Naomi Alderman is a British novelist and game writer who received a lot of praise for her 2017 novel The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction that year and was then adapted for TV by Amazon. The beginning and end of The Power were indeed very good, the middle not so much. And Alderman’s latest offering, The Future, suffers from not dissimilar issues in that a good third of it could have been chopped out by a brave editor without affecting it in the slightest.
The near future of The Future, as you might expect, sucks. The world ends on page one. Humanity lives in a climate change techno-dystopia just clinging on, presided over by three tech-magnates: Lenk Sketlish, the survivalist founder of social media platform Fantail; Zimri Nommik, philandering CEO of logistics/online shopping global giant Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who is the head of PC manufacturer Medlar Technologies and has imaginary conversations with her dead husband.
If you guessed that these were thinly disguised versions of a mashed-up Dorsey-Musk-Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos (interesting, given the Amazon connection), and a gender-flipped Steve Jobs, no prizes for you because the serial numbers were barely filed off these cyphers.
The troika receive early warning of an approaching pandemic worse than Covid and flee on a private jet to their secret luxury doomsday bunker. Think Ben Elton’s Stark but without the comic timing.
Meanwhile, there is a parallel narrative line of another group of characters, for want of a better expression. These are the eco and social activists Martha Einkorn, escaped from her father’s Oregon-based survivalist cult; Sketlish’s assistant, Lai Zhen, a web-famous survivalist influencer who survived the fall of Hong Kong and an assassin; Albert Dabrowski, rolled founder of Medlar and, one presumes, a cross between Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates; Nommik’s super-coder wife Selah; and Badger (yes, really), Bywater’s woke-radical youngest child with back-door access to the Medlar network.
The story metronomes between the two plotlines, with Einkorn and Lai very much the two main characters of what feels like an homage to The Magnificent Seven as it might have been plotted by William Gibson. Einkorn’s obsession and Lai’s curiosity play off each other well with the fate of civilisation in the balance.
At its best, The Future is briskly paced, twisty and turny, and full of intrigues, ideas and aphorisms like currants in a cake. Alderman nails the social media disinformation crisis, the surveillance society crisis, the environmental crisis and the grotesque power of the very rich.
Old Testament survival tales figure heavily, as in a groan-inducing machine that turns people into pillars of salt. The parts set up like online forum boards are a nice touch, but hardly anything new. I was rather taken by the cybersex suit modified into power armour.
At its worst, The Future is erratic, disjointed and makes huge, random, confusing time jumps without warning. As well, it is overburdened with pseudo-profound exposition (remember, kids, show, don’t tell) and the majority of the characters barely justify their existence. And there is distracting sci fi awards baiting – no one in real life is that obsessed with every character’s sexual orientation.
It’s a fun read even if sometimes it’s like doomscrolling for people who prefer books. I just wish it were as good as The Power. If you haven’t read that novel, you probably won’t feel my pang of disappointment and will enjoy The Future on its own laborious merits.
Better yet, get both and give yourself a double shot.
