I absolutely loved The Power and was so excited for this but I struggled to get into it. I think it’s a bit too sci-fi for me, and that’s not a usual genre. There’s literally nothing that’s not worth recommending but I just didn’t care.

"The Future" by Naomi Alderman presents a gripping tale of power, technology, and resistance in a world dominated by tech giants and social media moguls. Martha Einkorn, a former member of an isolated cult, finds herself working for a powerful social media mogul who seeks to control everything. Meanwhile, in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, finds herself targeted by an assassin and receives a mysterious piece of software on her phone that offers her a way out.

As Martha and Zhen's worlds collide, they find themselves caught in a web of intrigue and danger, with the fate of civilization hanging in the balance. While a few billionaires wield power unchecked, Martha's determination and Zhen's curiosity drive them to uncover the truth and challenge the forces threatening the world.

"The Future" explores themes of power, corruption, and resistance in a world where technology reigns supreme. With its thrilling pace, sharp wit, and thought-provoking insights, this novel offers a compelling vision of a future where the choices we make today shape the world to come.

I wanted to like this book so badly as her other works had been highly recommended to me. I am never going to be able to care what happens to a bunch of Silicon Valley billionaires. Too many characters, too many POVs, too much bouncing around, not enough editing.

Thanks for the opportunity to read but this didn’t do it for me.

Great, but somewhat disturbing, story...disturbing because I could see things actually happening in real life that happened in the story. The characters were well written and story gripping.

I didnt get a chance to leave a full review before the publication date, however I did read this one and gave it 4.5 stars

A glimpse into what our future might look like if things don't change. Overall, I struggled with this book, but I did like the futuristic thriller aspect of it.

Naomi Alderman's "The Future" presents a world transformed by advancements in medical technology, where individuals have the ability to predict their future health outcomes with unprecedented accuracy. Alderman skillfully explores the ethical dilemmas inherent in this scenario, prompting readers to consider the implications of such knowledge on personal autonomy, healthcare systems, and societal norms. For students interested in bioethics, the novel serves as a springboard for critical discussions about the ethical responsibilities of scientists, the rights of individuals, and the role of technology in shaping our future.

However, while the novel excels in its exploration of bioethical themes, it lacks the depth and complexity characteristic of other dystopian classics. The world-building feels somewhat superficial, with limited exploration of the societal structures and cultural dynamics that underpin the dystopian society portrayed in the novel. As a result, students may find it challenging to fully immerse themselves in the narrative and grapple with its implications beyond the surface level.

Furthermore, the character development in "The Future" is somewhat lacking, with many of the characters feeling one-dimensional and lacking depth. While this may be intentional to underscore the dehumanizing effects of the society depicted in the novel, it detracts from the overall impact of the narrative and limits students' ability to empathize with the characters' struggles and experiences.

Despite these shortcomings, "The Future" still holds value as a supplementary text in a unit on dystopian fiction and medical bioethics. Its exploration of timely and relevant themes provides fertile ground for classroom discussions and critical analysis. Paired with other texts that offer more nuanced world-building and character development, "The Future" can contribute to a comprehensive exploration of the ethical implications of scientific progress and the complexities of dystopian societies.

This felt very much like a sophomore slump. The Power was so creative, so propulsive. The Future fell totally flat for me. I felt no urge to pick it up. The characters lacked depth, the plot felt unevenly paced, it just wasn’t very readable to me.

The Future by Naomi Alderman

(Release Date- November 7th, 2023)

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Dystopian novels aren't usually my go-to, but when @simonbooks sent me the book overview, I was intrigued. I'm happy to say I wasn't disappointed.

This book is fast-paced, filled with significant ideas that really make you think. It's not a light beach read; it's intense, but the journey it takes you on is quite enjoyable. The themes hit close to home, especially since Naomi's portrayal of the future feels all too plausible.

Throughout the story, there are breaks in the form of blog-style posts. I found these conversations and prophecies to be quite engaging. For me, Badger was the standout character, bringing a lot to the story. And the ending, well, it was both unpredictable and mind-blowing.

Thank you @simonbooks for providing me with this free ARC in exchange for thoughts. 🫶🩷 #SimonBooksBuddy

✨Overview✨

The Future—as the richest people on the planet have discovered—is where the money is.

The Future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers.

The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons.

The Future is a handful of friends—the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet-famous survivalist—hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization.

The Future is what you see if you don’t look behind you.

The Future is the only reason to do anything, the only object of desire.

The Future is here.

"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 interview

What 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 interview

BTW, 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?

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 interview

Consider 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 interview

Zhen’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 date – 11/7/23

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.

Eight years ago, Alderman took the literary world by storm with The Power, a crunchy science fiction novel with a wide canvas whose topic was no less than the rewriting of human civilization. The fact that her follow-up novel has a similar title, and opens with several characters receiving news that the apocalypse is nigh, creates the impression of a similarly broad scope. This is only one of the ways in which The Future seeks to wrongfoot its readers. Set in a world very similar to our own, its opening chapters introduce us to the CEOs of the world's biggest companies: Lenk Sketlish, a short-tempered megalomaniac whose conglomerate Fantail has fingers in social media, electric cars, and rapid transit tunnels; Zimri Nommick, an embittered nerd who has revolutionized the worldwide transportation of goods with Anvil; and patrician patron of the arts Ellen Bywater, who ousted the founder of technology company Medlar, which continues to make sleek, paradigm-shifting products. All three are keenly aware of the mess—economic, environmental, political—that the world is in, and of the role that their own products and companies have played in increasing political polarization, encouraging deforestation and destructive resource extraction, and producing waste and greenhouse gas emissions. Their solution is to build lavish bunkers with elaborate security systems in which they can ride out the end of the world, and they also have systems in place to secretly abscond as soon as they believe the balloon has gone up. As the novel opens, this appears to have happened, and the evacuation occurs.

Immediately, however, the story moves backwards in time, introducing us to Lai Zhen, a popular vlogger in the survivalist community, and to Martha Einkorn, Lenk's personal assistant. The two women meet and feel an immediate physical and romantic connection, without fully realizing how similar they are. Zhen has survived war and spent time in refugee camps; Martha fled the compound of her doomsday preacher father as a teen; both have spent time wondering what survival actually means, and more broadly, what the meaning and purpose of human civilization is. Martha's father believed that humans lost their way when they gave up hunting and gathering, a life of self-sufficiency and communion with one's environment, for settled agricultural living, whose hardships must constantly be distracted from with meaningless baubles. But Martha sees the value of these baubles—of art and culture and science—even as she recognizes how much of the sickness her father diagnosed in modern society does exist. Zhen's followers are obsessed with finding the latest gadget that can assure their survival, looking for certainty in increasingly uncertain times. As someone who has had to flee for her life (and who ends up doing so again early in the novel) Zhen sympathizes with that need. But she also tries to instill in them the recognition that survival is not a solitary pursuit, and that the most important thing they'll need after the end of the world is people they can trust, and a community run on rational, compassionate terms.

As The Future moves further and further into the past, its plot seems to decohere, or rather to become something quite different than what its early chapters led us to expect. Martha forges relationships with other people in Lenk, Zimri, and Ellen's orbits, commiserating over their shared frustration at being yoked to people with tremendous power who seem determined to use it in the most destructive ways. In a second timeline, Zhen discovers that Martha installed a survival AI on her phone, meant to protect her in dangerous situations. In her pursuit of this technology, she discovers the bunker plan and learns of the CEOs' belief that the apocalypse is already in train. Eventually it becomes clear that there is a story beneath the story, and that The Future is less a post-apocalypse novel as a heist story, an attempt to wrest power from people who will never give it up on their own, in a world that seems entranced by it.

Plotwise, this doesn't entirely work—the novel's revelations are a lot easier to anticipate than Alderman perhaps intended, and a long final segment in which Zhen discovers what became of the CEOs can end up feeling repetitive and solipsistic. Plus, there's a bit of wishful thinking in The Future's implicit belief that the world's problems begin and end with a few billionaires, and that all it will take to put us on a path to a better future is for better people to take their place. But at its best, the novel offers many intriguing riffs—including some that are rooted in mythology and religion—on some of the fundamental questions of human civilization, on the constant struggle between individualism and community, between simple living and the dazzling complexity of our culture. The question that Lenk, Zimri, and Ellen keep asking—when is it time to go?—is, the novel ultimately concludes, the question of despair. When do you give up on humanity, on civilization, on your own community, on a life that has just been shattered by war and catastrophe? And what happens after you walk away? To her credit, Alderman recognizes that simple triumphalism is too easy a response to such questions, that some communities do need to collapse, and sometimes it is necessary to walk (or run) away. But what this thought-provoking novel persuasively argues is that whatever answer you give, it must be made in the understanding that you are not alone.

I recommend this title because it is entirely engaging and maybe a little relatable to the times.

End of the world.
Corruption.
Billionaires vs the others.

Thank you so much to the publisher and Netgalley for the e-ARC! I will be reviewing and/or showcasing this book on my social media accounts when I can. Thanks again very much appreciated and looking forward to this book!

Naomi Alderman takes on big tech moguls and climate disasters in The Future. It was completely engrossing and should be used as a playbook for our future. I've been pushing this book on everyone I know.

I really wanted to love this. I liked The Power even though it was a bit difficult to tie together the storylines. I was hoping that was what was happening with novel but I just couldn't gather any sympathy/empathy for any of the characters.

This is a well written book. It has some fine lines, a few well-conceived set pieces, a fair share of perceptive and insightful observations, and occasionally a lean and edgy narrative drive. The premise is enticing, and many of the characters are engaging. The subtle mocking of the central tech titans was especially entertaining. In places the book can be preachy and heavy handed, but that struck me as part of the deal, considering the premise and the way the plot developed. I would encourage inquisitive readers to give the book a try.

I really really enjoyed Naomi Alderman's previous novel, The Power, so I was super excited to read this. I unfortunately didn't like this nearly as much as I was anticipating. The futuristic setting was interesting but I did't really care about any of the characters or anything that was going on with them. It was cool that the author intertwined things that are happening present day, or within the last few years, as "history" and the reason why things were the way that they are in the future. The concept of this novel was super cool, the fact that the billionares are actively causing distruction and the advances in technology, but I just wish that there was deeper and more impactful conversations around these topics. It would have been nicer to see more converstaions about how "money is the root of all evil" more than what is commonly talked about now... CAPITALISM! Overall, my experience reading this was just ok and I'm disappointed that I didn't love it.

This wasn't my favorite book but it definitely wasn't the worst. I thought it could've used a little more world-building and character background.

Five Stars – thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to read this exciting novel

As a big fan of Naomi Alderman’s “The Power” I was very excited for the release of this book. As a big fan of dystopian literature, the description of this novel was instantly appealing to me. I’d describe this book to be more speculative fiction, though. Scary enough, it felt close enough to a possible version of the world we live in today. The pacing of the book is great, there were parts where it has hard for me to put down.

Several of the characters are obvious “stand ins” for business leaders in big tech we all know today. They’re all rich, powerful and have questionable motives. They’re clear villains here and Alderman does a great job to remind the reader that they do not have humanity’s best interest in mind.

There are a few characters who are not billionaires who want to help humankind, and their stories and connections are very intriguing to read about.

There are also numerous bible/religion/sermon tie-ins that are also quite interesting. I think most readers would find these parts alluring, too. They’re not preachy and their purpose is to strengthen to the plot and storytelling. Alderman did a great job here!
This book would definitely appeal to fans of books like the Power, Handmaid’s Tale and other books with strong women characters in dystopian world. But it’s attractiveness is not jump limited to those groups. Lovers of adventure, technology, social media criticism and beyond should find this to be a great read, too.

The biggest thing that stands out about this book is the unexpectedness. I was so caught off guard by where the plot went. I enjoyed the dystopian/end of the world vibes and LGBTQ+ representation. I did not care as much for religious overtones. I was goad to read this as it was not something I would usually pick up but I struggled to get into this. Thanks to the publisher for the opportunity to read and review!