Naomi Alderman, author of The Power, is Margaret Atwood’s protege. Alderman’s new book
is the winner of the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The television rights to the book have already been snapped up. In talking about the relevancy of sci-fi/dystopian books, especially ones that deal with the roles of women, I like what Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale) says about this genre: “I’m not a prophet. Let’s get rid of that idea right now. Prophecies are really about now. In science fiction it’s always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have.” That can be a wee bit scary sometimes when the book comes closer to reality than we’d like.