‘We are living in a dystopia now’

As her new series The Power drops, Naomi Alderman tells Vicky Jessop about telling stories where women don’t have to feel afraid

WHEN Naomi Alderman had finished writing her seminal novel The Power, she sent an early copy to a friend to read. The response was unorthodox. “She texted me and she said, ‘Why is this book making me feel horny all the time?’ I thought about it and I said, ‘Listen, the reason is, because when you’re reading it, you’re not feeling afraid.’”

Just think of being a woman, she says, sitting on the Tube. You catch the eye of a good-looking man, but can’t even smile at him lest he turn out to be “one of those totally random, horrible dudes”. As a result, “you can’t even really experience your own sexuality properly”.

In The Power, things are different. “The moment that you imaginatively inhabit this world, where you don’t have to be afraid all the time, then you can start going ‘ahh!’”

It’s an odd thought experiment, but it works. That’s because in The Power — both Alderman’s 2016 novel and the new Prime Video adaptation — teenage girls suddenly become the threat, as they develop the ability to shoot lightning from their hands.

As this ability spreads to older women, power structures begin to shift; revolutions take place and a new religion rises with women at the forefront.

The novel was a sensation, written as it was in the pre-#MeToo era but eerily prescient of it, and Alderman has relished the chance to update the story by adapting it for television.

“When I was writing the book, anytime I would hear anything on the news that upset me or made me angry I would just throw it straight into the book, because in the book, you can reverse it. You get a very nice cathartic feeling,” she says.

“I started working on this book in 2011. It’s been a long old journey. And conversations around diversity, around intersectionality, conversations in feminism, I think have moved on a lot.” The story now includes a trans character, which she is thrilled about.

Since The Power was published, as well as #MeToo, the world has seen Black Lives Matter and multiple revolutions, including the struggle for women’s rights in Iran, and they’ve all been incorporated, more or less, into the TV show.

Alderman says she cried many times watching episode four, set predominantly in the Middle East. “The reason I cry is because we all know that those women are not going to get the power to electrocute people… I’m hopeful for the women who are rebelling currently in Iran. But I’m not feeling like, ‘Oh, that’s going to be an easy win.’”

Her sense of justice arguably has its roots in her childhood. Raised as a strict Orthodox Jew in the suburbs of London, she cites her “feminist origin story” in a religious primary school. “Every day all the children say the blessing. ‘Thank you God for not making me a slave.’ It’s really a bit problematic that God wants that. But alright, fine... then the boys say, ‘Thank you God for not making me a girl.’ And the girls say, ‘Thank you for making me according to your will.’

“I remember at school the day when the boys went off to do their Talmud studying and the girls had extra sewing lessons and craft lessons. There’s nothing wrong with craft, it’s great. It was just like, ‘Oh, there’s knowledge that the boys are getting? There’s things I’m not allowed to learn because I’m a girl?’”

Undeterred, Alderman finished school, studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University and began to hone her craft as a writer. She started her career in the video game industry and helped to create the successful exercise app, Zombies, Run! Today, she balances writing with her work in gaming and technology.

Her debut novel, Disobedience, published in 2006, explored the closeted relationship between two Orthodox Jewish women in London (it was later made into a film starring Rachel Weisz). A few years later, she was selected to become Margaret Atwood’s protégée as part of an initiative for young writers.

When I was writing, any time anything made me upset or angry, I’d just throw it straight into the book

The pair are clearly close; they’ve appeared in joint interviews and in 2012, co-wrote a book about, yes, zombies on the website Wattpad. Alderman says her mentor has “taken me to places in the world I would never have gone”. They also share a lot of the same interests. “We both love a weird Bible story,” she says.

Now, Alderman is looking ahead, both to the TV series and her upcoming novel The Future, which is set in a dystopian world, five to ten years ahead of today.

Aren’t we living in a dystopian society right now? She shrugs. “People say to me, ‘Oh, The Power is a dystopian novel.’ The thing is, it’s the reverse of what’s happening in the real world right now. So if The Power is dystopian, then we are living in a dystopia right now. It just depends which sex you are.” Regardless, she has a knack for predictions, such as the rise of disinformation with The Power’s Right-wing conspiracy theorist UrbanDox. I ask how she does it; she laughs. “Obviously Margaret Atwood is a witch, and she has taught me how to do her spells.”

Then she turns serious. “I work in technology and have done so for years. So that always involves looking at what tech is coming up and trying to figure out how that’s going to affect people’s lives. That just trains you to be thinking five years out from where we are.”

So, where are we going to end up? Alderman laughs again. “You should read my book.”