"but in the end it doesnt matter because the planet will sort its shit out, its survived more than us. and were all going to be stardust before long anyway, and then the universe will die and there never was much worth hoping for."

I picked this up through Netgalley with thanks to Naomi Alderman, 4th Estate and HarperCollins for gifting me this e-ARC

rating: ⭐⭐

my thoughts: i haven't read a dystopian in a long time, and with the future being based, well, in the not too distant future i thought that it was a good jumping in place. but the reality was, this book just did not do it for me.

the first half of the book focuses on character introductions, jumping around from the three tech giants, their children/spouses/successors, and lai zhen. add in forum posts that didn't function correctly (technically i was reading an e-arc but this just ruined the entire experience of trying to read through it) and add in the preachiness of the bible and constant verses and deep dives it was just not right for me. the entire first maybe 70% of the book was so bloody long winded, and there were maybe one of two scenes of which i actually enjoyed???

the split of the world between the tech giants and everything going on which seemed like our current world, and then add in the preppers/survivalists which i feel like are currently few and far between in our world, i just felt too disjointed because of the lack of timeline or distinguishing when/where the book was set - and maybe that was the premise because it could be our all too distant future (especially later on with the mentions of covid-19) but it threw me off.

i have to admit i did like the backstory of the apocalyptic cult and how martha came to be, but it also felt like the author was trying so hard and again it may be because of my sheltered upbringing and not being educated on cults or on americanisms that it just felt like such an americanised book and its one of the things that i'm not a massive fan of.

it also felt like majority of the book could have been cut out, it was so long winded with additional information literally everywhere and the end of the book with the twists honestly didn't even bother me.

if i had to say the things i enjoyed, it would have to be the first survival/escape scenes with zhen, as well as her travels to the survival bunkers. other people may enjoy this book, and it's not going to stop me from eventually reading/watching The Power, i just hope that it ends up being more enjoyable for me.

Wow, that was good. One for fans of Oryx and Crake. Fast paced and terrifyingly astute, I was absolutely gripped.

The Future by Naomi Alderman
Publication date: 7 November 2023
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4 stars
Thank you to NetGalley and 4th Estate for providing me with an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review
~~~~~
A handful of friends plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.
~~~~~
I read The Power from Naomi Alderman a couple of years ago and enjoyed it, so I was really looking forward to reading her new book. And I really liked this one too; it took a little while to get going, but once it did, I was hooked. This focuses on a dystopian near future, where the greed of the very rich is about to bring on the end of the world, but the very rich are going to be OK; they made sure of that.
This book touches on greed, capitalism, climate change and our consumerist society. It is not the most subtle in the points it's trying to make, but the plot took me places I couldn't have imagined; it was twisty and clever. I also enjoyed the multiple POVs, jumping timelines and - unexpectedly - the religious and philosophical discourse.
I'm two for two with this author and I'll happily read more from her.
~~~~~

I requested this after enjoying Alderman's 'The Power' and the blurb was appealing. I love dystopian, end-of-the-world fiction and this sounded like my sort of thing.
However, it just didn't do it for me. OK, the writing was great, but I found it hard to differentiate between the cast of unlikeable characters; there was a LOT of technology-related stuff to get my head around; and the plot veered all over the place.
After plodding through half of the book I was on the verge of giving up, but things got a little more interesting and I continued through to the end which was only satisfying because it meant that I could start reading something else instead.
I can't really put my finger on why I thought it was so bad. Naomi Alderman is a talented writer with a great imagination, but this book just didn't click with me. By the end I didn't care who died or what the overall outcome was.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review.

Hmm... Had I know the style of this book I probably would never have picked it up.

This is a dystopian thriller that is far from subtle in its attack on tech giants and the power that comes with their wealth and influence.

Sometimes satirical, occasionally thought provoking, there were some interesting parts of the narrative that I enjoyed. However, it was so heavy handed that I just felt I was being beaten about the head by all that's wrong with the world and what our future will like. Which is sad because Alderman shows some intelligence in her writing. But to resort to a commercial style thriller which descended from one level of crazy to another was not for me.

This honest review is given with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this book.

After a few novels, Naomi Alderman gained plenty of attention for her last novel The Power, a speculative look at what might happen in a shift of global power. She has followed that book up with something a little closer to reality, but still on the slightly speculative side. The Future takes as its premise three of the wealthiest people in the world and their plans for escaping what they see as an inevitable apocalypse. Readers soon find though that there is a lot more going on than appears on the surface.
The Future opens with the bizarrely named Lenk Sketlish, head of a Facebook/Twitter style social media platform called Fantail, Zimri Nommik, head of an Amazon-style goods delivery service called Anvil and Ellen Bywater, head of an Apple/Microsoft/Google/IBM style tech company called Medlar. The three are together when they get an alert that the apocalypse is imminent. They immediately put in place plans to escape with their nearest and dearest to pre-built luxury bunkers to wait out the end of the world. Alderman then drops readers back in time, she will come back to this moment and its aftermath, but before that she introduces survivalist star Lai Zhen, who starts a relationship with Lenk’s right hand Martha Enkorn. Enkorn has her own plans and it turns out is working with Zimri’s wife, Ellen’s son and the former head of Medlar to try and stave off the very apocalypse that their bosses and partners are dreading.
Alderman is very much in Neale Stevenson territory in The Future with its day-after-tomorrow technology, activist hackers and social conscience. And while there is enough plot to keep readers hooked, there is also plenty of speechifying, exposition and explanation. That said, this book has probably the most approachable and engaging explanation of AI, its benefits and its limitations, around. This aspect of the book is not only fascinating but also gives readers a better insight into the plot mechanics. Enkorn is the survivor of a religious cult so there is also a bit of religion to go round – both from her but also from the cult leader who also happened to be her father.
In structure The Future ends up being a kind of heist novel, with plenty of great twists and turns, with the set up generally explained after the fact. Like any good heist novel some parts of the plan don’t work out as planned, go wrong and have to be retooled on the fly. There is plenty of sleight of hand and misdirection to make all this work. But as already noted, it is this aspect, the secrets and revelations, that prevents The Future from becoming a series of lengthy (although interesting) lectures.
The most important aspect of The Future though is that its real focus is on people trying to make positive change. People who believe that the technology that now rules our lives can actually be turned to good. People who say: sure there may be an apocalypse on the horizon but also, maybe there isn’t, or maybe we can avert it or moderate its impacts. It is an idea starting to creep into science fiction through the solarpunk genre but one that has not yet had wide play. And for that reason alone, The Future is worth picking up.

After reading her other book The Power, I was so excited to get a review copy of The Future on @netgalley thanks so much @4thestatebooks

In true Naomi Alderman style we visit the world in a different state, although frighteningly not that unimaginable, from where we are now. Where the focus is on the apocalypse and survival videos are always trending.

The three major tech companies and their owners have the most power and appear to be joining together to help with climate change when in fact behind the scenes they are using their money and power to build their own security.

This book is very clever! It jumps about in time a little and there are parts when I wasn’t sure what was going on but it all unravelled at the end and I thought the ending was brilliant.

The only parts I didn’t enjoy were the web chats, mostly about the religious cult Enoch, and while some added to the story and the background of the characters, others didn’t and I just wanted to get back to the main plot when they popped up.

There are a lot of characters to keep track of but the author does a great job of focusing on a couple and building the profile of the others along the way so you can keep track. I’m not sure if I liked any of the characters, but tbh I don’t think you’re meant to! And it’s probably a bit more action based than the majority of my reads, but I loved it for it’s mostly fast paced and thrilling ride that it took me on!

Definitely recommend if dystopian/apocalypse thrillers are your thing!

I do feel like this was a 'wrong book at the wrong time' kind of moment because I just couldn't get into this novel - but also, I got very tired of reading "edgy" characters and I felt kind of disappointed by how Alderman wrote her female ones especially.

When three tech billionaires plan to escape from the world, the future is just around the corner.

I have to admit that I struggled with this book for the majority of it. I appreciate that it’s clever but the themes of technology, environment, religion and privacy seemed to bounce off each other without much combined meaning. Whilst the characters are there, I didn’t really care much about them. I was such a fan of Naomi Alderman’s last novel that I stuck with it and let stuff I didn’t understand wash over me.

The twist about 80% through is genius and definitely not something I saw coming. It makes sense of what I couldn’t understand up until that point and gave me an appreciation of what Alderman is doing. My general feeling is that unless you are very knowledgeable about key themes you may struggle but I personally think it is worth it to see the author pull of one of the best twists I’ve read in a long time.

This is an intriquing read. Of its times. Its central characters are so similar to social media multi millionaires of today You will be thinking of the underlying issues well into The Future

Alderman's previous The Power set a very high bar, and I am pleased to report that this book lives up to it. It's a little less violent and has a more uplifting story; a clever and interesting tale of a world on the brink and a handful of determined people's quest to save it.

We are introduced to a future not to far from now with global issues not too dissimilar to today's. Three billionaires have pretty much all the money, tech, logistics and social media under their control. These characters are transparently based on our own Zuckerberg, Bezos and Jobs and though all make token efforts to make environmental/social changes to try to stave off humanity's seemingly-inevitable decline; it's clear to those around them that it won't be enough. The story is about how the people closest to these obscenely rich figures - their wife, their child, their ousted ex-CEO, their assistant - decide to take matters into their own hands. Caught up in this web of secrets and wildly massive, world-shaking plans is Zhen, a survivalist with a big YouTube following who through sheer chance gets a front row seat to everything.

Alderman has obviously thought a lot about what it would be like if the world ends, but this book focuses more on how people would react if they knew the shit had hit the metaphorical fan; and the billionaires with their bunkers and their early-warning systems are instinctively despicable to the reader. We are firmly on the side of the world-savers and their efforts to try to reverse the damage that humankind has wrought on the planet with projects like large wildlife reserves meant to stay untouched and investment in systems that promote kindness instead of conflict.

I found the most interesting part of this book the development of an AI software that predicts disaster and danger on both a large and small scale. There is also a lot of navel-gazing in the form of religious philosophy and using parables to describe the eternal struggle between the Fox and the Rabbit (hence the cover art!) which boils down to hunters and gatherers versus farmers, wanderers versus sedentary humans. The concept of ownership and entitlement of and to land is posited as the root of most evils and it's an interesting theory that informs the plot.

Highly recommended for those who enjoy dystopian fiction. Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC.

Another dystopian future from Naomi Alderman, and one that I enjoyed reading. We follow a small cast of characters over an unspecified period of time, with some flashbacks to give s0me (sometimes very relevant, others not so much) background to the characters.

The good: I usually enjoy a multiple POV book. This was no exception, and I enjoyed that it was a small cast of characters we followed. The characters felt different enough and had experiences and views that overlapped on some aspects but diverged in others, which was interesting to see and compare through the story. I also really enjoyed having a female-centric dystopia in which the women are not being squashed, for once! It felt very empowering.

The bad: perhaps a bit too long, and I particularly didn't enjoy the chapters that pretended to be a forum discussion.

As a side note, it wasn't really clear how far into the past/future the flashbacks/flashforwards were. Months? Years? Once again Alderman plays with us as she did in The Power (but this kind of gets answered at the end).

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free eARC of this book in exchange for an honest opinion.

My thanks to Fourth Estate for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Future’ by Naomi Alderman.

On the day the world ended three tech billionaires, the richest people on the planet, receive alerts on AUGR, a top secret app, that summons them to drop everything and report to an airport where they would board a private plane.

Their cover story was that the three CEOs are in a closed session for negotiations about reducing carbon emissions. In reality they will fly to a staging post where two of them will be met by their own aircraft and then all three will be taken on to their lavish secret bunkers. Their only concern is their survival. Meanwhile a handful of friends, themselves connected to the billionaires, are hatching a daring plan that might be the greatest heist ever. No further details to avoid spoilers.

The Future’ does bop around in time, follows a number of narrative viewpoints, and includes forum chat exchanges so it did require a close reading in order to keep things straight. The focus of the plot is quite idea-based packed with philosophical concepts about the beginnings of human civilisation and the factors leading to its collapse.

There were also a number of Biblical references throughout, especially of Lot and his wife and daughters. Given the theme of a cataclysmic end to human civilisation and the presence of an end-of-days cult, these made sense though I found them difficult to relate to. The same was true of its characters as aside from doomsday prepper, Lai Zhen, I didn’t find them particularly engaging.

In addition, the constant shifting between episodes of high action and the intellectual musings about religion and other subjects made the pacing rather patchy.

Overall, while I appreciated many of the ideas that informed ‘The Future’ and it scored some direct hits with respect to aspects of our computer-dominated society, it didn’t really work for me as a techno-thriller.

Naomi Alderman's THE FUTURE, while set *in* the future, is terribly prescient. Focusing on a main cast that involves a small group of tech billionaires, the story looks at their inordinately large grip on the workings of the world and the subsequent consequences. To say it's unnerving isn't quite enough: some of the developments can be see in real-time in our own world. As a result, the story is gripping and quite terrifying, compelling you to turn the pages not only to find out what might happen to us a society, but how we could ever come through the other side. It looks at people who know that the way we are headed is nowhere good, and how little changes and actions can sometimes create a groundswell large enough to actually divert our course. In that sense, it's a comfort of some sort: but I still need people in power to READ THIS BOOK. The plot is intriguing, exciting, and plays well through differing character viewpoints. There's a twist that I did see coming from a little way off, but another slightly unexpected one on top of that, which I enjoyed. A sobering but great read.

This new book by the author of The Power is a superb thriller, as well as a damning critique of modern society and technology.

The relationship between Lai Zhen, a kind of survivalist, and Martha Einkorn, the wife of the founder of a giant technology company, is the pivot on which the book turns and it offers the opportunity to spotlight not only how mankind is destroying the world and itself, but also how it appears to be powerless to do anything else.

Then, there’s some topical comment about the story of Lot and Sodom from the Old Testament with contemporary relevance, and an unravelling of how new technology steals people’s identities, sell them lies and claims to be innocent and powerless.

It isn’t just doom and gloom either, because there is a way out which ironically involves the shakers and movers of world technology voluntarily heading for their private bunkers in the expectation of a world cataclysm which can possibly be avoided!

It’s a great read and Naomi Alderman holds all these linked plots together and presents a coherent argument as to how the future might be managed. Finally, there’s the neatest analysis I’ve seen of how social media easily degenerates into violence and social abuse. There’s a lot to think about!

Naomi Alderman’s The Power - a subverted Handmaids tale where women gain electric superpowers - has stayed with me ever since I read it in 2017 so I was beyond thrilled to get a preview copy of her latest dystopian novel.

There is a LOT going on - set in a near future society where a handful of tech billionaires are planning to safeguard their own futures in the event of an apocalypse, whilst allowing the rest of the world’s population to suffer the(ir) consequences.

There are huge lessons about climate change and what people are/should be/will never be prepared to do (would you suffer blackouts and travel restrictions for 5 years if it meant safeguarding the earth? I would, hundreds wouldn’t).

There are a few plotholes, which may resolve themselves on a second read - Alderman is a very clever writer and I’ve no doubt there are some subtle suggestions that flew by me in this read.

I’ve read a couple of reviews criticising the chapter structure and failure to use capital letters; baffling…it’s literature and this is perfectly accessible - hardly Ulysses. If you’ve read this book and the formatting bothers you let’s talk; I'm genuinely curiousx To me, it just enhanced the message.

I have a feeling this one is going to stay with me for a long time to come. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher.

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The crucial set-piece in Naomi Alderman's new speculative thriller, The Future, comes almost exactly at the midpoint of the novel. Marius, a Romanian university lecturer who speaks in rather stereotyped broken English, is passionately trying to convince his students that computers can't understand, learn, or feel. To do this, he evokes Donald Mitchie's matchbox and bead experiment from 1961. In short, he explains, Mitchie realised that if you use a matchbox to create a machine that drops either a black (O) or red (X) coloured bead, you can get the matchbox to play tic-tac-toe. By using very many matchboxes, through very many repetitions, and by 'rewarding' the box for wins by adding another bead of the winning colour (and doing the opposite for losses), the matchbox appears to 'learn' how to play the game. But, Marius argues, suggesting that computers are nothing more than sophisticated matchboxes, it hasn't learnt anything at all:

'Whole human race has fucking death wish, wants to replace itself... We feel shit and small all day long if we judge ourselves next to machine, if we try to think like machine. Like trying to run next to car. But what we do is better! Car is just tool, goes fast brum-brum, very exciting. Person is person. Why don't we start by knowing that people is valuable already? That if people not perfect, that means "perfect" is not important? We fucking hate ourselves. Let me tell you something. These matchboxes don't even know the rules...! Who knows if machine has lost game of noughts and crosses? Who knows if it won? I do! You do. We are the ones who can tell.'

The Future has a lot going on, but for me, this is the central thought at its heart, something very Black Mirror or Ted Chiang-esque: technology won't doom us or save us. We'll do that all by ourselves.

The Future brings both Alderman's scriptural knowledge, drawn from her Orthodox Jewish upbringing, and her engagement with computer games together to produce a highly engaging, refreshing and memorable take on the near-future. The main narrative of the book starts with Lai Zhen, a survivalist YouTube blogger originally from Hong Kong who's recently attracted the ire of a fundamentalist religious group, the Enochites. Zhen has recently met Martha Einkorn, daughter of the Enochites' leader, who left the community and is now working for the CEO of social media company Fantail [I couldn't figure out what all the fake companies in this book were meant to be in real life, but think Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, but rolled into one]. When sparks flew between Zhen and Martha, Martha secretly gifted Zhen a new app, called AUGR. Now Zhen's running for her life from a shooter in a shopping mall, and AUGR switches on, ready to tell her how to escape.

However, before we meet Zhen, we meet the CEO of Fantail, Lenk, and two equally powerful CEOs from rival companies, Ellen and Zimri. They have all recently received an AUGR notification as well, a few months after Zhen is hunted down in the shopping mall. It tells them that the world is about to end, and they need to activate their evacuation plans. But as the CEOs depart on a private plane, something goes wrong. Rather than being transported to their respective bunkers, they end up dumped on an isolated island. Nobody knows where they are, they don't trust each other - and chaos ensues. Think Lord of the Flies. Meanwhile, in the days leading up to the apocalypse, we follow Martha's posts on an internet forum, where she retells the Biblical story of Lot and Abraham (Genesis 12-19) but argues it offers us lessons in how to survive disasters today, and how we know when it is time to give up and run. 'Abraham... said "OK, but, just bear with me, what if there are fifty good people in Sodom? Would you destroy the whole city? You are supposed to judge everyone fairly." That was a great point and to be honest the Lord hadn't thought about it before.'

Reviews of The Future so far seem to be mixed, as it's praised for its smartness and pace, but ultimately seen as shallow. I disagree. I think Alderman is having fun here (rich literally left on an island to eat each other!), and that this is not meant to be taken deadly seriously, but that doesn't mean it isn't an important, thought-provoking novel. (The summary also makes it seem more disjointed and complicated than it actually is; once it gets going, it's a streamlined read with occasional discussion board digressions.) Everyone wants to compare it to The Power, so I'll have a go, too: I think The Future is better. It's more original and more coherent, and the smaller central cast means that the characterisation has greater depth. I agree to an extent with the critique that this is about a handful of people saving the world, which suggests not very much has actually changed in terms of who holds power in society, but again, I don't think Alderman means us to read this entirely straight. The utopian ending is not realistic, but it injects important hope into a very grim sub-genre. There's some resonance here with Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood (despite its 'rocks fall, everyone dies' conclusion), and also with Cory Doctorow's For the Win, which similarly thinks about how technology can be used for social justice as well as capitalist exploitation. In short; this is great. I doubt it will be anywhere near as successful as The Power, but it deserves to be. 4.5 stars.

This book is swinging for the fences just like The Power did, taking on the nexus between corporate greed, income inequality, and the fate of our planet. No, it doesn’t work quite as well, there’s really only two characters who are fully developed, and I wish it could have been more evenly paced, but it’s certainly an interesting story.

The Future is the greatest heist ever? Or the cataclysmic end of civilisation…

The story starts in the not too distant future, with the billionaire leaders of three big technological industries planning for survival in the face of an imminent apocalypse. These three CEOs control the world both economially, politically and socially through their enormous technological institutions and are
partially to blame for the world's environmental downfall and imminent destruction.

The story is mainly narrated by Zhen, a journalist and survivor in the recent collapse of Hong Kong and Martha who is the assistant to Lenk, CEO of one of the 'big three companies' (and daughter of the founder of the cult 'the Enochites') and also part of the online survivalist chatroom that has entries throughout the book.

This story certainly had dystopian vibes although lots of the central issues could definitely be thought of as relevant today too.
I loved the main plot of the story and wanted to keep reading to find out whether the main characters would survive the potential end of the world in their bunkers. I also loved the back story of Martha and Zhen and their alternative plan for survival!
I found the chatroom entries a bit hard to follow and some parts were a bit too biblical/ philosophical! I was keen to get back to the main story.
Although I had to concentrate in parts I thoroughly enjoyed this thought provoking dystopian/ environmental thriller. A great read!