Christina Dalcher: VOX

Christina Dalcher’s Vox is the latest in a rush of feminist speculative novels, and like most of them begins at the terrifying end of the spectrum. All the women and girls in America have been fitted with a metal bracelet that delivers an electric shock if they go over their limit of 100 spoken words a day. Pens and paper are forbidden; books locked up; sign language punishable by … what? No one knows. The offenders simply disappear, hauled off by enforcers in the vastly expanded Bible belt.