The Power

In Armon’s narrative of how women came into power, Margot Cleary represents the opportunities and the dangers of their political ascent. Part Margaret Thatcher, part Senator Joseph McCarthy, Margot, as a mayor of a small Wisconsin city, grasps the potential of the skein. Her frustrations are understandable. As a savvy female politician in the early 21st century, she feels herself surrounded by incompetent men and chafes against the limits her gender places on her ambitions. With the skein, however, she asserts her authority. For her, the skein is the chance for women to run the world.

Even as she struggles to control her skein, she envisions a mass movement of girls her daughter’s age who tap into this power and move into consequential roles in society. She gets behind the NorthStar Camps system initially to provide confused girls like her own daughter a chance to define themselves and their relationship to their skeins. As a politician, she acts locally but thinks globally. By investing in the NorthStar camps, both politically and financially, Margot uses the rise of empowered women as an opportunity to advance politically and secure a fortune.

Margot’s character shows that power corrupts, whatever the gender. She becomes reptilian, calculating, and selfish. As senator, when she advises the President to side with Bessapara—a military strategy she knows ensures Armageddon—she is motivated less by feminist idealism and more by greed; she has invested in NorthStar camps which provide Bessapara its army. That Margot uses her daughter as a pawn in this scheme underscores how power blinds her. She sides with power over compassion, denying her the experience of love, family and community. She incinerates the world for a profit margin she will never see.

As the only male among the principal characters in Armon’s story of the emergence of women, Olatunde Edo serves three critical functions.

As a journalist, Tunde provides the narrative with the eyewitness testimony of incidents that mark the beginnings of the rise of women. As a journalist, his accounts are balanced. He records the revolt of women in Saudi Arabia and in India. But he also records evidence of the corrupting influence of the skein. He records incidents in which men are harassed, gang-raped by roving gangs of Glitter-engorged females, tortured, and even executed. He provides critical objective testimony. He shares what Armon dares not share in his world: evidence of women’s brutality. Armon writes, “The camera makes him feel powerful; as if he’s there but not there. You do what you like, he thinks to himself, but I’m the one who’s going to turn it into something. I’ll be the one who’ll tell the story” (151).

As a man, Tunde’s testimony is far more emotional. As he travels to hotspots covering the women’s uprising, he taps into the increasing anxiety of men in the new era. He is taunted as he walks the streets of Delhi, he is tailed by female authorities in Bessapara, and he fears being ambushed as he walks alone on Bessapara’s backroads. He barely escapes being gang raped; he is arrested and detained for no cause. Given his occupation, one of the most heinous offenses against him comes when his own editor, a woman, fakes Tunde’s death so that she can publish under her name his copious writings about the women’s uprising.

It is as Roxy’s lover, however, that Tunde serves his defining function. That relationship provides Armon’s allegory with its broadest wisdom. A man and a woman, equal in all measure—Roxy is by then skein-less—find their way to passion, support, and trust. When Tunde agrees to hide in the trunk of the car Roxy provides for his escape from Bessapara, that single act provides the Armon’s fiction its most generous wisdom. As Armon’s proxy, Tunde records how power corrupts and how gender can be weaponized. Only by mutual respect and trust will society, five thousand years after the fall of men, achieve meaning. 

Roxy Monke plays a pivotal role. For most of the story, she represents the strength of a woman uncomplicated by compassion or empathy. Even before she masters the skein, she is a martial arts devotee. At 14, she watches helplessly as her mother is brutally killed. She understands the logic of revenge. As the daughter of a powerful crime boss, Roxy grows up understanding how might, not mercy, determines right. As her name suggests, she is hard and strong. Her ascendance into her father’s crime organization reveals her strength, her willpower, and her sense of predatory justice. Her backing of Glitter evinces her belief in physical power—the more, the better. 

It is only when Roxy loses her skein that she emerges as the novel’s exemplum. After the hack-surgery to remove her skein, Roxy is vulnerable. Deprived of her skein, she is able to see the dangers of physical force in the growing paranoia of Tatiana. She emerges from the experience of loss relying not on the genetic aberration of the skein but rather on her keen sense of survival and her determination to adapt, adopt, and improve conditions. She responds to the friendship of Tunde without the paranoia and anxiety of the Glitter-addicted women in Bessapara.

In her relationship with Tunde, Roxy provides Armon’s narrative with its spare message of hope: Only in her willingness to help a man, particularly a man dependent on her assistance, and only in her willingness to allow herself the intimacy of love, does Roxy exemplify both strength and courage. A man, Roxy learns, is a person not a gender. 

Tatiana Moskalev is Moldova’s First Lady who is appointed President after her husband death’s, for which she is likely responsible. She creates a government-in-exile called Bessapara and builds an army of skein-powered, Glitter-addicted soldiers. As much if not more so than Margot, Tatiana is a pure expression of the precept that power corrupts. The laws she passes enshrines a system of anti-male sexism that mirrors the misogynist and patriarchal structures of present-day Saudi Arabia. She wields her power cruelly, culminating in the moment when she forces a male servant to lick up the mess caused by a broken wine bottle, glass shards and all.

Ultimately, her total disregard for men’s humanity leads to a state of affairs in which the female citizens of Bessapara routinely and indiscriminately rape and murder the men living there. After realizing that Tatiana has lost control, Allie uses her skein to stimulate Tatiana’s synapses in such a way that the woman slits her own throat.