The Power
InThe Powerthe world is a recognizable place: There's a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; and a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: They can cause agonizing pain and even death. With this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2018–2026years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Power by Naomi Alderman.
Can't remember whether it was this year or last year, but Walter Jon William's Metropolitan series is great, too.
- Naomi Alderman's The Power in the opposite...
- Lead designer of Perplex City here! Perplex City was an ARG (alternate reality game) produced by Mind Candy in 2004. Unlike almost all ARGs at the time, it wasn’t promoting a movie or TV or associated product - instead, we sold packs of puzzle cards that tied into the game’s story.
Lots more on Wikipedia here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City
This is a puzzle card I thought would either be solved very quickly (within a year or two) or not at all. To have it solved after 14 years is very special.
Perplex City has had a lot of interesting alumni. It was made by Mind Candy, which was founded by Michael Acton Smith, who is also co-founder of Calm. The lead writer was Naomi Alderman, who became an award-winning novelist and whose novel The Power was one of Obama’s top books of the year and is being adapted into a $100m Amazon TV show.
I went on to co-found Six to Start with my brother Dan Hon (who you may know from his popular newsletter, and later left the company to do a lot of good work in the US government digital services realm and Code for America). Six to Start is best known for Zombies, Run!, which is the world’s most popular smartphone fitness game and is sort of like an ARG, if you squint at it.
I continue to do a lot of thinking and writing around ARGs (which are still fascinating) and gamification (which I mostly dislike). My blog post, What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon, went somewhat viral a few months ago: https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qan...
Edit: That blog post also gets into the confusion between the Perplex City Satoshi and the Bitcoin Satoshi (which conspiratorially-minded people DM me about regularly) along with my supposed involvement in Cicada 3301.
