Can confirm that Naomi Alderman's next book is every bit as explosive as 'The Power!' 💥

🌎 'The Future' by Naomi Alderman is about the end of the world. It tells the story of three tech billionaires who are obsessed with surviving the apocalypse. Unhappy with the way these billionaires have ended up controlling almost every aspect of modern society, three people close to them decide to take matters into their own hands by enlisting the help of survival expert Lai Zhen.

🤯 This was excellent. I finished it earlier this week and can't stop thinking about it. However, this is NOT a book to rush through. Take your time. There are a lot of details, lots of religious theory & philosophy, lots of detours into characters' rich and unusual backstories. Not a light read, but an immensely satisfying one.

🖥️ I've read a few novels about 'evil global tech companies' with too much power. None of them managed to do what Naomi Alderman's done. She writes with nuance and creates a fully fleshed out near-future world which doesn't fall back on the laziness you sometimes see in this genre.

✨ 'The Future' uses present day events and people (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg were definitely inspirations!), and weaves them together to explore a huge question: How do we stop climate change and make capitalism more ethical if the people who control the world have a vested interest in sticking to the status quo?

📖 None of the characters were especially likeable, but they were vivid and fascinating. I was especially interested in Martha's backstory - she grew up in an extreme doomsday cult and goes on to become the assistant to one of the billionaires.

📚 Overall, I thought 'The Future' was both riveting and original. If you want a thought-provoking book that holds a mirror up to the flaws in society, do not miss this!

🗓️ 'The Future' comes out on 7th Nov 2023.

🎁 Thank you to @netgalley & 4th Estate Books for my gifted advance reader copy.

- Katie

[Review is on Instagram @katiespencebooks, will be on X/Twitter @katiespencey next week]

Sorry I could not get on with this book. I gave it over 200 pages before giving up. I found all the characters unlikable. Far too much backstory between the first chapter teasing the plot of the book and anything actually happening.
Didn’t get on with the forum snippets

This book is innovative and well paced. If isn’t a book you can pick up and put down easily so be ready to cancel plans! I loved ist and given the author this isn’t a surprise I can see it will be a hit and no doubt adapted for the screen.

David Eggers “The Circle” (and sequel) meets Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” trilogy meets Eleanor Catton’s “Birnam Wood” Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” meets Genesis Chapters 13-19 in a worthy follow up to the author’s “The Power”

In January 2017 I read “The Power” and made a series of “near-future” predictions: that it would be a strong contender for the Bailey’s shortlist (and even the prize); that it could even be a Booker longlist contender – albeit English authors were being largely overlooked; that it would be idea for an HBO mini-series. Well, the book of course did go on to be longlisted, shortlisted and then win the Bailey’s (now Women’s Prize) – and was massively underestimated by literary prize followers unable to look past the embedded use of genre and other media conventions by an author embedded in the world of science fiction and scriptwriting – and it has this very year been turned into a miniseries (albeit Amazon Prime).

Now 7 years on we have the author’s follow-up, one which I think has its roots in much of the author’s background:

Bought up in an (to quote Wikipedia) unconventional Orthodox Jewish family and so with a deep scriptural knowledge.

She said in a Jewish Chronicles interview this year about miniseries of “The Power” “As a Jewish person you obviously grow up knowing a lot about the Holocaust and asking yourself questions about how would I know when to get out? How do I avoid it? What are the signs?

She was for a number of years in the early 2010s a technology writer for the Guardian – particularly interested in the area of immersive gaming and digital storytelling.

She was famously mentored by Margaret Atwood in 2012 – and dedicated “The Power” to her, and Atwood’s implicit influence is clear here again.

In 2012 she was the lead writer on the fitness app “Zombies, run” – which as its basic inspiration and premise that the reason we want to be able to get fit and be able to run is to be able to escape in a end time scenario such as being able to outrun a Zombie horde.

And all of these play out in this near, slightly alternative, future novel.

The book opens with third party viewpoint sections by the three billionaire CEOs of the three technological giants which increasingly dominate not just the world’s economy but its global politics and its very social foundations. Lenk Sketlish is the CEO of the Fantail social network (a clear Facebook analogy although the character seems to draw on aspects of Elon Musk also); Zemri Nommik is the CEO of the logistics and purchasing giant Anvil (of course standing for Amazon) – and is planning to divorce his brilliant, black, environmental activist wife Selah; Ellen Bywater is the CEO of Medlar Technologies, the world’s most profitable personal computing company (the closest to Apple in the book – although with a more complex origin story including the gay founder of the firm Albert Dabrowski being exited but not subsequently ever rejoining) - Ellen herself is always conscious of the presence of her late husband, and has a particularly difficult relationship with her non-binary and politically-radical child Badger.

All are together at an environmental conference when all individually receive a notification on their personal device that something has occurred which is going to shortly trigger an apocalyptic scenario, and all will calmly and secretly evacuate to their end time-prepped billionaire bunkers well ahead of the actual event becoming widely known, starting off by (due to their proximity) all taking the same plane and then to wait out whatever occurs.

Next we are taken to posts on a survivalist forum – where a user posts on Abraham’s debate with God over how many good people it would take to stop the total destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

In turn we join Lai Zhen – a poster on the same forum with an expertise in technological survival (first honed by her experiences when her family were caught up in the fall of Hong Kong when the PRC decided to attack it due to the continuing dissent) – she is at a charitable event at a Singapore mega-mall when she suddenly realises that she is being stalked by an assassin who she quickly realises is likely to be from an American fundamentalist, survivalist cult group – the Enochites. The Enochites founder was most famous for his sermon on The Fox and The Rabbit – about how human history has mistakenly but definitively moved from the hunter gatherer Rabbit types to the farming and then City-dwelling Foxes (a divide which features across Genesis as well as other ancient texts). At a London based tech conference Lai Zhen had interviewed (and later slept with) Martha Einkorn – the Executive Assistant and right hand woman to Lenk – and on finding to her surprise in the interview that Martha had not just grown up in the Enochite community but was the daughter of its founder, inadvertently insults the memory of Enoch so leading to her current predicament – one she somehow survives with the help of a piece of software – AUGR – which to her bafflement appears on her clothing embedded thinscreen – not just alerting her to the danger but talking her step by step through her escape.

From there we have a story which spins out in a number of directions.

We go back in time to see how Martha, Selah and Badger seem to have formed an alliance between themselves (into which Albert is also drawn) – all concerned at the way in which their boss/husband’s/Mum’s firms are seemingly taking the world on an inevitable path to collapse (and conscious also of, and intimately involved in, their boss/husband’s/Mum’s plans to pre-emptively evacuate before that collapse and bunker down to await its playing out). Their small-scale attempts to start to try and reverse the damage the firms have done to the very social fabric of humanity are either ineffectual or counter-productive.

We follow Lai as with the help of a brilliant but oddball Eastern European Professor (who specialises in lectures on artificial intelligence and its uses) and technology hacking genius Marius she figures that the software was installed on her phone seemingly by Martha as a gift – but Martha can now not be contacted.

And then we are on a remote Island near Papua New Guinea where the three billionaires (and a surprise fourth occupant) are stranded after their evacuation plane crash lands, and fight it out for survival while the wider world succumbs to a devastating and deadly pigeon and package carried virus.

And we revisit the survivalist forum – for more on the Fox and Rabbit and much more on Genesis.

Before eventually finding out how the world develops post apocalypse.

To say more would be to spoil what is both an deeply thoughtful and a thought provoking novel – although one which like its predecessor will not be to the taste of those unable to look past its embedded genre trappings.

My thanks to 4th Estate, PRH for an ARC via NetGalley

While I enjoyed this book, I felt like it was stretched too thin over too long a period of time. The concept - what if we got rid of all the tech billionaires together? - was really interesting, and there was a variety of moving pieces which all pulled together to create a hugely interesting thought experiment of what would happen when our technology overlords all simultaneously vanished, but my God it was drawn out and convoluted, and really took far too long to get to where it was going. There was serious bloating in the tale, which could have been a very powerful short story, I found myself putting this down multiple times because I was bored, where was this going, when was the actual plot going to start? Naomi Alderman is a great writer, and there are some really excellent passages in here, as well as thoughts about the nature of technology and our reliance on it, and the agglomeration of tech companies coalescing into supercompanies, all of which I quite enjoyed. It just felt, overall, like there was a lot of bloating with the philosophies of rabbit and fox and escaping a cult and online forums... Too much, all at once. Much like trying to find content online. Perhaps that was the idea, and I'm just too dumb to appreciate it?

Comentaba con mis amigos del Fantascopio que el resumen de The Future era un mensaje claro: Eat the rich. Pero claro, quizá a los lectores del blog les gustaría algo más de información sobre el libro, así que me expandiré un poco más.


Naomi Alderman nos maravilló a todos con The Power una distopía feminista que dio mucho que hablar y que pensar. Sin abandonar ese escenario de futuro cercano pero escogiendo otro punto de ruptura, ahora nos ofrece The Future, que por desgracia he de decir que no tiene la misma fuerza, ni el mismo mensaje que su obra anterior.

En este libro, Alderman nos mostrará las vidas de tres multimillonarios tecnológicos que nos recordarán mucho a ciertas personas reales. Desde su posición de privilegio y con un endiosamiento muy bien reflejado por la autora, veremos cómo hacen planes para sobrevivir a la caída de la civilización, que creen que está al caer. Al principio de la novela vemos como canalizan millones y millones en investigaciones que parecen luchar contra el cambio climático y otros monstruos que predicen la desaparición de la humanidad, pero en realidad solo lo hacen por su propio beneficio. Con el resumen que he hecho del libro, no hace falta tener mucha imaginación para suponer que estos personajes son los malos del libro, pero la verdad es que la autora carga tanto las tintas que al final acaban pareciendo villanos de opereta. El mensaje queda al final en algo demasiado maniqueo, por una parte y también bastante inocente por otra.

Alrededor de estos personajes y protegidos también de la vida real TM por su manto de superioridad, aparecen otros personajes que no están dispuestos a admitir el fin del mundo tal y como lo conocemos. Y ahí es donde encontramos el núcleo de la novela, pero os puedo decir que no resulta para nada sorprendente el devenir de los acontecimientos, con los avisos que hemos ido recibiendo anteriormente.

Es interesante cómo la religión sigue siendo una parte fundamental de nuestras vidas, algo que la autora refleja de manera bastante acertada con la creación de los Enochitas (que en mi fuero interno imagino que son un homenaje a Enoch Root), un grupo de “supervivientes” cuyo credo influirá y mucho en las vidas que vemos reflejadas en la novela.

Esperaba mucho más en la parte especulativa de The Future, pero me temo que es un libro que se queda muy corto en los aspectos más interesantes que podrían haberse desarrollado más.

Set in the near-future (the early 2040s was my best guess) which closely echoes our current reality, The Future concerns a handful of tech billionaires and how their rapacious greed may not - to put it mildly - be the best thing for the survival of either the planet or humanity.

Weaving together the story of the fall of Sodom, as told on a survivalist forum, a prepper cult called the Enochites, and the perspective of former refugee and survivalist expert Lai Zhen, The Future was never less than gripping and thought-provoking. And while at one point I felt the narrative had lost its way somewhat, I should have trusted in Alderman’s talent for constructing a story with unexpected twists.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5, and a book I will be thinking about for a long time to come.

The Future is a mindbending imagining of the near future from the views of three billionaires, a doomsday prepper and the former member of a cult.

I was gripped at the start and enjoyed meeting all the characters. I really liked the Singapore Mall scene and details of the cult. I thought that Naomi tried to provide enough info at the beginning so that you could feel for the characters, I only felt that for Lai Zhen and Martha though.
The middle third of the book was a little tough going. The descriptions of tech were a little too much in my opinion, they didn't add to the narrative. But it was clear that Naomi had done her research!
The final third perked up and I was able to get back into the storyline. The many layers of what had actually happened vs what you thought had happened took a lot of expaining and I felt a little disappointed that the events weren't guessable.

We open with Lenk, a more likeable Musk-type, in the middle of a meditation class he’s been forced to take. This class is interrupted by a notification ping, announcing the end of the world. He jets off, along with two fellow technological megalomaniacs, to their ultra-fancy bunker. Over the course of the next 300 pages, we follow the building and unfurling of this scenario. Martha, Lenk’s assistant, and her traumatised, survival expert, twin flame Lai Zhen, work to pedal the narrative towards its inevitable end. Layered subterfuge involving AI generated news footage, an exclusive survival ensuring app, and lots of hacking, programming, and lesbian sex later, Martha and Zhen sit on a beach, laughing like children, while the world keeps spinning around them.
For the last week, this book has echoed in my mind. As I read news headlines, messages from friends, posts from influencers, I realise more and more how perfectly Alderman has depicted a certain aspect of the Zeitgeist. She’s recreated the fear. The very real and present fear of the current, collapsing moment and where it will take us.
I’ve had complicated feelings about Alderman for a while. I severely disliked ‘The Power’. It was so drenched in first novel, almost YA dystopian, ultra obvious feminism politics that I put it away after a few chapters. ‘Disobedience’ offered something very different though, something subdued and tender. But it suffered from its barrenness, unlike her debut. ‘The Future’ seems to blend something of ‘The Power’s rich language and fantastical narrative with ‘Disobedience’s delve into the more nuanced human experience. It gripped me from the jump. Over the course of six parts, we uncover the collective timeline of several important, wealthy and difficult people who face the end of the world as they know it. This is where the fear comes in. The ever approaching, invisible cliff edge we’re careering towards is never far from any of the characters minds, in biblical, financial, and ecological senses. They each plan for the end, repeatedly. And ultimately, [Spoilers] there isn’t one. We, as a race, will keep going in some shape or form for a disappointingly long time after the end. Perhaps like this book, as Alderman hints at potential for an (unnecessary) sequel in the final pages.
What Alderman doesn’t get right however, is her need to dictate. Over several chapters, she, or rather Martha and sometimes Zhen, delivers lengthy teachings on how things are, how they always have and always will be. How we became this way, how we’ll change, how we’ll stay the same. It’s boring just to summarise it. After one telling of the Fox and the Rabbit, you know it. Alderman clearly didn’t believe this though. My other issue relates to the complex, multi-string narrative. With so many moves and countermoves, time-jumps, and memories injected into the story, I found it difficult to find my feet at certain points.
This is, to put it simply, a great book. Just a great book. I don’t see it seeping into the collective consciousness or becoming a classic, but it’s successful in mirroring and building on the fears of the future as we foresee it today. Her characters are complex, cunning, charismatic. Her subplots and overarching narrative slide over and through eachother like intertwining snakes. It was an excellently unexpected read. But one I won’t be coming back to just for the pleasure of it.

Plot and ideas based speculative end-of-the-world novel 2.5 rating, raised

This is primarily a novel of ideas and not too speculative envisioning of technology. And the age old battles of factions and individuals against each other

Set in a ‘tomorrow’ within touching distance of today, a conglomerate of the most powerfully wealthy individuals, who have built their domains of various aspects of the technologies of communication, data mining and influence (so Musk, so Zuckerberg, so Bezos, so Jobs, so Gates and so so on) have prepared to be ahead of the signs of any apocalypse. As no doubt any living, super powerful, super wealthy person has.

And there are those who, for motives both beneficial to humanity and absolutely the reverse, have been secretly working to undermine the empires of the powerful

I do like ‘speculative’, but am less drawn to the kind of speculative this is. It has too much stuff about the nuts and bolts of the invented supertech stuff, and too much bam bam bam (not to mention wham bam thankyou maam) which I found somewhat formulaic.

The big problem for me, is that Alderman does not appear to write within the depth of individual character, which is what I always want. This is certainly a book which is plot driven – plus a lot of vaguely philosophical debates about good and noble hunter gatherers and bad and acquisitive agriculturalists and urbanites, over history and prehistory.

In a word, I was quite bored, and did not really care about or truly believe in the characters. They seem written from outside, rather than empathetically somehow channelled into reality from imagination which engages with heart, mind, viscera.

There were some interesting twists in this, but my emotional disengagement from this book merely had me responding ‘hmm, interesting, clever’ rather than any kind of visceral jolt way

At the end of the day, Alderman is not a writer who works for me, though I am attracted by other writers and other books which touch similar territory, such as le Guin, Atwood, McCarthy, Lessing, St.John Mandel. What links those writers for me is that the foundation is character, inhabited and written from that kind of engagement with the inside, rather than description from the outside.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book with no obligation to review.

I really enjoyed The Power so I was very keen to read this book but unfortunately I was disappointed.

The premise is good and it starts off quite well. Some of the book is quite interesting - the pasts of all the characters, and even exciting - Lai Zhen at the Singapore conference and all the business with AUGR. I liked the description of the life on the island too and the amazing suits.

I liked Martha and Lai Zhen and the biblical and Enochite things (apart from the bear episode in which i felt sorry for the bear). I was intrigued by the suggestion that all the brotherly feuds in the Bible are actually about 2 different ways of living. The view of the book seems to favour the nomadic and hunting life but I would imagine that such a life was very hard on women.

There are a lot of flashbacks in Lai Zhen's story and they confused me a bit, sometimes I was not sure if we were in the now or in the lead up to now. I quite liked the substance of the social media posts but not the format as all the status and @ remarks and flaming confused me. Also, my copy had blank squares in in at the social media posts, i don't know if that is a formatting problem or if it means something which escaped me.

In the middle of the book I felt that the pace got very slow and in my opinion we get bogged down by the tech stuff, especially Marius and the matchboxes analogy and the homebrew tech which goes on for ages and which I, for one, neither cared about nor understood.

The Future part seemed highly unlikely to me. Commendable of course in what they were trying to do but, where is all the electricity going to come from for all these cars etc. Are humans naturally cooperative or competitive? Surely this Utopia is doomed?

The epilogue was a nice touch but there was not enough about what happened to Lai Zhen and Martha.

All in all a bit of a chore to read and at times I felt I was just ploughing (like Rabbit lol) on to the end.

"The Future" by Naomi Alderman is a complex read but oh so worth it. Set in the near future, three heads of technology companies are preparing for the end of the world, with lavish bunkers and complicated escape plans whilst leaving the rest of humanity to burn/starve/die/suck it up. This does cause you to think about the heavily consumerist society we live in and how long we have before we destroy our beautiful planet. I was going to call it perhaps the most depressing dystopian book I've read but towards the end I changed my mind. Brilliantly conceived and executed, on every level.

Thank you, 4th Estate, for a copy of The Future by Naomi Alderman.
I have read the authors previous book ‘The Power’ which I had mixed feelings for. So, I thought I would give the author a second chance by reading her new novel.
The future is about Global tech companies and what they are doing to sort out climate change. The style of writing is good but unfortunately, I am not the right audience for this novel as I found this quite boring, that I didn’t finish it. 2.5 stars from me.

★★★★☆ (4.5)

When three tech billionaires are told the apocalypse is coming, they hurry off to their secret survival bunkers. But nothing is quite that simple.

This was a wild ride in the best way. Told across many characters, perspectives and timelines, it should be difficult to follow, but instead it is a delicious web of power, manipulation, terror and violence, told with such dry wit, it's addictive. I don't really have the appropriate words to portray this book to be honest. Just read it.

It's a dystopian novel, yes, but there is still such hope in it. But the question of morality and ethics is so strong - when do you know where the line is? When do you know how many people is too little to save Sodom? Or how many people is justifiable to save the rest of the world?

Crazy. also really scary to think about the advancements of technology to the extent that they describe it. I hope I don't see lots of this lol

ps. Naomi alderman WHAT was Zhen's thing with the dog ?!??

cw// murder, violence, apocalypse, mentions of civil unrest and destruction, mentions of incest and rape (retellings of the Bible)

I really enjoyed The Power so I was really excited when this came up on netgalley and I couldn't wait to read it. I had high expectations and the book did live up to them.

On the whole, I really liked the plot although as with anything that has multiple points of view, there were some I liked more than others. Nothing drastic enough to stop me from enjoying it or from wanting to reread it, just enough that there were some moments (mainly earlier on in the book) where I was got a bit frustrated with it. I don't think it helped that I think the formatting on my kindle for the online bits of the book looked a bit weird. Again, nothing actually very serious.

A lot of it was too plausible (yay climate catastraphe and billionaires destroying the planet!) to make for a necessarily entertaining or fun read, but it was written fantastically well written with some great characters. I loved Zhen.

Anyway I definitely recommend it and thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the arc

Rating: 2.8/5

I was very much left with mixed feelings after reading "The Future". Naomi Alderman is clearly an intelligent and talented writer and there are aspects of this novel that are brilliant and display great perception and imagination. At other times it made for quite hard work and was somewhat wearying and frustrating.

The premise is enticing and the execution is, in parts, admirably clever. The novel outlines a scenario of a dystopian future that is part science fiction, part satire and delivered in a style that is a (not always comfortable) mixture of mystery, spy action / adventure and same gender romance. There are multiple character viewpoints utilised, but the narrative is primarily supplied via two key protagonists, Zhen and Martha. As is quite fashionable at present, there is also the inclusion of extracts from on online forum to offer a different perspective, which most frequently serves to draw comparisons with events referred to in the Christian Bible.

Naomi Alderman's attention to detail is admirable and the various strands of the complex plot do ultimately tie-in together, without leaving glaring plot holes. The author's dystopian vision also throws up some interesting ideas that would make for stimulating book club discussions, but personally I felt that the overall impact of the novel was diminished by traits that made it less reader-friendly. The timeframe moves around, which is fine - but it does so without any clear signposting, which is not particularly helpful. On a number of occasions I found myself having to re-read sections after I had become aware of a time shift. I also felt that there were times that the author was guilty of self-indulgence rather than writing in a way that was primarily aimed at delivering a more rewarding reading experience for the audience.

On the whole, "The Future" is a book that I would certainly recommend reading - but with the caveat that it may well have a "Marmite effect".

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for supplying an ARC in return for an honest review.

Ok, this book took me a while to read.

It’s heavy and such wildly believable dystopian that it felt less leisurely than normal reading.

Much like Alderman’s other great dystopian novel, The Power, this is a work that takes our current state of affairs and adds just a couple of twists to project us into a future that could be.

Using beautiful prose, forum posts, religious references and a strong dose of liberalism, we enter a world in which three billionaires control the lives of the majority of the world’s population. Either they make communication possible, they deliver your groceries or they control the tech. Sound familiar?

The premise of the book takes these three rich tech giants and poses the question: what will happen to them when the world ends? (Probably facilitated by their very actions)

What follows is the tale of a wonderful survivalist heroine and a group of people who just want to make the world a better place.

Alderman’s world-building is sensational and you can tell she’s thought of every detail.

It’s a tough topic and it’s a tough read, but it’s so well written that it genuinely feels like a possible glimpse into the future…

Really interesting novel about the effects of tech companies and their influence on the world. A story of billionaire CEOs and their plans for survival in the wake of an apocalypse. Told from the perspective of an influencer journalist who is drawn in against her will.

This is a difficult book to review without revealing spoilers and the pleasure of watching the events of the story unfold. But this book is eerily evocative of the influence of wealth on society today.
I received a copy of my book for a free and unbiased opinion
This mix of climate dystopia, a survival tale, vigilante justice, high tech along with unpleasant yet sympathetic characters make an amazing read. I was never sure where the story was leading, and I was taken by surprise with the way it eventually ended.
The story has a few point of view characters and is a mix of traditional and non-traditional narratives- some people may find this a bit jarring. I did struggle through some of the biblical descriptions, but this did make sense in the end.
This is definitely a book for anyone who is looking for something a little bit different but with a riveting story.
Content Warning
References to suicide

Three tech billionaires, who may or may not bear a passing resemblance to certain well known real personalities, preparing for the end of the world at the expense of the rest of humankind and finding the future is not as predictable and comfortable as they had planned? I enjoyed this book so much. So many twists and turns in the plot, excellent characterisations, and oh, if only some of this would actually come true…
A fun, fast-paced and thoroughly enjoyable read. Highly recommended!