Following in a similar vein to The Power, Alderman explores a world that is just like ours, just with some subtle, yet important tweaks.

Here, Alderman explores survivalism and the threat of apocalypse, especially through environmental collapse and rampant consumerism, exploring how the super rich will try to do whatever they can to survive the end of the world that they are complicit in hastening. It was a fun and rich story, exploring some vital conversations whilst also just being a fun read.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Naomi Aldderman’s books are always thought-provoking and this one was no exception. I enjoyed the writing and the premise but occasionally got confused with the different characters. An interesting read that is certainly relevant to the times we live in.

The Future is speculative fiction set a few years from now. It imagines 3 tech billionaire CEOs, preparing for ‘the end of the world’, whether it’s another pandemic, nuclear war, or a climate extinction event. Instead of using their wealth for the good of the planet and society, can they buy their way out of it and escape?

I listened to Alderman talk on Radio 4 and she is inspiring - clearly incredibly well researched and knowledgeable in the topic coming from a tech background. She said the idea for the book came from Zuckerberg buying an island in Hawaii to create a private apocalypse bunker.

Whilst I really enjoyed the twist at the end of the book, and the whole premise/grounding in reality, the pacing just felt off to me. There are several sex scenes at the start of the book (maybe to draw readers in?) but then no more - didn’t match the tone of the rest of the book.

For me, it’s a long book, drawn out with a lot of religious subtext and biblical stories of Lot and Sodom - I found this repetitive and skim read most of it.

Alderman said she is constantly trying to write to reach tech billionaires, her message being “if you leave somewhere thinking you can start again and that you did not have to help others, you will take your selfishness with you.”

There is a great moral to this story, but it’s not necessarily targeted at us. If the premise sounds interesting to you I’d still recommend you give it a go.

Working in architecture, I want to my work to contribute positively to solving the climate crisis. It’s incomprehensible to me to have that amount of wealth and not want to advocate for radical environmental solutions.

Although, it would be fun to design my own bunker … guess we’ll never know how we’ll act until we have the 💰💰💰 in the bank.

* Thank you for providing me an ARC NetGalley / 4th Estate Books

An okay read but it always feels a little tired to me to jsut stereotype and scapegoat "rich people" like "rich" is a personality trait.

Having loved 'The Power', I was thrilled to have the chance to read this new novel by Naomi Alderman. A novel which looks at a future when society is about to undergo an apocalyptic event, and only the billionaires have the resources to survive it. It has multiple narratives in the form of traditional, text messaging, news reports and online forums. This made it a quick and propulsive read, but at times I did feel a bit muddled and ultimately 'un-involving' for me as a reader. An interesting but flawed read.

The Future is far too close to home. Set in a time not very far from now where 3 all powerful technocrats and their companies essentially rule the world, The Future examines how easy it is for everything to unravel, and if it is possible to stop it happening.
While the rich plot and plan, another group, many with links to the top, are looking at a whole other way of running the world. Their plan is almost unbelievable but it might just work.
There is little I can say plot wise without give the story away, however this is a thrilling yet terrifying book, with some very clever twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat. It’s a little uneven in places, but you can feel the hand of Margaret Atwood ( her mentor) as she creates a totally believable dystopian world.

Unfortunately I'm in the minority with my feelings over this book.

A novel that essentially will have you wondering about the future of the world and the state of humanity. The book is written from the viewpoints of multiple characters and bounces around quite a bit which lost me at times.

I love dystopian novels but unfortunately I just don't think the writing was quite for me. I ended up really enjoying some parts and skimming others.

Overall an interesting story but executed a little to complex for my liking (in others I'm not smart enough for it haha)

I was really enjoying this book. I was gripped from the start with good versus evil but I literally couldn't be bothered towards the middle when it all got a bit too technical for me. . . .computer algorithms that were predicting the future bored me and I found it very difficult afterwards to get back in to the book and the story.

I didn't "take" to any of the characters and I don't feel as though any of them were really supposed to be the kind that one roots for.

Like the author’s successful 2016 dystopian thriller The Power, The Future is an ambitious novel, which aims to shine a new light on real-world issues. It weaves together drama and political intrigue through a dystopian lens. This time, it’s set in the near future and introduces the reader to three tech billionaires who, with the Covid-19 pandemic behind them, are making sure that they’re more prepared for the world’s next big catastrophe.

This story explores the power of technology and how it can manipulate individuals, and the selfishness of certain large corporations. The Future pits The Man against some plucky individuals in a kind of a battle of wits in the face of the End Of The World. It sounded intriguing, but I struggled to connect with any of the characters – they’re all quite unlikeable. It also doesn’t help that the chapters move between characters and times in a way which is vague, confusing and difficult to follow.

The Power was always going to be a tough act to follow, and I have to admit I didn’t enjoy this as much. But this might be one of those times when it’s not the book, it’s me. One thing I’m sure of is that everyone will take something away from this book. It offers a insightful take on age-old philosophies, religion, politics and modern relationships. One of the protagonists, Martha, grew up in a cult, and I found her storyline the most engaging and insightful – both her reflections on her childhood, and the beliefs she cultivated and decisions she made in the present day.

The last quarter of the novel picks up the pace with a few twists and turns and a complex ending I didn’t see coming. It’s an end-of-the-world story which explores the moral corruption of modern society, but it ends on a decidedly hopeful note which I think we can all appreciate.

The world in turmoil, the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer. Sound familiar?
It should!

The Future is a masterful piece of spec fiction, grounded far too uncomfortably in our reality. A diatribe on history, anthropology, theology, technology, capitalism, and global disaster. A commentary on how we are not actually killing the world, but ourselves, and every other living creature we share this planet with. After all ”it is we who divide and subdivide it”

While there were a few lengthy moments, the vast majority of this book was ‘holy shit’ what happens next?????

Well, I’m not going to tell you, but if the world does go to shit in my lifetime, there are certain characters in this book that I’d want in charge, working to restore it.

It’s a solid 4.5 out of 5 for me and a thanks to Naomi Alderman, 4th Estate, and NetGalley for an arc of this book. Opinions are my own.

I’m not sure if I’ve just got dystopian fiction burnout - probably brought about by the good old pandemic - but I was surprised at how little I liked this book compared to ‘The Power’. I approached the latter with no small amount of trepidation, because sci-fi/fantasy has never been my favourite genre, but found that Alderman’s engaging writing and complex characters had me hooked. ‘The Future’, on the other hand, is akin to an ABC for apocalyptic fiction. It’s all there - terrible names for tech companies that do everything from social media to unlocking your house; unhinged, misogynistic billionaire CEOs; and unassuming, troubled females with a score to settle. I’m perfectly willing to believe that I’m being a little harsh here, but between that and the constant jumping around between perspectives and time periods, I spent most of my time trying to flick backwards to find out who was who/what time period we were in/etc.

‘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.’

As a lesbian woman, I am all admiration for Naomi Alderman. She reliably presents orders other than the heteronormative in the least indulgent way. Every time I picked up ‘The Future’, I was awestruck by how the novel could be so typically cynical, sardonic, and spicy, yet so delicately soft-hearted and romantic:

‘Sitting on the toilet, Zhen allowed herself about forty-five seconds of daydreaming about what kind of wedding Martha Einkhorn would arrange – probably in a castle of some sort. But she didn’t go on long, because she’d messed up relationships and herself before by imagining the future after the first date. Her therapist had explained that human beings long for certainty so much that we’re willing even to undermine and sabotage ourselves in the search for it. Worrying about whether you’ll get a second date? The easiest way to end your uncertainty is to be so weird and creepy with her that you definitely won’t get a second date. The urge to imagine the winter wedding is an urge to make it all crash and burn so you don’t have to think about it anymore.’

Alderman’s an author whose work I feel is distinctively moreish – deeply pleasing somewhere down in my belly – and I found myself coming back to ‘The Future’ compulsively, just as I had with ‘Disobedience’ and ‘The Power’. But, wow! I’m so glad I only read the blurb after I’d finished the novel, because the blurb gives far too much away! If you can, try to forget the book description. All you need to know is that ‘The Future’ is about the friction between humankind’s origins being wanderers, hunters, and gatherers (termed ‘Fox’ by the cult leader in the novel), and modern settled populations (termed ‘Rabbit’ by the cult), who in Alderman’s envisioned near-future, live machinated lives governed by Big Tech, and who – as we’re told in the Author’s Acknowledgements – ‘[end] up with […] murderous hatred of people who live even small parts of the hunter-gatherer life that we all, after all, lived until a few brief millennia ago’.

Intriguingly, the term ‘the future’ changes meaning as the novel unfolds and I enjoyed observing the subtle shifts that take place:

‘They laughed as children do when they are thrown high in the air. We are all falling, all the time, from the half-understood past to the unknowable future. The other name for falling without fear is flying.’

Even reaching the Author’s Acknowledgements, the meaning takes a turn with the revelation of Alderman’s thought process and research for the novel. I was conscious of the fact that the author is using Survivalism to spotlight the fragility of ‘the future’, though the radical Anprim-leanings demonstrated by the prepper forum posts that she splices into the narrative so confidently suggests she is deriding this subculture (especially considering the status updates she includes in the forum). However, the so-sublimely-done forum posts are in fact vital to Martha’s characterisation, and vital in bringing the plot to fruition. Furthermore, Zhen, our sympathetic protagonist, is herself a survivalist – indeed, (in)famously so – whose prepping videos earn her the contention with the ‘Enochite’ cult, which brings about the initial crisis that sets the plot in motion.

Yet what I didn’t fully appreciate is that, although the novel draws attention to the ‘hatred of Jewish people (constructed as “wanderers” as we are)’ that – in Alderman’s own words – she feels ‘draws partly from […] self-disgust directed towards our human origins’, one of the deeper ideas that she hopes to expound in the novel is ‘that it is laughable to search in deep space or within computer algorithms for intelligent life when we’re ignoring, torturing, despising, or destroying so much intelligent life here on Earth’. And, thinking on it, this eco-consciousness is where the novel ends up, with the SafeZones and with the type of existence that Zhen finds herself living. But gladly, Alderman is never too brash, never too didactic, will never confine readers to a singular interpretation:

‘There were no more names for anything. She was there as you are there.
Wherever you are, the richness and complexity and inexhaustible, unplumbable thereness of the whole rushes in through your eyes and your ears and your nose and across your skin. Every single thing around you is right there and so are you. The teeming world is right there, and all of it is neither good nor bad, it just is.’

So, ‘The Future’ travels places where I didn’t expect it to go. I’d no idea it would end up where it did, and I was tickled pink to read the ‘bit of tricksiness’ postscript after the author’s acknowledgements. Alderman’s extensive research into Native, Indigenous and First Nations wisdom suffuses the text, rather than dwarfing it, leading the reader to Alderman’s conclusion that: ‘rather than getting the machines to be as clever as we are, we are training ourselves to think down to their level.’ But this position isn’t over-stressed. Alderman’s condemnation of the Tech Giants Amazon, Apple, and Facebook never engulfs the narrative and at all times I appreciated character as the fundamental essence of the novel.

If you know Naomi Alderman, you'll know that she is an author unparalleled in the scope of her character creation (perhaps, let’s say, sharing the Top Three with Donna Tartt and Emma Donoghue). In ‘The Future’, I cared about all the characters, admirable or detestable. Alderman, with accomplished ease, moves characters around within the plot like chess pieces, in order to realise certain patterns and structures, the significance of which might only transpire in the final movement of the novel.

Take Lenk, for example, and the fact that Lenk’s character opens the novel. In the first couple of movements, I kept wondering why Alderman had accorded him this significance. Surely she couldn’t have meant him to be marked so central to the plot - he’s not one of our protagonists?! But then, each of our central characters are revealed to readers so unhurriedly, so deliberately (again, like chess pieces), that it’s only bit-by-bit we come to realise who the principal players are. And Lenk opening the novel is a delicious prefigurement of his role in its resolution. This game of character chess - its endgame in particular - is exquisitely done.

Yet what Alderman’s ‘Many Many Years Later’ easter-egg postscript assures us of is that strong characters can live on past the endgame (once again, the meaning of their ‘future’ has shifted):
‘Everything is always in motion. Nothing remains still. Despite what anyone says, history never, in fact, ends.’

The above concluding quote is almost word-for-word citation of the final words of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (cuncta fluunt – ‘everything is constantly in flux’), and just as, with his final word, Ovid claims his poetry will endure (vivam), so too do Martha and Zhen abide, in various futures and in various forms. Alderman invokes Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ recurrently, each time she presents us with the image of Eurydice looking back. It’s as though Alderman is self-reflexively underlining the strength of her own character creation. Her characters will never end (that active email address included at the very end of the manuscript is extraordinary!). In fact, characterisation in ‘The Future’ is so assured that Alderman can invoke literary allusions such as Ovid’s ascension of Eurydice from Hades and the ruination of Lot’s wife in the Bible, without the reader missing a beat.

This motif of the glance backwards/looking backwards is prodigious, since it depicts the passive figure looking forward, yet the active figure looking back. In this metaphor, is it Lenk, Zimmri and Ellen who look forward into ‘the future’, and Martha, Selah, Albert and Badger who look backward to the past, or is it the other way around? Can both can be done at once? Is ‘Rabbit’ the future and ‘Fox’ the past, or vice versa? Is the message of the novel that we (with the author) should cast our glance backward into the past (to Indigenous, Native, and First Peoples) in order to forge ahead, up and out into the future?

My deepest gratitude to 4th Estate and William Collins for giving me the great pleasure of reading the latest from a favourite author (citations might be subject to change).

Another great thought provoking book by Naomi Alderman. An interesting take on how people can group together to turn a situation to their advantage. Very well written.

I'll read any book with "end of the world" in a description. However, this book didn't capture me like others by Naomi Alderman. I enjoyed it mostly but there were parts I just couldn't get into, where as other parts I found exciting.
It was a mixed bag for me.

So many twists and turns, I’ve probably missed some of them. It’s a story about the future, taking on the topics of social media giants, evangelism and billionaire bunkers to name a few. The characters are strong. I really enjoyed Disobedience and The Power by the same author, so was looking forward to this book. However, I read half of it on my kindle, as I’d got an ARC via @netgalley but I found it difficult ,particularly with online dialogue. The second half I listened to, and the range of performers really added to the experience.

A timely novel about climate change, technology and the end of the world.

Three billionaires have the future all planned out, they know that they will survive that upcoming apocalypse. They have used the technology available to them to secure their futures, regardless of the rest of the world.

I felt the first half of this story to be incredibly long....but it picked up in the second half with a good twist in the story which I hadn't seen coming.

Don’t you hate it when everyone says an authors previous book was better? Well, I know I hate that and yet I’m about to say that exact thing. This was a swing and a miss for me. Whilst ‘The Power’ was brilliantly written and pulled me forward with its characters, I just hated all of them in this novel. Was it because they are billionaires and I can almost see everything in this novel being true? Possibly. I guess that, whilst I enjoy dystopian fiction, I don’t want to read about really rich people doing things that annoy me - I mean, I read the news anyway! So, this was a middling read I’m for me.

Naomi Alderman's latest novel is a timely and gripping story set in the near future in which three billionaires essentially control technology, the economy...the world (sound familiar?). They are fully prepared for the apocalypse that they are helping to usher in until a few of the people closest to them decide to turn the tables.
This novel deals with capatalism, climate change, artificial intelligence etc. Everything I like about a climate-fiction novel.

The Future is apocalyptic, there is money in the apocalypse. A trio of billionaires are leading the world to destruction to line their own pockets.
The future is a quartet of friends planning and hatching and scheming to pull off, either, the greatest heist ever, or the catastrophic end of civilisation.
The future is now!...

'The only way to know the future is to control it.'

If you can get past the central idea that some of the richest people on Earth are doomsday preppers intent on protecting themselves, their legacies and a select few if/when the shit hits the fan then The Future is an enjoyable read.

Its big strengths are the setting and the technological advancements depicted. Other fictions have fallen down one or other of these, but not The Future.

There's an air of almost chilling prescience about The Future's Earth. An Earth that is recognisably ours, but a few years further down the path to doomsday that some would have us on and the technology, whether its for military, environmental or leisure use, is all too believable.

Is it as good as The Power? No, but that's not a bad thing. The Power was always going to be a hard act to follow and to come even close is an achievement in itself.

Thanks to HarpertCollins and Netgalley for providing an advance copy.