This is the first time since I started serving on the Notable Books Council and discovered a book during our off season that I wanted this badly to be able to nominate. I truly do believe it reaches that level of literary fiction and science fiction combined. (Actually, I checked to see if I could suggest it for next year, but sadly although my library got it in November, the publication date was October, and that puts it in the 2016-2017 cycle.) It's a The Handmaid's Tale for our time. In fact, there are ways that it might be better than The Handmaid's Tale, although one must keep in mind that everybody who has written something in this vein since The Handmaid's Tale had the benefit of Margaret Atwood having gone there before. But the most common complaint people seem to have, in my admittedly unscientific perception of these things, about The Handmaid's Tale is that they can't believe that society could change so much in just a few years, with the actual chain of events only portrayed in disconnected flashbacks. Of course it could, because they have, but it's still a perception that makes it difficult for some people to accept the premise. In The Power, we watch the world change as it happens over the course of ten years, and there's no escaping from it. Additionally, The Power is global in its scope. While The Handmaid's Tale depicts things that happen to women around the world happening to women in (what had been) the U.S., The Power deals with events that happen around the world, the details and the degree of the impact often varying based on what the condition of women had been there in the time before.
And while the framing device- a presentation of the body of the book as a historical novel by a man author, attempting to reconstruct the most likely series of events from several thousand years before, sent to her for her opinion- seems like a minor point at the introduction, the exchanged letters attached at the end drive points home that were passed over more quickly in the main text and couldn't have been lingered on in the time frame of the story proper, and also allow for some of the most bitterly humorous lines in the book.
Since I missed my chance to make a case for this being on the literary fiction list, I just hope that the Reading List was on it when they were nominating science fiction.
Overall: A+