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!

I finished this book and sat in the dark, not for long, but just a few minutes thinking about the amount of money i chuck into a website that is also a river, the minutes, ok hours spent scrolling on social media and the ways that these companies and the suppliers of the devices i use them on manipulate and influence me without me noticing. I mean is that book that everyone is raving about really that good? i read it i thought it was brilliant but how much of that was because everyone else had already to9ld me it was brilliant? and where are all the people who didn't like it? you can never please everyone so there must be a large contingent of anti-certain-bookers.... not on my phone!

What I'm trying to say is that this book, makes you think, it might not make you change your ways but it is novel enough that once your finished you sit back and say ' i never thought about it in that way' I love a book that surprises me, that makes me think in a new way. It means i haven't already read a hundred books along the same lines.

The characters were complex - who is the hero and who is the villain and how did the become as such? it's not clear cut and i think different readers would identify different characters as the heroes and villains.

I really really enjoyed it and though i've read three books since its still in my head. Four stars, i would have like to see a bit more interaction between the characters.

The Future is an interesting book discussing a what if scenario in the near future. Clearly based on social media moguls like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Alderman dissects the ethics and moral responsibility that the communications network has in pushing a specific agenda. The concept that if big business chose to that they could create a significant impetus for good, both in terms of financial contributions and controlling the narrative particularly in terms of climate change.

Although Alderman is clearly addressing a social issue, this doesn't appear forced in the narrative and is woven in with ease. The characters are dynamic and diverse, which works well with the multiple narratives..

A compelling and gripping book with some great plot twists and echoes of recent American history (Branch Davidians),

An excellent dystopian novel which, while light touch in places, never loses sight of the seriousness of the situation and the implication that this fiction could become reality sooner than we think. In a tradition led by the 1984, The Handmaid's Tale and more recently Prophet Song, yet another look into our potential future is chilling in its prescience.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC

I liked The Power; I thought it was a clever idea, told simply (in a good way). Conversely, The Future, has a LOT of ideas and the narrative jumps about chronologically and also between characters.

There were also forum extracts that didn‘t work for me (badly formatted on the ARC) and a lot of comparisons with Lot in the Bible so I skipped those bits.

It sounds like I hated it, but I didn‘t; it‘s still a soft pick.

This is my first book by Naomi Alderman and I was intrigued to read it having heard her speak about it earlier in the summer at The Women’s Prize For Fiction Live in London.
With the future of the world at risk, three of the world’s most prestigious, wealthy and influential tech leaders are secretly planning their own survival whilst watching their own technologies steer the human race towards self destruction of the planet. The novel has a slightly dystopian feel and yet there’s a simmering undercurrent that leaves you feeling like some of the big tech giants of today could actually have such schemes in place. Full of so many topical themes, this book is bound to get people thinking and talking.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an e-arc in exchange for a review.

Well, I finished it. It was a close call as there were several times I wanted to give up.
Thanks to NetGalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.
Described as a ‘white-knuckle tour de force’ - not so much. There were some exciting bits, yes, but also some pretty long winded dull bits too.
A great deal of philosophising, and technical discussion, economics, and the issue of the mega rich with their mega companies effectively controlling ( destroying) the world. The author makes some good points, but at length.
The first line begins ‘on the day the world ended…’ Except it wasn’t. Or was it? It got confusing. The timeline jumped about a lot, and the narrative moved between action, long descriptive sections and online philosophising in a chat room. I found that the layout and online slang used in these sections distracting.
I really liked The Power but this one was a wee bit of a chore..

Thinly disguised tech giants wield enormous power over the world's communications, purchasing/delivery systems and technological development - the possibilities of a global catastrophe mean that the uber rich leaders of the companies are planning for their own survival while the rest of the world is left to devastation.

The narrative flits between characters, the past, present and future, keeping the reader a little in the dark at times which works well..

Not sure how the 'online discussions' are presented in a physical book, as on a Kindle there were blank white screens.
I learnt a lot (matchboxes and beads, the full story of Lot, foxes and rabbits etc) and wanted to be left hopeful about the future but of course humans are never satisfied.

Overall, a really enjoyable and thought-provoking read.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the free e-ARC.

The premise for this book is that the world is heading to a final global disaster; three billionaires running mega million companies have set up an alert system so that they and their loved ones can escape to safe havens before the disaster strikes. This type of dystopian novel appealed to me, so I started it eagerly. However, three quarters of the book is set in the past or present and involved a lot of pontificating about the value of life and the planet.

Overall the book is an interesting and thought-provoking read, but the style in which it is written didn't really work for me - it felt very bitty and disjointed. We get some more pontificating at the end as the author speculates about how we are ruining the planet and what steps need to be taken now to save it, which is both frightening and timely. As a work of fiction it kept me turning the pages, but I really wanted more substance and less speculation.

Thank you to NetGalley and Fourth Estate for allowing me access to the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

After reading the blurb for this book, I was expecting something to knock my socks off.
Unfortunately it didn't quite hit the mark for me.
When three of the best known techno 'nerds' decide to take over the world (think Pinky and the Brain cartoon but not as good)
These three billionaire's think that they are unstoppable but it just reads like a bad movie from each POV.
The concept of the story is good but it really it does go on forever!
There's some good humour and twists involved.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this book.

Imaginative yet scarily plausible. I found some of the forum parts difficult to read but the main story was great.

I loved this book!

Set in the near future, The Future describes a world where the people who own the largest tech companies all have their own bunkers in readiness for the apocalypse. When that apocalypse arrives they'll leave the rest of us to it safe.

The story starts by setting the scene. It shows us what the world is like in the near future, introduces us to the 3 CEOs who basically control the world, and also introduce some of their closest people.

I don't want to give away the twists and turns, but this is truly a masterpiece. I just had to keep reading to see what was going to happen next. I've not read anything by the author before, but I'll definitely be checking out her other books.

Set in the near future we see the world (not too different from our own) where wealth, power and influence is in the hands of a few billionaires who lead massive global spanning empires (I'm sure you can name the current day companies that were the inspiration). The story is focused around the three biggest tech billionaires and there monopolization of the world for their own gain even at the cost of the earth, safe in the knowledge that they already have bunkers set up for them to retire to when (not if) a global catastrophe hits. So is there any hope?

A small group of friends from a variety of backgrounds group together to hatch a plan to save civilization - will their heist succeed or is this truly the end?

Overall I enjoyed this plot driven story but there was a significant structural challenge that I struggled to overcome and that was the jumping around in time that occurs through much of the book. The chapters are short (most less than 10 pages) which is normally something I enjoy but I found I was spending he first page or two of each chapter trying to figure out when these events were happening which kept pulling me away from what was happening and as we were jumping into a new chapter and a new point in time every few pages this made for quite a disruptive reading experience.

So overall I'm going for 3 stars

Review on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5770058794

Review to be published on the Bask in the Story Youtube Channel on Tuesday 7th November

I was kindly given an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I absolutely loved this and will be buying a physical copy!

The Future happens in an uncanny, unsettling version of reality in the not too distant future, where tech companies have more power than anyone else. They dictate how we perceive and participate in the world. Alderman has an incredible ability to illicit visceral feelings of dread and doom throughout The Future, and grapples with what it means to be human.
The world building was so expertly done that I felt fully immediately in The Future, which made the many twists all the more thrilling!

*Gifted copy from Netgalley and 4th Estate

Having read and adored The Power, I knew I had to request this book! The synopsis will go a little way to explain the story so have a look at that in my stories. It is a pretty complicated one to try and fit into an instagram caption but it is most similar to a dystopian crossed with a environmental science fiction, but could also very nearly be seen as prophecy for the genuine, real life future!

We are in a world of tech companies that are profiting off the looming extinction of the planet and also survivalists who are not exactly profiting, but thriving off the eventual death of the planet. We meet three tech billionaires and learn about their companies as well as the contingencies they have in place for the end of the world. We also meet the people close to them, PA’s, wives and children. The tech world collides with the survivalists in tech conferences where the PA of a tech billionaire, Martha, meets Lai Zhen and their relationship drives a large portion of the narrative.

As the end of the world happens, there are twists and turns that keep you guessing and the second half of this book absolutely raced along. There are a lot of characters to follow along and also long passages from Genesis which I found rather long but other then that, it was gripping!

The solutions that are presented are clever and the ending is really satisfying! If you’re only halfway through and not sure where you’re going, keep going!

This also reminded me of the TV Show called The Wilds so if you enjoyed that, you might love this!