Women have written their way out of powerlessness at least since the French scholar and writer Christine de Pizan produced The Book of the City of Ladies in the early 15th century. The work, the focus of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time last week, defended mythological and historical female figures from Zenobia to the Queen of Sheba, extracting them from the torrent of misogyny threatening to overwhelm the narratives they inhabited. But science fiction, as a genre, is especially adept at challenging the balance of power between the sexes, for its job is to ask the question “what if?”, and it has, as such, frequently been the site of pointed societal critique.

Feminist theorists, influenced by Freud, Lacan and Kristeva, have long seen in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein a disturbing meditation on motherhood, the female body, and the act of (female) creation. In a less occluded manner Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in her 1915 utopian novel Herland, imagined a scenario in which a group of American explorers stumble upon a remote people – a peaceful, prosperous, wise society made up entirely of women, the equilibrium of which the men threaten with their galumphing lubriciousness.

In the later 20th century, examples of feminist sci-fi included Ursula K Le Guin’s 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, in which a man arrives alone on the planet Gethen, encountering a people who have no fixed gender. And, of course, there is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985 and now enjoying a remarkable revival, including Channel 4’s current adaptation starring Elizabeth Moss and Joseph Fiennes. The novel’s focus on women’s bodies and reproductive rights has brought readers back to it in their hordes: the story has seemed, to many, prescient in the era of Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

The latest work to take a worthy place alongside these books is Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power, which won the Baileys prize last week. Its story operates as an inversion of the adage that what men fear about women is that they will laugh at them, while what women fear about men is that they will kill them. What if, Prof Alderman’s story asks, women were physically stronger than men? She creates a world in which women develop an ability to electrocute at will – a talent she borrowed from the physiology of the electric eel.

Like The Handmaid’s Tale, the story comes with a metafictional framing device. Ms Atwood gives the reader to understand that the main body of her story is being told during the proceedings of an academic conference, far in the future after the events narrated by its heroine, Offred. Prof Alderman’s story, it immediately becomes clear, is framed as a speculative account by a researcher about a time in the deep past, now known only through its scattered archaeological artefacts, from which he reconstructs a set of events that lead to the establishment of the current order – which is a matriarchy. It is another inversion, this time of the ideas put forward in the 19th century in Johann Jakob Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht, which posited a matriarchal period buried deep in human prehistory.

Prof Alderman has given us a thought-provoking and timely work of speculative fiction that, once again, asks the reader to rethink the interweavings of gender, power and society; as the Guardian’s reviewer said on its publication, it is “an instant classic”.