at Alamo Drafthouse theaters in Austin and New York. The series began shooting in early 2020, with Leslie Mann in the role of Margot, but the pandemic shut down production. But she also points out that the role came to her very abruptly. “I often don’t read the source material-I like to focus on the scripts that I’m given, because that’s what’s chosen to be focused on,” Collette tells Vanity Fair by phone from Sydney. Toni Collette hadn’t read The Power when she agreed to star in the Amazon Prime Video series adaptation, premiering this March, playing fictional Seattle mayor Margot Cleary-Lopez. What would happen if teenage girls had the ability to electrocute at their fingertips? What would the world be like if women didn’t fear men anymore? How would women wield their new strength, and how would men push back? The novel imagines a cascade of aftershocks as the balance of gender power shifts.
Naomi Alderman’s 2016 dystopian thriller The Power was an instant classic of speculative fiction-the kind of thought experiment that destabilizes our sense of what’s possible.
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