The Future

by Naomi Alderman

Overview

The bestselling, award-winning author of The Power delivers a dazzling tour de force where a handful of friends plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it.

When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?

Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate, and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what’s going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?

Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.

By turns “playful, incisive, horribly relevant, and surprisingly hopeful” (Lauren Beukes, New York Times bestselling author of The Shining Girls), The Future unfolds at breakneck speed, highlighting how power corrupts the few who have it and what it means to stand up to them. The future is coming. The Future is here.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668025697
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	09/17/2024
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	572,875
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 1.08(d)

About the Author

Naomi Alderman is the bestselling author of The Power, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was chosen as a book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and was recommended as a book of the year by both Barack Obama and Bill Gates. As a novelist, Alderman has been mentored by Margaret Atwood via the Rolex Arts Initiative, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. As a video games designer, she was lead writer on the groundbreaking alternate reality game Perplex City, and is cocreator of the award-winning smartphone exercise adventure game Zombies, Run!, which has more than 10 million players. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. She lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

08/28/2023

In the kinetic latest from bestseller Alderman (The Power), activists attempt to wrest power from three CEOs after a near-future apocalypse. The executives are Lenk Sketlish, the survivalist founder of the Fantail social network; Zimri Nommik, a serial cheater who runs the logistics and purchasing giant Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who heads Medlar Technologies, a leading PC company, and often carries on imaginary conversations with her dead husband. When the trio receive an early warning about a pandemic said to be worse than Covid, they board a private jet to a secret doomsday bunker. A parallel narrative follows a group that’s been fighting for ecological and social change, among them Lenk’s assistant, Martha Einkorn, who grew up in her father’s survivalist cult; Albert Dabrowski, the ousted founder of Medlar; Zimri’s wife, Selah, who wrote some of the code for Anvil; and Badger, Ellen Bywater’s politically radical youngest child, who takes umbrage with a private early warning system for the über-rich. While Alderman’s erratic chronological jumps can be hard to follow, the narrative is eminently quotable (“The only way to know the future is to control it,” goes one line ready-made for a movie poster). The endless intrigue and surprising twists keep the pages turning. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

This heady, propulsive, and cannily constructed thriller easily doubles as an ecologically focused, end-of-the-world howdunnit, as well as a will-they-won’t-they love story...Alderman’s futuristic world is both captivating and corrupt, and she delineates it with her trademark smarts and humor...our band of resisters are refreshingly resilient. They’re not just deeply knowledgeable, they’re also compassionate and cleareyed, seeing the world as it is...There are also plentiful reminders — a beautiful dawn here, a recognition of human kindness and connectedness there — that the world is, indeed, worth saving.”—Boston Globe

“Alderman is one of the most consistently inventive contemporary British writers, combining literary and historical erudition with an instinct for narrative pace honed in her parallel career writing video games”—The Guardian

“The Future is so pleasing and page-turning a read, so full of intrigue, emotional depth and a delicious conclusion that I didn’t want it to end. That Alderman — who was raised Orthodox Jewish — manages to mine the Book of Genesis in exciting ways, making accessible the parables of community, conflict and survival found in its pages, is an added and surprising bonus. It’s almost enough to make you believe, despite the evidence, that the bleakest of futures isn’t inevitable.”—Los Angeles Times

"The book’s most impressive quality is its vivid, tactile imagination of our ultra-computerized future...Alderman’s encyclopedic knowledge of everything from cryptographic history to biblical hermeneutics lends the novel a savvy, scholarly gravitas.”—New York Times Book Review

"Alderman has crafted characters readers will want to follow wherever they go—even to the end of the world. A smart, engrossing fable about digital technology and human community."—Kirkus Starred Review

“A daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read.”—BookPage, Starred Review

"The endless intrigue and surprising twists keep the pages turning."—Publishers Weekly

“Naomi Alderman has become one of the great writers of twenty-first century speculative fiction...a hefty but highly compelling page-turner that pulled me in and kept me reading from the first line. It’s a very dark read but also shot through with humor, sharp satire, compassion, a great love story, and well-wrought prose.”—Brooklyn Rail

"The Future, is (in my opinion) about to sweep the charts."—Margaret Atwood

“In The Future, we get a cracking, multi-point-of-view adventure novel about billionaires prepping for the end of the world...Alderman skillfully maneuvers all these power players and blocs into position before detonating the crisis that sets off the book’s second act, where we get into some damned fine Masque of the Red Death territory, but clad in Tony Stark mecha survival suits and against a backdrop of total disaster...this is a fantastic and incredibly satisfying comeuppance novel that gets very deep into the ideology of wishing the world would end, and dreaming that when it does, you will finally matter.”—Cory Doctorow

“This book. My god. My expectations were very high. And they were blown-out-of-the-water exceeded. Holy crap. I will be recommending this book to everyone. Forever.”—Laurie Frankel, bestselling author of This Is How It Always Is

"Playful, incisive, horribly relevant and surprisingly hopeful, The Future is a thrill ride that’s also a powerful manifesto hurtling towards a world where everything might turn out to be okay. A little Atwood, a little Gibson, all Alderman, it’s brilliant and I loved it."—Lauren Beukes, New York Times bestselling author of The Shining Girls and Bridge

"It is the genius of Naomi Alderman to embed a smart and thought-provoking meditation inside a page-turner of a book. This is one wild (and thoughtful) ride. Many things to think! Many things to feel!"—Karen Joy Fowler, New York Times bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“How can a novel of big ideas be such compulsively readable entertainment? A nail-biting love story and a witty page-turner about the pros and cons of human civilization, The Future is a wow.”—Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of Learned by Heart and Room

"Talk of AI—and fears of what it can do—are everywhere in the news these days, but nobody seems to know exactly WHY we should be afraid and where this is all leading. Except Naomi Alderman! Her bold new novel, The Future, looks at AI in all of its seductive, terrifying forms while telling a story that takes place RIGHT NOW and spans continents and world-ending catastrophes while managing to be intensely personal at the same time. A story of advertising tricks and devious (or downright evil) algorithms, cults and corporations, billionaires determined to save their own skins at all costs and eco-idealists equally determined to save the world, set in, of all places, Sodom and Gomorrah! A compulsory—and compulsive—read!"—Connie Willis, SFWA Grand Master

“Elegantly written, funny and frightening, The Future is a must-read - and one of those books other authors wish they’d written.”—Nick Harkaway, author of Titanium Noir

"The Future couldn't be more timely, or more welcome. It's the book we need right now. It manages to be a persuasive, carefully thought-through manual for social and technological change, a roadmap to a better, greener, kinder tomorrow - a world that's ours for the taking if we want it badly enough - while also a rollicking, fun-packed thriller with juicy stakes, constantly escalating twists, and a cast of characters who feel like they already exist somewhere out there in our fragile, free-wheeling present."—Alastair Reynolds, author of Eversion

From the Publisher

Guinevere Turner and Natalie Naudus confidently lead the sweeping ensemble of voices who tell this devastating story of the end of the world, caused by the evils of technology and power. Once the fate of the planet becomes clear, a small group of super wealthy individuals jump into action, seeking refuge in secret predetermined locales. Assisted by the key performances of Graham Halstead, Lorelei King and Santino Fontana, Alderman's audiobook may peer bleakly into the future, but the details are of the moment. Aggressive AI applications mine massive data from everyday human behavior, while rich tech companies employ algorithms to steal labor from the masses under the guise of "efficiency." Jeremy Bobb and Fred Sanders round out this stellar group of performers. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile

★ 2023-08-12
Another vision of the not-too-distant future from the author of The Power (2017).

“On the day the world ended, Lenk Sketlish—CEO and founder of the Fantail social network—sat at dawn beneath the redwoods in a designated location of natural beauty and attempted to inhale from his navel.” Readers who appreciate everything that’s going on in the opening sentence of this novel are likely to enjoy the whole thing. This is a story about the wealthiest people in the world and how they live. Other readers might like to know that this story is set in the very near future in a world that is divided between tech billionaires, preppers, and pretty much everybody else. Where these categories overlap is where it starts to get interesting. Lai Zhen lived through the Fall of Hong Kong to become a survivalism influencer. Martha Einkorn escaped her father’s cult to become Lenk Sketlish’s right hand. Badger Bywater is ready to use their access to Medlar—the network their mother oversees—to help their friends try to save the world. And Selah Nommik is best known as the wife of Zimri Nommik, but she’s also a kickass coder. Alderman begins with the end of the world and moves back and forth in time from that moment, which sometimes makes it difficult for readers to understand where they are relative to end times and sometimes makes it difficult to understand characters’ relationships to each other at any given moment. That said, Alderman has crafted characters readers will want to follow wherever they go—even to the end of the world.

A smart, engrossing fable about digital technology and human community.

Kirkus Reviews