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!

The Future is uncomfortably close to reality and a great thriller. Although at first I struggled to get into the story and connect with the characters, but it is worth continuing and I was soon blown away. by this dystopian thriller. The characters were really engaging and I loved the idea of a main character being a doomsday prepper which, to me, was a really unique perspective. I also thought the world building was greatly written and although confusing in parts, is very interesting. I do believe this book won't be for everyone but I do recommend giving this a chance.

The latest novel from Alderman is a high-energy, cinematic speculative sci-fi that explores the possibilities of the future. From the more cutting-edge technological advances and scientific breakthroughs, to the terrifying abuse of power that could allow to grow and corrupt and breakdown of the climate.

The Future is one of those stories that feels too possible, to close for comfort with familiar places and people to create something uncomfortable with real nightmare potential.

Each character had a different viewpoint, a different voice to bring to the story with many different weaving subplots and stories that come together to show a vision of the future in spectacular ways and of course creating a female-led, female-focused cast that always manages to capture the real issues at hand.

Mixing cli-fi with high-energy thriller vibes along with real, warm characterisation this was exactly the kind of intelligent but entertaining thing I’ve come to expect from Alderman.

This was an absolute page-turner for me. It is a compelling story, full of action and rich characterisation, set in a familiar world of polution, climate crisis, and personal and corporate greed. The setting is close to the bone, and the book has a lot to say about our place in this world. This didn’t make it a difficult read - rather it gave the plot and characters’ motivations a poignancy.

The plot moved at a good pace, with plenty of twists and reveals that kept me on my toes. The cast of characters is nicely varied, with each character having a unique and well drawn personality. They all have an emotional presence and authenticity that made the book a joy to read - and I was genuinely engaged with the overall plot and the outcomes for the main characters.

The book has a satisfying, unexpected, and thought-provoking ending. The characters, technology, and overall spirit of the story left me wanting more - I would love to see these characters or settings appear in a future work by the author.

Thank you #NetGalley and 4th Estate for the free review copy of The Future in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

This book started out quite challenging for me, I had a really hard time getting into it between the thinly disguised caricatures of the three main characters and the sections written as part of a forum which was a bit hard to follow and suffered from formatting issues on the Kindle (which I'm sure will be fixed in the final edition). I did persevere and ultimately found the book to be quite entertaining once I got past the issues mentioned above, though more as a comic novel than a dystopian environmental thriller. I did find the other characters aside much more engaging than the three tech bosses and liked the twist at the end, though taken as a whole there was just a bit too much going on for this to be a winning read for me.

This was a really interesting book packed with ideas and reflections on what could be the outcome of various contemporary global events. A lot of it was also really scary and almost too plausible. Unfortunately, the negative side was that it was so packed with ideas, I found it confusing at times and difficult to remember the relationships between the various characters. However, I think it is a book I shall continue to think about for some time to come.
Thank you to netgalley and 4th Estate for an advance copy of this book
3.5 rounded up to 4 stars

This is a very thought provoking book, and it took me on quite a journey!

In short, this is about a small number of billionaires safeguarding their future by buying a product that will warn them when the world is about to go crazy (think pandemic/earthquakes, etc etc), and Will send them to a secret bunker where they can survive until everything is back to normal.

As expected, the alarms go off and off they go….

As I said above, it’s an excellent, truly excellent read and it threw me a good few times as I did not expect what was coming! It’s left its mark on me though, quite a big one. What if this happened? In real life? Could it….should it? I think it should…

My thanks to Netgalley and 4th Estate and William Collins for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.