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?
The Future’s timey wimey narrative layout means that some of its plot can be difficult to follow and shifting allegiances within competing narratives doesn’t exactly help keep the relationships of characters to one another at any given moment straight. In fact, some of the story’s best twists probably won’t become apparent to readers until well after they’ve taken place on the page. But the end result is something that’s richly and surprisingly satisfying.
Alderman deftly pulls on multiple bleak threads together to create a world on the cusp of irrevocable disaster, even collapse. The story of The Future touches on everything from the dangers of climate change, wealth inequality, and overconsumption, to social media, commercialization, our increasingly polarized political systems, and artificial intelligence. Its prose is pointed and often extremely funny throughout—from throwaway snide comments between characters and entertaining one liners to rude message board posts and survivalist best practices meant to up your chances of living through the end times.
But where The Power is a complex exploration of gender dynamics that reads like a female empowerment narrative before spiraling into a dystopian hellscape, The Future is ultimately about something altogether different: Hope.
Yes, this book offers an uncomfortably realistic depiction of the likely end of society, but its appeal lies in its insistence that the dark times it depicts are not inevitable. Humanity’s worst possible outcome doesn’t have to happen. The future is not fixed. Change is possible—-but only if we collectively decide we want it to be. Whether that sort of universal belief can ever be enough to stem the ties of humanity’s worst impulses is something that The Future and our own days to come can answer. But the ideas at work here—and Alderman’s unabashed embrace of community and optimism even in the face of our darkest hours—certainly feel like fragments shored against our ruins.
The Future is available now.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB