It was dark already at the airfield. Lenk Sketlish’s bone-conducting mini-pods were playing The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. Inside his skull, the Beatles had broken up, the sixties were over, violent revolution was in the air and now, anything could happen. He felt alive, he thought, truly for the first time in his life. The night drive out, the music beating in his head, the future was just moments away. This was what he’d planned for. This was the midnight beginning. This was the smooth running-out of the old world and the birth of the new.
Set a few decades ahead of where we are now, The Future imagines us trudging inexorably forward along our current dangerous path: with climate change and income disparity both worsening, power and wealth further concentrating in the hands of a few tech billionaires, and the internet manipulated by algorithms to anger or placate us into partisan camps. This is an interesting plot-driven read — with a Bible-study subthread that I did find particularly fascinating — but honestly, nothing felt like we were any further into the future: the world is not the polluted hellscape of Ready Player One or the dystopic authoritarian state imagined in The Handmaid’s Tale; this reads like the billionaire heads of Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (just slightly more monopolistic and going by other names) collude to further enrich themselves, knowing that if the world were to end tomorrow, knowing that they had hastened that ending, they would have remote luxury bunkers in which to weather any storm. And I assume that this could be set in our current year and that that would still be true. Still: I was intrigued by the plot (even if I didn’t connect to it on a deep level as I did with Naomi Alderman's last novel, The Power) and I enjoyed the read. Three and a halfish stars, rounding down to three. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Although it was strictly against the protocol, Ellen checked the big survivalist site, Name The Day. If anything was out there, if anyone knew the big one was coming, it’d be somewhere on the site. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. Troop build-ups in the South China Sea. A pipeline explosion in eastern Europe. The same old prepper rants. Nothing that those people knew had boiled over. Still, somewhere out there something was happening. Alarms don’t go off for no reason. Somewhere in the world, a situation that used to be just about under control was slipping into ‘not under control at all’. A chain reaction. Somewhere in the jungle, there was a tiger.
As The Future begins, the three main tech heads are at an ecological convention in Northern California when an alarm, which only they have access to, goes off — prompting them to board a jet to safety, long before anyone else on Earth knows that civilisation is about to collapse. Through flashbacks, internet posts, and updates on current events, Alderman weaves together a satisfying and unpredictable storyline with a Blake-Crouch-sci-fi-light vibe. The tech billionaires themselves are blandly interchangeable with the Zuckerbezogates-type we’re all familiar with, but Alderman puts more colour into the people in their sphere who benefit from the money, but have a bit more moral conscience: the smart Black wife, the gay businessman who was squeezed out of his own company, the nonbinary child with the hacking skills. And tying both camps together is Lai Zhen: the lesbian POC, former refugee with a Masters degree (in Archaeology?) who has made a name for herself on the internet as a tester of prepper/survivalist gear. When Zhen lands on the wrong side of a fundamentalist doomsday cult, she and her hacker pals find themselves peeking behind the tech billionaires’ digital curtain. That’s the plot set up, and it works as a pageturner.
I really did like the philosophical bits from the survivalist website as a former member of the doomsday cult tries to explain what its founder, Enoch, meant by the parable of the foxes and rabbits (which explains the animal line-drawings on the novel’s cool graphic cover). In words that evoke the writings of Yuval Noah Harari and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (about humanity domesticating and diminishing ourselves with the dawn of agriculture and private property), the username “OneCorn” explains that right from the start, the Old Testament divides people into farmers vs. hunter-gatherers-pastoralists (Cain vs. Abel, Jacob vs. Esau, Lot vs. Abraham [incidentally, I didn’t know that Lot was Abraham’s nephew and that the destruction of Sodom reflected their different lifestyle choices]) and that the “civilised” farmers/city-dwellers are generally the immoral ones; folks who were more interested in accumulating wealth than respecting the rhythms of the Earth, and that there is a straight line from them to us today. “(Genesis) is about a war. The first great war. The war that lasted five thousand years and ended the world as all human beings had known it before. When the farmers won, they created a new future and we’re living in it.” Alderman also writes in passing that it is in order to justify our own lowly domestication that we settled people want to chase away or harm the Indigenous, the Travellers, and the Homeless; and I need to keep thinking on that. “We hate them to convince ourselves that we’re OK and safe. The story of Sodom is about urban people who had the illusion of a plan, and how they found out that there is no such thing as a plan.” Whether I agree with everything Alderman says or not, it’s the philosophical bits that elevated this beyond potboiler for me.
The sky was grey and saxe-blue*, the air very still. Small birds swung through the sky describing a parabolic curve between invisible infinities, snapping at flying creatures too small to see. Everything that has ever begun in the history of the planet has started with one tiny change, invisible to the naked eye. The sperm says to the egg: knock knock. The egg says: I’ve no reason to let you in. There are no guarantees. And yet, the egg opens up. And yet, the sperm wriggles in. And yet, two packets of information merge. That’s how all of us got here. That’s how nothing turns into something. That’s how a bare ball of rock ends up with gulls and shearwaters, with moss and lichen, with unfurling pale green leaves and scuttling millipedes and rabbits and foxes. That’s how we get life.
(*Not only can I not picture “saxe-blue”, but I was distracted by how many different shades of sky Alderman describes here: the blue can be bright, light, pale, dark, lucent; stone-blue, slate-blue, water-washed blue, “the blank blue chalk of the sky”. Not really a complaint, but not ignorable.)
It was interesting to read this at the same time we’re watching the TV show Succession , the same week that billionaires were lost during the implosion of the Titan submersible, and while I would agree that there’s something immoral about anyone hoarding assets by the billions (“eat the rich” is so obvious a thesis as to be lazy), the line that Alderman draws between some of our oldest writings and their inevitable consequences through today and into the future is a compelling point that I haven’t encountered before, and that elevated the whole for me. Better than good, maybe not great.
