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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On the day the world ended…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I loved The Power (the novel, I haven’t been able to get into the TV series), which is why I requested this book. And this book was okay - a group of billionaires have an ‘escape plan’ for when the world is likely to implode. However, it sometimes felt as if there was a bit too much going on. I am not quite sure what the chat room posts about Sodom and Gomorrah added, I found myself zoning out during these sections.

The characters are not likeable, but I think that is to be expected with the subject matter. The book gave no idea of timescale - I was surprised, at the closing chapters of the book, to find out how much time had allegedly passed.

The ending - less a twist, more of a disappointment. It just didn’t sit right with where the book felt it was going.

This is an okay book.

Following The Power, this needed to be a strong offering and it was a good read but didn't quite match up to the previous success. That said, my husband and I both read it and it sparked really interesting discussions so definitely one for a fulfilling book group read.

This was an interesting futuristic read. I thought it could do with additional editing but I liked the different characters point of view and the world building.

Thank you for the advanced reader copy.

It takes a while to get going, and found I lost interest in some parts. That being said towards the mid/end of the story I was hooked and needed to keep reading.
The plot was an interesting take on the end of the world but was easy to get lost in the various ideas and characters throughout.
Overall I enjoyed The Future and look forward to reading more Naomi Alderman books.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the opportunity to read.

Quite poorly executed in my personal opinion. This had so much potential but was let down by the writing style/prose.

This is a story that could definitely become the future! Technology "leaders", climate change, the have's and have nots. The twists and turns kept me gripped.

This novel gives a glimpse into a possible near future, when technology moguls rule a world that has been destroyed by greed and climate change. Despite trying to create a better world, money still has the loudest voice and all is not as it seems on the surface. This dystopian book is full of twists and turns that keep you on the edge of your seat whilst providing a stark message about social media and the fragmentation/polarisation of society. A great read!

Hello! I had actually already bought and read this book and really enjoyed reading it. It's engaging and I like the overall message and how the plot is more character-driven. I also enjoy how the author balances serious topics with bits of humour and romance.

I have added a link to my video review. It got 60 views in the first ten minutes and currently has 200+

Thank you!

Certainly a very thought-provoking and unnerving read. I didn't always understand the technological and religious narrative but a book that could provoke some interesting conversations.

So disappointing. The Power Jaime of my favourite books so I was really looking forward to this, yet it was a struggle to get through it. It feels like five different people wrote it, and two of them were a computer programmer and some sort of biologist. I like a bit of information about things I’m unfamiliar with as part of the world building, but I don’t want to read chapter long tangents. This book could have been a third of the size. Do not recommend.

What if the future involved catastrophic events, and what if the world’s richest people had made their own plans to escape the chaos? We find ourselves in the late 2030s, after the Fall of Hong Kong, with a world dominated by three major tech companies and their avaricious CEOs. Naomi Alderman’s world building is excellent as she details the fundamentalist cult one of the main characters grew up in. This is another creative and readable novel from Alderman (I loved The Power), which tackles interesting subjects and jumps around in time and location, but the final twist was predictable and the characters a bit one dimensional.

I couldn’t get enough of The Future by Naomi Alderman. This book pressed all of my Sci-Fi/ Speculative fiction/ dystopian buttons ALL AT ONCE!!

I’m not actually sure how I should explain this… There’s so much going on in this book - doomsday preppers with an awful lot of money, climate breakdown and pollution, social media influencers.

Actually, that doesn’t explain half of it.

This is the story of a heist. A pretty daring one, and one that could so easily fail, but in order to save the future, a group of friends decide that they will have to do something to protect the world from three of the most powerful and influential billionaires.

The story is told in punchy, short chapters, interspersed with excerpts from a chatroom ( I loved these parts - I didn’t think I would to begin with, but I really enjoyed them). This style really propels the story forward. Actually, the STORY propels the story forward.

Look, I just really, really loved this book, and I think you should go and read it. Ok?