This is an exciting novel. Ok, fine: electric. Its urgency arises from both its subject matter (and premise) - power and how it shifts in society, specifically between genders, after women acquire their new power - and how it's written, in shortish page-turning sections from alternating perspectives (initially, and predominantly, Allie, Roxy, Tunde and Margot), with plenty of action.
The politics are interesting. I was a bit unsure how to take the way that when women gain physical dominance, things flip so simply with women then replicating the patterns of oppression and entitlement that exist in our (actual, male-dominated) real-world society ... but ultimately I think it's polemically and politically effective, in highlighting even more clearly the effects of power. It also dodges the question about whether a matriarchal society would be more caring, collaborative, communicative and so on, or at any rate whether innate difference is or should be a driver of how we think about these things. And it stages the old 'radical' vs 'liberal' feminist approaches, in the end giving us a playing out of the radical (via cataclysm), which leads to a thousands-of-years-in-the-future society which, so for as we can tell from the framing, has at least some things in common with present-day society but just with a straight gender-power reversal.
Anyway, it's a lot of fun, it's neat, it's pacy, and it's thoughtful in how it engages with gender and power. A good read.
The politics are interesting. I was a bit unsure how to take the way that when women gain physical dominance, things flip so simply with women then replicating the patterns of oppression and entitlement that exist in our (actual, male-dominated) real-world society ... but ultimately I think it's polemically and politically effective, in highlighting even more clearly the effects of power. It also dodges the question about whether a matriarchal society would be more caring, collaborative, communicative and so on, or at any rate whether innate difference is or should be a driver of how we think about these things. And it stages the old 'radical' vs 'liberal' feminist approaches, in the end giving us a playing out of the radical (via cataclysm), which leads to a thousands-of-years-in-the-future society which, so for as we can tell from the framing, has at least some things in common with present-day society but just with a straight gender-power reversal.
Anyway, it's a lot of fun, it's neat, it's pacy, and it's thoughtful in how it engages with gender and power. A good read.
