Science Fiction is often a genre of what critic Gary K Wolfe calls “The Genre Conversation”. Even as science fiction novels come out, further science fiction novels and stories can be considered and thought of as reactions and referents to those prior stories, answering some of the questions they raise, posing new questions, and “arguing” with the previous work. Or trying to engage with the themes in that prior work in a more satisfactory way. The flood of stories and novels reacting to “The Cold Equations” is perhaps the most famous, but, consider, for example how Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War reacts to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Or how Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade responds to both.
What does this have to do with an erotica novel by Anna Ritter? Let me explain. Naomi Alderman’s The Power is a contemporary near future fiction novel, written as a retrospective history, where teenage girls start manifesting psychic powers. It’s a brutal novel in many ways, showing a rather nasty and patriarchal societal response to women, and then as women get the upper hand in society, turn and handle men in an equally merciless manner. It is a rather unpleasant societal turn that Alderman posits, very cynical in how bloody such a takeover would go.
If you have read any of Ritter’s fiction that focuses on Gynarchial themes (as opposed to strictly femdom), those societies generally aren’t carved out of blood and bullets. Women take control by various means, or are going to, by various means, but violent revolution and gritty narratives. For all that she loves to write power play, Ritter’s fiction (commissions a very big exception) are not, in the end, brutal.
So we come to The Powers. The title alone is a clue that this is a genre conversation with The Power, and the description makes it clear. This is a novel where women of all ages start to manifest Telekinesis, Telepathy, psychic powers, and boys...well, boys soon find out that they are on the short end of the stick. If you have read her Crystal Canyon works (where women gain the ability to command boys with their voice) or the Nova City verse (e.g. Into her Web) where most of the superheroes that have emerged are women, you can see that there is a power imbalance, and this is one of Ritter’s jams.
I argue that the erotica elements of the novel (which I will get to) are in the end somewhat secondary to the science fiction elements in the novel, and that this novel, while it has very arousing scenes, is very much a reaction to the power, and a “real” (please note the quotes) science fiction novel.
But this is not a science fiction novel that is all about trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of how the powers work and why (although there is a subplot involving men’s reaction to those powers and how to deal with them). The technical details are not that important and are not focused on. In a way, psionic powers as seen in this novel really are more of a form of magic rather than any hard and fast “net up” rules.
But science fiction is more than gadgets and endless technological speculation, it is about how society reacts to those technological changes. The sociology of how a society deals with, say, women gaining psychic powers is extremely a science fictional concept. And here is the heart of Ritter’s novel.
As usual with a Ritter novel or story, “it’s the characters stupid, and so we are iintroduced to three young women, MacKenzie, Brooke and Aubrey. The story of The Powers is how these three come to learn about The Powers, how they come to terms with them, and how they use those powers, the sociological changes in their lives and what may come from society. And it is here where the characters and story shine. The kind of society that they want, and they start to build, first steps, is a lot of the matter of the novel. How are children, teenagers raised in this society? Men and women relations. Sociological and social consequences to women having power and wielding it. The future of what a society could, and should look like when women can read thoughts, and use telekinesis. There is a lot of food for thought here.
But what about the sex, you might ask? Is there sex? This IS a Ritter story and novel, and while the amount of that sex can vary from work to work, Ritter does leaven all of this science fiction with plenty of female dominant sex. Much like the Crystal Canyon Tempting Fates series, a fair chunk of this sex is women learning to assert their sexual needs and desires upon the men in their lives, with the Powers backing up the assertion of what they want. And what they want, in the end, is to gain sexual autonomy, and then dominance, over their men, one of the abiding kinks in Ritter’s work.
There are some really interesting fillips here, given the aforementioned Power and science fiction. Given the telepathy of the novel, there is a fair amount of mind reading, and this novel makes clear that some of the men long to surrender to a powerful women, that this is what they want. In an interesting scene I’ve rarely seen Ritter touch, Brooke, one of the aforementioned three central characters, reads the mind of Tony:
"Another image flashed through her mind: Tony Cat, age nineteen. he was on his knees in a pink, frilly dress with tight panties between his legs, a chastity cage beneath the satin, and a snug color locked around his neck. A beautiful girl, Jasmine stood above him. She held the end of his leash and smiled down at him"
While for me such sissification isn’t one of my kinks, the point of this mind reading is to show that in the end the men in Ritter’s stories either consciously or subconsciously or are led to the conclusion that women should be in charge of society, especially in terms of sex. (this ties into the chastity training that Ritter loves to put into her work. While some more brutal authors might go for ballbusting or the like (and this is found in some of her commissions) , Ritter prefers her men locked up, so that their sexual urges and activity are at the discretion of the woman in the man’s life. So, when women assert their power over men, and take control of society, it is not as non-consensual as it might look like. In a way, the telepathy shown in The Powers allows the subtext that Ritter has advanced in her works to BE text--the men, the male populations of her works are happier in the end underneath the women. Some of them know it, others need to come to realize it, but in the end, all of them will Besides the above exchange, there are plenty of telepathic readings of men that reinforce the narrative.
In the end, I highly enjoyed the novel, I really do think that in the long form, given Ritter’s penchants for worldbuilding and characters, that this is the form that her work is most effective at all of its goals. Readers who are looking for a “Wham bam thank you mistress of telekinesis” might be slightly put off by all of the non erotica elements in the novel. This really is a science fiction matriarchial/gynarchial novel more than an erotica novel. It is an interesting world, interesting set of characters, and interesting speculation
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![The Powers: The Complete Novel by [Anna Ritter]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51eslDD1xDL._SY346_.jpg)
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