A very clever dystopian novel that kept me gripped all the way through.

The end of times is coming, and a few of the world's richest people have prepared for the future. How many are they willing to sacrifice?

The different threads of the story gradually come together as the past, present and future are revealed. With well-written characters and a story line that keeps you wondering, I felt all the emotions as I read this book. Highly recommend!

Naomi Alderman is an immediate read for me. I really enjoyed this book, so much so that I went out and bought a hard copy 😅

I absolutely loved The Power back in the day so I was really excited to read The Future. It didn't live up to the expectation, for me. The concept wasn't as exciting, the storyline not as pacy.

It dives into tech, power, and dystopian themes, with her signature sharpness and wit. The story explores a world where tech moguls are reshaping society in dark, sometimes terrifying ways, challenging ideas of power and morality. Alderman does a great job of making it thought-provoking while keeping the plot thrilling. It’s a bit unsettling but absolutely gripping—a smart, fast-paced read if you're into speculative fiction with depth.

Really loved the Power by the same author and that this science fiction tale is really going to make you think about technology and how we use it and how it could be used. Really recommend.

I tried really hard to like this book but unfortunately it wasn't for me.

The writing style is good, the plot is there but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

So i have this on my shelf a lovely hardback signed edition so when its time to read then ill be that version

Having thoroughly enjoyed Naomi Alderman The Power I’m quite sure this will be well written and characters ill love and most likely hate

Can not wait to read but the book has not called to me yet but it will let me know when its their time

Loved loved loved this. Have recommended it to everyone and got my whole family reading it. It's very clever, highly believable yet still so imaginative.

I previously loved Naomi Alderman's 'Power' novel, so when I saw that this author had written another (semi) dystopian, futuristic novel, I knew I needed to pick it up. I loved the callbacks to recent history - including actors such as Ryan Reynolds, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, etc.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I would say that the ending was predictable but it was more like the author set it up to lead the reader to the ending without confusion. Extremely well written and excellently researched, I would really recommend this to anyone who is worried about the future, who enjoys reading about technological advances - real or fictional - and who loves a dystopian read.

End of the world books are my kind of thing and this did not disappoint, everything I love with a futuristic twist .

Naomi Alderman has done it again. I'm starting to believe she may be the voice of our generation. This story is so hyper-realistic, I'm still thinking about it months later.

The Future is an enjoyable read. Slightly disconcerting at times as you know in the back of your mind that everything being discussed and imagined within the book is something you know could possibly happen in real life.

Lots of twists and turns as we have come to expect from Naomi who is a great storyteller. This story does involve themes of 'end of the word' scenarios but I absolutely loved it. I had to know what was happening next and what the characters were doing. Naomi is definitely up there on my favourite authors list.
Thank you to Netgalley, Naomi and the publisher for this ARC.

Thank you for offering me the opportunity to read this book, I enjoyed it very much. It was thought-provoking and full of a lot of fascinating characters. To top it all, there were some really unexpected changes throughout the story. I can definitely recommend this!

How far would you go to save humanity?
A thought provoking and twisty story from Naomi Alderman.
Three tech billionaires are planning their escape from an impending apocalypse, but not everything is as it seems. In a world where technology runs everything, and you can't trust anyone, what would you do to save the world?
I really enjoyed the themes of this book, the twists and turns kept me on the edge of my seat, and the introspective nature of the content was a great reminder of how we as a society are influenced by social media and greater powers.
I also loved the addition of a little email easter egg at the very end. It adds yet another twist and reminds you that everyone works to their own agenders.

Naomi Alderman's "The Future" had an intriguing premise but ultimately fell short for me. The plot felt scattered, it took me a long time to get into it and the pacing was inconsistent. Whilst there were interesting additions on technology, especially AI and society, they were overshadowed by a lack of cohesion. I struggled to stay engaged through it.

I went into this expecting The Future to be a fast paced and suspenseful dystopian tale - I just didn’t see that. Ultimately I did really enjoy this book but it took me an absolute age to get into it, and even when I was invested I just found it so incredibly easy to put down.

What I did love was the premise and the whole plot line. I absolutely loved this twist on a dystopian future and it really didn’t feel like this was set too far in the future which was perfect. This felt like such a realistic take on how things could turn and I loved that.

I also really enjoyed how many twists and turns this story went on - the betrayals, the lies, the deception - just brilliant.

For me the characters in general didn’t have the depth I wanted and I really felt like this could have been a much stronger read if it had gone through a really good edit - I’m convinced a third of the chapters could have been cut and it wouldn’t impact anything.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an E-ARC

Someone asked me what I was reading when I was about halfway through this book and I described it as "the world is ending and billionaires are terrible" which is odd because I could be describing real life.

That fact makes The Future quite a hard read in places because it can fill you with despair to look at the state of our planet and see the billionaires that don't care about the people they're exploiting or the nature they're destroying because they just want more money and see themselves as better than everyone else. So for an escape this probably isn't the book to read.

The tech billionaires in question in this book really make you go "yeah I hate you with every fibre of my being" but that to me shows how well written they are. I can read about Ellen, a ruthless CEO who managed to oust her predecessor, and hate her while also feeling empathy towards her when she's talking to her dead husband.

The real highlight of this for me though are the characters on the side of "save the world at all costs". I wanted to route for them and for Zhen who is stuck in the middle of this wild tale just by happening to get close to the PA of a tech billionaire.

The part of this I struggled with was the sermons and the religious aspect. Maybe it's growing up being forced to go to church multiple times a week but the second someone starts to sermonise or talk of God, even in the guise of human survival, I am turned right off. I found these parts a real struggle to get through and they dampened my overall enjoyment of the book down a star from where I would be sitting at without them.

I really struggled to get through this book. I found the plot totally unbelievable, It was a female based with loads of monologues that were too long winded. The concept was good but just was not for me.

The Future is a pretty big title to give to a novel. And in case you were in any doubt about the bigness of the themes, the first line starts with:

“On the day the world ended…”

Naomi Alderman has not written a post-apocalyptic novel about people eating each other amid the wreckage of our cities, however. It’s a much more hopeful book than that. It looks the end of the world dead in the eye, as I think any novel about the future must in these times of runaway climate change and irresponsible, war-mongering leaders, but it concerns itself more with the question of how we avoid it than how we survive it.

Alderman takes us back to the times before the day the world ended and shows us several strands, some involving three immensely powerful tech billionaires, others involving people close to them but emotionally estranged from them in various ways (the wife of one, the child of another, the executive assistant of the third), and another involving a tech survivalist/influencer called Lai Zhen who’s being shot at for reasons she doesn’t understand.

Those strands take a long time to come together, but when they do eventually converge, they do so in a satisfying way. There’s a major plot twist which I can’t reveal without ruining the book for some people, so I’ll stay away from it and just say that it’s worth persevering with all those separate strands.

Also interspersed throughout the book are extracts from a survivalist forum, many of them with religious overtones: discussion of Old Testament stories and of the teachings of a cult leader who’s connected with a couple of the main characters.

A lot of these discussions, and a lot of the points of action and character development in the book, are centred around the tension between fear and trust.

The tech billionaires have lived their lives based on fear: facing an uncertain and potentially dangerous future, they’ve chosen to defend themselves by accumulating wealth and property, walling themselves off from the world, creating bunkers to survive the apocalypse. The hugely powerful platforms and businesses they’ve built are based on the same instinct and consequently end up amplifying and monetising fear and anger among their customers and users.

The other characters, in various ways, choose the riskier but more rewarding route of choosing to trust. They love, they confide, they open themselves up to being hurt. There are several beautiful passages on trust, such as this:

“How does trust build between people? It is an offering and a receiving. It is putting yourself into the position to be hurt, just a little, and noticing that they refrain. It is the reaching out between people, laughing at the same moment. It is building a model of the other person inside yourself, placing them in the palm of your hand, rotating them and saying: Yes. I see the flaws and I see the dangers and nothing will happen here that will truly harm me. And it is saying: I would rather trust you than be alone.”

In the words of the cult leader, the fear/trust dynamic is an age-old struggle that goes back to the Bible and reflects the changes of the agrarian revolution. He says human beings lived for millennia like foxes, roaming freely and just taking from nature what little we needed to survive. But a few of us became so afraid of what would happen if we ran out of resources that we began to hoard, to fence off land and call it our own, to plant seeds to protect against future shortages. We worked harder and were constantly afraid, but we had more security. These people he calls rabbits.

Today, sedentary Rabbit has more or less conquered nomadic Fox. The vestiges of our earlier way of life linger only in some indigenous peoples and other nomadic groups, all of whom have been persecuted with a savagery that reflects Rabbit’s constant fear of Fox.

As the novel builds towards its denouement with the end of the world and that accompanying plot twist, the Fox/Rabbit dynamic again plays a central role. Will openness, fluidity and trust win, or will fear, suspicion and selfishness be more beneficial when the end of the world comes? The answers are surprising and go against the current of many end-of-the-world novels, but they’re also quite convincing.

Although I’d say The Future is a novel in which ideas and plot are more important than character development, the characters are still believable. Naomi Alderman is too good a writer to allow them to become mere representatives of different points of view. They exist as real, living people, and we care about what happens to them, even as we also consider bigger ideas about the future of the planet.

I didn’t entirely buy the ending of the book or the implication that we could avoid the end of the world with just a few changes of attitude and some different personalities in positions of power—I happen to think the issues go much deeper than that. But I did appreciate the way that this novel made me think about the problems we’re facing while following a mostly page-turning plot. I’m glad I read it, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to see our possible futures battle it out to an Old Testament soundtrack.