Very cool premise but the execution and ultimate outcome was far too tidy and far-fetched for me. There wasn’t a strong enough critique of billionaires, despite that being the purpose of the book.

Thank you to the publisher, Frenzy Books, and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In the not-too-distant future, three wealthy and powerful tech giants form an alliance to make each other richer, knowing that they are leading the world to destruction with their technologies as the effects of climate change worsen, the rich get richer and the poor become poorer and social media is intentionally manipulated by their algorithms to sway public opinion on critical matters. Even as the situation worsens, these CEOs have already made preparations to ensure their survival when the apocalypse comes by building extravagant, secret bunkers. Meanwhile, there are others within their orbit, a group of friends, who come up with a risky plan to thwart their scheme and use the advanced technology they have at hand to fix Earth’s problems instead. If they can pull off this scheme, they could save the planet, if it goes wrong, the apocalypse is certain.

This book has been on my radar since early this year and between all the hype about it and the high praise from early reviews, I knew I had to pick this up. The blurb promised a mix of sci-fi and dystopian plot which is something I hadn’t read in quite some time, so I was excited to return to these genres. However, this book simply did not work for me.

The Future is based on a plot and in a state of things that was not too far removed from the Earth we know. The world described in this book and the actions of the characters could be all too real which made this a highly intriguing read and a smart one too. The core plot itself was fascinating and completely unpredictable with several unexpected twists which I really enjoyed.

The writing style was definitely good but the material of most of this book was just not for me and I found myself bored very often. The pacing was also off, and close to 60% of the book felt like it was going in circles with no clear delineator between past and present narratives. The POV shifts and interludes were not smoothly done and when you add in timeline shifts, this was not a smooth read.

I only started to really get engaged in the story after this point when the narrative returned to the present and the billionaires have evacuated after being alerted of an incoming catastrophic event and a survivalist expert who got caught up in this whole business ends up on the remote island with them.

I didn’t like the philosophical parts from the survivalist website at all, and after struggling through the first such interlude, I started skimming and later, entirely skipping these portions. The message board formatting itself was quite jarring, though I don’t know how much of that was due to my copy being an ARC. What little of this I did read was extremely tiresome and I didn’t see why so much page time was taken up the philosophy and life in a doomsday cult and even more by a whole lot of biblical discussions that seemed to have no direct connection to the story. From the comments I saw in reviews before I started reading, it seems to be somewhat relevant to the story, but not reading these sections didn’t have any impact on my understanding of the main plot.

I found it quite difficult to connect to the main character much less any of the others. The three CEOs were such generic characters, they didn’t stand out much. To be honest, I think the plot was so convoluted that it didn’t allow any time to focus on the characters and what little development they had.

There were some hints dropped throughout about the twist at the end of this book so it wasn’t a huge surprise but I did like how clever it was and how the tables were turned on the CEOs. On the other hand, after all the build up throughout the book, I was hoping for a slightly more grandiose ending than what it turned out to be.

Overall, I tried really hard to like this book, but I found The Future to be a rather disappointing read and the mixed media narration didn’t work for me. The story never managed to truly hook me into it and I found it very difficult to get through even though some of the plot points were interesting. The Future wasn’t my type of read, but if the plot appeals to you, maybe give it a try.

I loved this book. I also loved The Power, but I think Alderman's characters are stronger here. I really loved the cast she built, their complexity created a sense of realism that I really enjoyed. The world she built was also so compellingly close to our current world that everything seemed plausible and therefore mildly disturbing, but in a good way. It felt extremely prescient which made it so compulsively readable. I also enjoyed the way the plot played out and the twists through the end. I liked that it was a bit unpredictable. I also think this will be excellent book for book clubs and will probably use it for one at the library here.

This was a really interesting climate change/dysptopian novel with a full cast of characters (including some animals). Thought-provoking, original and excellent on audio with a great group of narrators! Highly recommended for fans of books like Songs for the end of the world by Saleema Nawaz or the MaddAddam series by Margaret Atwood. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital copy in exchange for my honest review!

“Imagining bad futures creates fear and fear creates bad futures”

The Future by Naomi Alderman was an incredibly intelligent and well delivered look at what some possible outcomes of our world could be. The beginning was a bit tricky to get into as we are meeting all the players and hopping a little bit in the timeline, but I promise you, once things start to unravel, it happens very, very quickly.

If you knew the end of the world was coming, would you save yourself and let the rest of humanity suffer the consequences? Would you take a golden ticket to ensure you made it through the end of humanity as we know it? These are some of the questions that come up while reading this incredible book. I almost forgot for a few chapters that I was reading a fiction and was so sucked into this potential future of our planet.

If you want to read a very realistic and deep dive discussion into what makes humans think and respond, I highly suggest this book. You might have some uncomfortable moments are you debate whether it is better to sacrifice the few to save the many. Are you a fox? Or are you a rabbit?

This book is a thrilling near future book that scarily reads like non fiction.

I love Naomi Alderman’s writing. The Power was one of my top favourite books in 2019. You should read it. And then you must read The Future. The book jumps between different perspectives and characters: between billionaires in charge of massive companies (think companies like Apple, Meta and Google) who really control our world and our lives. What happens when their lives are threatened and they flee to their safety bunkers (I one hundred percent believe these kind of bunkers totally exist and the very wealthy have them hidden around the world). If these controlling billionaires disappeared, what could happen in the world? Would it crumble? Could people build something better?

This book is set a few decades from today, which is one of my favourite time periods to read or watch. The future still felt similar to now: climate change is a huge issue, civil unrest and wars are raging, and most normal people are working to survive. Sounds familiar?

We meet the billionaires and some key people who work for them, sleep with them and have sold their companies to them. Everyone wants something for each other. Interspersed is a character who has become an influencer, so to speak, in the prepper/ survivalist world. It seems like many of the world are waiting for the world to end.

Throughout the book, there’s some interesting conversations and pathways about learnings from the bible, the parable of the fox and the rabbit, archaeological discoveries, and how patterns repeat themselves until someone is brave enough to change them. It left me thinking about the story and characters long after I’d finished the book.

While there are a lot of characters to meet in this story, and some of the writing felt a little background info heavy, and therefore some of the plot dragged on, I found this book fascinating. Especially as I thought about Naomi writing this a couple of years ago at least and then reflecting on events of the last few months of: wars around the world, billionaires getting richer as their employees use food stamps, and the wealthy dying in a submarine explosion as floods devastated other areas of the world. I started reading this book before I made dinner one evening. By the time I looked up from the pages, a couple of hours had passed and I ended up just eating popcorn so I could get back to the book.

This is probably a case of this book being too smart for me because my reading experience of it was full of extremes. I, at turns, found this to be too real, incredibly clever, and very skimmable.

I definitely think this is a book that every reader will get something out of and I hope a lot of people pick it up. I think there's a lot in here that is very relevant, very relatable (and thus somewhat depressing), but it's also got a clever element at play that I wish could be enacted in our own world. That isn't to say, however, that this was entertaining or an edge of your seat thrill ride. I did do some skimming -- mostly in the forum/storytelling posting sections, but I'm sure I also breezed past other bits, too.

Our cast of characters were not the most compelling though I definitely understand why we needed their perspectives but I think in some areas we just spent too much time not focusing on anything, really, or I was just too thick-headed for the attempted nuance.

But the ending was good (though not the very end, that part didn't land for me) and my favourite part of the fantasy is imagining we get the same kind of ending for our future, too. Here's hoping!

Naomi Alderman's The Future is based on a compelling premise. Unfortunately, I found the narration style a tad meandering and hard to follow. As a result, I had trouble connecting with the characters and the events of the story. I was interested enough to keep reading but ended up finishing without much of an impression. 3 Stars.

I loved the Power, but this was absolutely a miss for me. Part of it was the formatting of my kindle e-arc was horrendous, particularly the weird bible verse online forum chapters, but even without that, the jumpy narrative style and strange writing cadence was just not for me in any way.

Set a few decades ahead of where we are now, The Future imagines us trudging inexorably forward along our current dangerous path: with climate change and income disparity both worsening, power and wealth further concentrating in the hands of a few tech billionaires, and the internet manipulated by algorithms to anger or placate us into partisan camps. This is an interesting plot-driven read — with a Bible-study subthread that I did find particularly fascinating — but honestly, nothing felt like we were any further into the future: the world is not the polluted hellscape of Ready Player One or the dystopic authoritarian state imagined in The Handmaid’s Tale; this reads like the billionaire heads of Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (just slightly more monopolistic and going by other names) collude to further enrich themselves, knowing that if the world were to end tomorrow, even knowing that they had hastened that ending, they can unapologetically jet off to luxury bunkers designed to weather any storm. And I assume that this could be set in our current year and that that would still be true. Still: I was intrigued by the plot (even if I didn’t connect to it on a deep level as I did with Naomi Alderman's last novel, The Power) and I enjoyed the read. Three and a halfish stars, rounding down to three.