This is one of those books that i had a really hard time starting--and then once i started it, i had a really, really hard time putting it down. It's a near-future dystopia (~10 years from now) with loosely disguised players. So much happens, and it's hopeful in a way that i needed to read right now.

I was so excited to read this after loving the Power. It's as impressive, as compelling, and as unputdownable. I loved it.

Grateful for the ARC and chance to read this gem by Alderman. The premise and overviews grabbed me right off and was excited to acquire the ARC and chance to dive in.
It did not disappoint.
A really good read that parallels current realities and potential pending disasters. Nicely crafted characters who chase very tangible paths. Alderman's careful release of the story and plotlines keep readers turning pages to see what happens next.
More than just a novel idea and timely parallels, she posits realistic pulls on our humanity, motivations, and reactions to things racing at us all. Great balance of thriller, thinker, and societal reflection. Hopeful and tragic. Glad to have been along for the ride.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for this ARC. This book will be published on November 7, 2023.

This book was magnificent!! It’s a long book but so engaging and fast paced you don’t even notice. I love the post-apocalypse, sci-fi, future tech genre and this book did not disappoint. It is one of the most original in these genres I’ve read in the past several years.

The characters are all interesting and you develop a relationship with each of them for different reasons. The world-building is phenomenal and is very realistic to potential future, post-capitalist society. This story makes you feel all the emotions. It was funny, thought provoking, intense, and beautiful.

I highly recommend this book. This book is definitely in the top three of books read this year. I will definitely be going back to read The Power. Thanks again #SimonBooks, #NetGalley, #NaomiAlderman for the opportunity to read this book for an honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC of Naomi Alderman's follow up to The Power. In The Future, Alderman tackles the issues of greed, technology, AI and climate change. The first half of the book moves slowly, as we are introduced to a slew of both major and minor characters. But once past that, it becomes a page turner. The plot - three wealthy technology giants long for the end of the world so they can each hole up in their palatial bunkers while the rest of the world dies. Meanwhile each of them has someone close who wants to thwart their plans and instead use the technology to solve earth's problems. What actually happens is a highly interesting, if totally implausible outcome. The story has more holes than Blackburn Lancashire, but just go with it. The ride is well worth it. This one won't make you say, "what if?" like The Power did, but it will most definitely keep your attention. Highly recommend. #TheFuture #NetGalley #NaomiAlderman

This book was an incredible amount of fun. The characters are unique and well drawn. The plot has twists and unexpected turns. And the wish fulfillment of saving the planet through dismantling the tech oligarchy is pretty satisfying, if sadly unrealistic. The best part is that this book doesn’t take itself too seriously. Enjoyed my read from cover to cover.

Really enjoyed this read. I tend to love speculative near-future fiction and how it predicts and reckons with the logical trajectory of our current path of unfettered techno-capitalism, ecological collapse, and billionaire special interests. Here, we follow three tech moguls who are building bunkers and preparing for the end of the world, more willing to throw up their hands at the consequences of their inventions – it's very obvious to see parallels to Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, et al – than to examine and change the ways they contribute to the degradation of society and the planet before it's too late. But for something that appears dystopian – the literal collapse of human civilization – THE FUTURE ends on such a utopian note, with a delightful if slightly preposterous (given human nature) solution to our societal issues. It's a lot to think about, in a good way.

Dipping your toes into Alderman's world feels like a sneak peek at a tech-driven tomorrow. It's eerily close to home, making you wonder—given all our tech advancements—where exactly are we headed? The story pulls you in two directions, sometimes feeling unsettling, and at other times, giving you a glimmer of hope.

The core narrative is the heartbeat of the book, exposing the desires and fallout of our tech titans. However, it can feel a bit like completing a puzzle, only to discover a heap of extra pieces leftover. You can see the image it's supposed to form, but you're left wondering about those odd pieces.

If you're expecting super deep, memorable characters, well, this might not be the book for that. The story's the star here. But that's okay because it's got enough juice to make you ponder, debate, and question. All in all, "The Future" takes you on a whirlwind journey. It might not be smooth sailing throughout, but it gets the gears in your head turning, and isn't that the point of a good read?

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for the ARC.

I love a dystopian, apocalyptic, technological story and this hit all the high spots. There’s a swath of character, but all are easily distinguishable. The story flashes back and forth but you never lose track of where you are. I opened the book with the idea I’d read a few chapters and ended up reading it all throughout the day. Excellent writing, excellent story. Highly recommended.

My Thoughts:
In this dystopian story we follow three big corporate billionaires who have control over the Technology and what’s happening and the plans they have to save themselves and the ones who save us. This story was a bit scary because it so close in some sense to Reality today. You will find yourself wondering about the ending and thinking about this story for an awhile after reading it.

Captivating dystopian story as a commentary about society’s current destructive path

I enjoyed this fictional account of the not too distant future based on what the world, its people, societies, and the planet itself, currently looks like. It certainly made me think, validated some of my concerns and gave me lots of new things to reevaluate. I would definitely recommend this book.

At the beginning, the story is told through multiple POVs and, as a result, it started off choppy with little cohesive flow to it. It was confusing and felt as if the reader is dropped in mid-story. This writing style made it hard at first to follow the storyline or differentiate between the characters. But hold on because at about 10% the story gets a more consistent flow by a rewinding of the storyline to a past point and then walking us back to the “event” that occurs at the beginning of the book. This change definitely upped my investment in the storyline and my willingness to keep reading the book.

Once the story passes 10%, it is much less choppy and becomes an engaging read and an interesting commentary about income disparity, corporate greed, technology and the resulting harmful consequences to society and the planet. But it is not non-fictional preaching. The story was well written and included witty dialogue, three dimensional characters, and an engaging storyline. The main plot is centered around three tech billionaires (Lenk, Ellen, and Zimri), the companies they run (obvious parallels to Meta, Apple and Amazon), and four other people who orbit around these billionaires (Martha, Albert, Selah, and Badger). The final character is a fifth person (Lai) who is an influencer and a survivalist who has some moments with one of the four which pulls her into the event. The author uses current events, bible references, a past cult, and future projecting to lead the reader to the what if….what if….What if we try to correct course. What if we don’t. “There is a trajectory to human affairs. At a certain point, things become inevitable.”

After the story catches back up to the event, the story moves quickly to its unexpected/expected conclusion. The book, particularly in its middle portion includes some powerful language and imagery that elicited a multitude of different thoughts and feelings.

There’s pessimism - “Enclosures were justified in the name of efficiency: take all those little strips of common land and put them together and you could farm them with bigger plows and single crops. You could really achieve something. And they did; they made a lot of money for people who were already rich and powerful, and none of that wealth went back to the poor. They took something that used to belong to everyone and found a way to make it theirs.” “That’s what these social media and big technology companies have done. They’ve found a way to siphon off something that no one used to be able to own. They invented a new kind of fence to make a new kind of enclosure. …[They] have taken something that used to belong to each of us, put it together into useable data chunks, and used it to become very, very rich.” “We just have to stop letting a few people use what belongs to all of us to make themselves richer and richer.”

There’s optimism tinged with pessimism - “We have no shortage of good projects; there are thousands of people working on these things already and they are proven and scalable. The reason you feel despairing about this and think it’s impossible … is because they want you to think it’s impossible.”

There’s realism - “The future calls us on one painful step at a time and the first rule of life is to survive.”

There’s tentative hope - “There is a beautiful world on the far shore, where we’re not destroying all the species anymore and our cities are clean and beautiful and full of wild birds, and our cars are all electric and all shared, and the streets are safe for kids to play in, and we get to keep TV and the internet and concerts and ball games and all that good stuff, and fine, we’re eating mostly vegan food but it’s good, and if we can just get through the pain barrier as quickly as possible, then we’re there.”

Finally there’s pure hope - “It is morning again and I am standing in the sunshine at last.”

Definitely read this book. Think deep thoughts. And maybe work toward a different what if. “No state is perfect; no utopia exists but that it leaves someone out. All we can be is alert, like Fox, to the changing winds. To ask ourselves in each new situation: What would we hate anyone to do to us? And: Who have we forgotten? To exist in motion, falling forward, trying to bend our own histories toward what is fair and kind, what is sensible and good. We will keep failing, but final success was never the point.” 4.5 stars.

What woman ( and I’m guessing many enlightened men) didn’t love the author’s previous book The Power? Alderman could have written an appliance manual next and I’d be eager to sign on.. Happily this is no appliance manual. The publisher’s summary gives you a fair assessment: “ a handful of friends plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.” but that doesn’t tell the half of it. There were times while reading this I thought my head would explode either from the overload of technology or the end times anxiety or the crosses and double crosses of the plot..
If the previous title was The Power, I’m renaming this The Powerhouse!
So many complex characters combining good and not-so-good qualities. So many situations mirroring the world as we know it today. And so many ethical decisions that leave the reader wondering how you would respond. Calling the story a heist diminishes the significance of the scheme created by this group. The ultimate goal is always to reframe human society to make it healthy and fulfilling for people as they find their rightful place in the natural world. It is great fun to see altruistic smart people put a plan into effect and because they are far smarter than I, there were twists along the way I didn’t see coming, all due to the author’s great writing..
And most significant of all (and no spoiler) is Alderman’s hint at the end that the story is not yet over.

In The Future, the world is about to end.

This is literally true of Alderman's book, but it's also a sentence that would make logical sense to me if someone approached me on the street and whispered it in my ear. The world is flooded and on fire and at war, and things feel apocalyptic, and so the beginning of this novel, in which 3 tech giants get on a private plane because they've been alerted (before anyone else) that the world is ending and they should evacuate to their cushy private bunkers, felt a little too real. And maybe that is our future (Bezos definitely has a bunker, right?), but the rest of The Future makes the argument that assuming the end is nigh may just be a psychological trick we're using to shortcut the unpleasantness of uncertainty. For so many of us, a known end is more comfortable than an unknown one, even if the known option is terrible. What makes Alderman's characters so compelling is their inextinguishable hope, and their willingness to use the levers they have access to to change what they can.

Alderman wrestles with big questions in this novel (my favorite being, "Will we leave the world or will the world leave us?"), and certainly it's up there with The Children's Bible for the way it made me reimagine the end times. The things I appreciate most about The Future, though, are narrative, not ideological. I love Alderman's depiction of the queer romance between a survival influencer and a former cult member turned Big Tech bigwig. I love her rendition of a survivalist site called Name the Day, where people fight in the comments section about what board a comment belongs on (strategies? Old Testament prophecy?). I love the puzzle of the novel, the way I was never quite sure what people were plotting. And if I didn't love the neatness of the ending, it's perhaps because I'm still more of a cynic than I'd like to be.

Long story short, this is a top book of 2023 for me. Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the ARC!

I loved this book. It's smart, prescient, relevant, and as twisty as the path of a samara seed.

There were times when I wondered where we were going. It felt like following the illumination of a short-range flashlight in a pitch-dark forest at times, unable to see a clear path and wondering why we were in this neck of the woods. But it all came together in the end, like a well-designed labyrinth intent on directing all those lost in its maze to the same end.

I'm overusing the similes here, but suffice to say that I think this is a book well worth reading, especially in today's world.

I really liked this book, but I'd be curious about what the general public will think. I've worked closely with social media and technology a number of years, so a lot of the these ideas in here seemed very cool to me, personally.

For instance, quotes like this one: "That's where we are right now with the media and the internet: stuck inside a cave with the worst person we know, finding increasingly degrading things to do to each other and feeling righteous while we do them." (Hello, Twitter).

Building off of these feelings, the book kicks off a brilliant premise that I can't really go into here without giving away spoilers. Let's just say it involves an intricate plan to save humanity involving a fictional group of big tech players. The plan is super smart and, given how it's set up, makes a lot of sense. (Although the implementation is complex as hell).

Honestly, this story is dense (but I dug it, personally.) However, the characters are enjoyable (special thanks to Alderman for featuring more female power players than you'd find in real life) and the plot moves along at a rapid pace. At first Lai Zhen seemed not to fit into the plot as much, but eventually her characters arc makes sense.

This is a complicated caper (maybe that's too light of a word? this is about saving humanity) but this book ties up every single loose end. (Maybe too tidy?) It's quite the writing trick to juggle this kind of complex plot and bring everything end for a solid landing.

Ultimately the Future is about the battle between love, compassion and coexistence, versus hubris, wealth and control. The book is firmly rooting for the former in quotes such as this one: "The only future we ever own resides in our trust in others, their trust in us."

Thank you to the author and NetGalley for granting me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I had previously read Alderman's The Power and had a few preconceived notions about this book. Silly me. I loved The Power, but The Future was just so so so different! (in such incredible ways!)

I loved how the story unfolds... back and forth a bit in time. Alderman reveals bits and pieces carefully... never too much, but just enough. I had a very hard time pacing myself to read this story (and I stayed up until almost 3AM to finish it... so that pacing did not work out so well!)

The story led me down such fascinating paths... and was profoundly compelling. But the ending... oh.my.gosh!! I never, ever saw that coming! Brilliant!

If you liked The Power, you will LOVE The Future! I highly recommend! Really... read it! I cannot stop thinking about it!

I would like to thank Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for this ARC. This book will be published on November 7, 2023.

In the not so distant future the world as we know it is close to disaster. Three tech giants have decided that they want to flee to their underground bunkers before things get bad though it could be easily argued that their technology sped up the earth's demise. But they don't know everything about their technology.

This is a philosophical journey that delves into human nature, how much we can control with technology, and also slightly about how religious narratives can shape how we view the world.

The premise of this book was interesting and I enjoyed the twist within the book. The characters were somewhat one dimensional, and the whole tie in with religion (Abraham and Lot) was weird and offputting. The pre-apolocalypse and survival genre is also not my normal genre of choice to read.

There are many things happening in this book as well as many characters which I ended up having to make little notes along the way to keep up. There are sections in a forum format that I did not enjoy how they were executed. While not a fan of the book I did see relevance in how it parallels many things happening in our world currently in regard to things such as data mining and technological advancements. The Future is coming and this gives a plausible outlook to why that could be.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. This wavered between 3 and 4 stars for me. I really enjoyed the author’s previous novel and found this also raised important questions about our society.

We follow three corporate giants and the people who orbit them, in an often scathing commentary on greed, the environmental crisis, and our own willingness to prioritize ease and immediacy over the common good. Set in the not so distant future, this sci-fi adjacent, post-apocalyptic (maybe?) glimpse into a world of information overload, social media manipulation, and technological “advances” pulls back the curtain on what our own future could look like. It also gives us a vision of how different that future might be for those with the wealth and opportunity to create their own escape hatch from a crumbling world.

I found the plot compelling and the subject matter thought provoking, even if I felt the character development was a bit weak. The author demonstrated a knowledge of subjects ranging from AI to the Bible to create a well thought out story that I’ll be turning over in my mind for some time to come.

So good! This one really kept me turning pages and guessing at what was going to happen. Scary in the sense that I feel that we're moving (if we're not already there) toward the future described in the book. Excellent storytelling.