Naomi Alderman Weaves a Strangely Hopeful Dystopian Tale In The Future
No matter her subject matter, Naomi Alderman’s stories always seem to arrive right on time. Her award-winning novel, The Power, was first published in early 2016, just before the United States would see a woman run for president, the inaugural Women’s March, the rise of the #MeToo movement, and the premiere of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, all events that would force the country to confront its ideas of gender, misogyny, and power. (Not to mention give women everywhere a new language in which to express their rage.) Now, in 2023, her latest novel, The Future arrives, and it’s almost as uncomfortably prescient as its predecessor.
In it, Big Tech controls almost every aspect of our lives. The mega-rich are busy building cushy private bunkers on remote islands in order to protect themselves from the ecological disasters they’ve helped unleash. Oppressed people are continually exploited, algorithms know what we’re thinking before we do, and social media is specifically designed to appeal to the worst instincts in each of us, to encourage that which makes us want to embrace violence rather than peace. Sounds a little too familiar, maybe, doesn’t it? (That description should make you nervous, by the way—-it’s supposed to.)
The Future follows the story of a half dozen major characters, some of whom are tech titans, some of whom are doomsday preppers, and some of whom are activists desperate to save the world, and their stories unfold over multiple timelines and mediums. (There’s even an old-school internet message board for survivalist types, where its members argue about which sub-forums Biblical stories of destruction and punishment belong in.) In this not-too-distant future, three of the most powerful tech billionaires—Lenk Sketlish, the survivalist founder of the Fantail social network; Zimri Nommik, head of the purchasing giant Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who runs PC giant Medlar Technologies—have all read the proverbial tea leaves. They know it’s getting bad out there in the real world. After all, a big chunk of all this societal decline is in large part their fault, it’s a reason they’re as rich and influential as they are. So it probably won’t surprise anyone that they’ve got contingency plans, up to and including a secret doomsday bunker where they’re all meant to wait out the next pandemic or uprising or [insert your own nightmare scenario] here.
Elsewhere, a YouTube survival influencer named Lai Zhen meets Martha Einkorn, the daughter of an end times cult leader, who now serves as Lenk’s right hand at Fantail. What initially seems to be a fun conference hook-up becomes something more complicated as Lai is increasingly drawn into Martha’s group of activists, which include Zimri’s hacker wife Selah, who wrote much of the code for Anvil, Ellen’s politically radicalized youngest child Badger, and Albert, the gay founder of Medlar who was forced out by his own team. Determined to use their unique access to these particular levels of power to try and save the world—-how far are they (and Lai) willing to go to do what they think is right?