- The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Like The Power, it examines how control over women’s bodies reshapes law, status, and everyday life.
- by Sheri S. Tepper
Tepper uses a sharply constructed society to question whether gendered power can produce peace or merely conceal coercion.
- The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Its multiple societies and confrontational women protagonists expose the instability of supposedly natural gender roles.
- The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
A bridge from Alderman’s gendered power struggle, it turns women’s collective knowledge and solidarity into a force for political change.
- by Angela Carter
Carter’s provocative transformation narrative interrogates sex, identity, violence, and the construction of power.
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Butler combines social breakdown with questions of hierarchy, vulnerability, leadership, and the uses of extraordinary ability.
- Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Its female protagonist confronts a brutal power structure that makes bodily autonomy and social authority immediate political questions.
- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Rather than centering gender alone, it broadens the inquiry into how radically different social structures distribute freedom and authority.
- by Sophie Mackintosh
This tense feminist dystopia explores female vulnerability, family power, and the stories societies create to justify control.
- The Bees: A Novel by Laline Paull
By imagining a rigid female society through an individual worker, it makes hierarchy, reproduction, labor, and rebellion vividly strange.
- The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
Its gendered post-apocalyptic danger directly connects bodily autonomy, social power, and survival.
- The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
Its marginalized characters confront institutions that fear and exploit unusual abilities, creating a powerful bridge to Alderman’s premise.
- by Louise Erdrich
Erdrich focuses on state control of reproduction and the urgent resistance of women under biological crisis.
- by Pamela Sargent
Its gender-segregated future tests whether a society ruled by women can escape domination and inherited violence.
- by Suzette Haden Elgin
Elgin imagines women stripped of legal rights and resisting through language, kinship, and collective knowledge.
- by Kirsty Logan
This intimate future tale links social hierarchy, ecological scarcity, gendered expectations, and the possibility of chosen community.
- The Children of Men by P. D. James
A fertility crisis exposes how quickly governments weaponize reproduction, fear, and control over bodies.
- The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
Levin turns enforced femininity and male anxiety about changing gender roles into concise, unsettling horror.
- by Jeanette Winterson
Its shifting identities and erotic storytelling challenge fixed assumptions about gender, desire, and power.
- The City & The City by China Miéville
Its unsettlingly divided cities provide an indirect bridge to The Power through questions about collective belief, borders, and enforced social perception.
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin uses an ambivalent gender system to examine how biology, politics, intimacy, and social expectations interact.
- Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Its society-wide use of a single gendered language makes imperial power and assumptions about identity newly visible.
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
A young woman’s public power becomes a threat to an authoritarian order built on spectacle and inequality.
- by Octavia E. Butler
This sequel expands Butler’s examination of authoritarian power, ideological control, and resilient communities under pressure.