The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The future? It’s so passé
In Naomi Alderman’s latest novel, the world is burning, tech billionaires are plotting and new ideas are thin on the ground
THE FUTURE by Naomi Alderman 416pp, HarperCollins, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £11.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
In Naomi Alderman’s fifth novel, The Future, the environment is in chaos and the ultra-rich are uncaring. The future, you see, is actually the present. From internet stars to inspirational speakers, there’s an understanding that the reader recognises who’s being skewered. Whether that understanding leads to a successful novel is less clear.
In The Future – Alderman’s first book since 2016’s The Power – three tech billionaires are preparing bunkers for the end of the world. We are told they’re the heads of Anvil, Medlar and Fantail, roughly Amazon, Apple and Facebook. Their equivalence is underlined, unnecessarily, by a table of the companies’ functions. One CEO has a wily personal assistant, Martha Einkorn, who plans to use her proximity to the group for sabotage.
The problem, in Alderman’s novel, is capitalism, but don’t expect an interrogation of the global economic structure. The politics of this book are vaguely “aware” – billionaires look selfish; the climate crisis is being ignored – but not incisive. Ironically, given it also warns about the perils of social media, The Future parrots timeline-politics, saying, in essence: “Urgh, money.”
Here’s the rub: Alderman seems uncertain as to whether The Future is a romp or satire. She’s trying to pin down our most terror-inducing social issues, while simultaneously attempting to establish a commercially viable franchise. I suspect that this novel will please neither readers of science fiction, nor those looking for something more intellectually demanding.
I suspect, too, that Alderman would prefer that her readers belong to the latter group. Take this coincidence (a device on which she’s very keen): Martha Einkorn is also the daughter of an enigmatic cult leader, which introduces a secondary thread about evangelical charisma. A more confident writer might have used this to introduce Christian imagery: this is the apocalypse, literally. Instead, Alderman separates out the religious elements as posts on a mock messageboard. The cult becomes a tantalising prospect, unexplored, albeit exemplary: initially thrilling concepts are overdone, overcomplicated, little flashes abandoned in favour of something not so subtle.
Einkorn isn’t the protagonist: that’s Lai Zhen, who’s a cipher for the reader in that she isn’t a billionaire. She is, however, a survival expert, making her capable of extreme feats of physical endurance. Useful, then, for the book’s many action scenes: Alderman favours resolution through (rather cinematic) bouts of fighting, and unlikely methods of violence. At times this proves successful, as when we hold our breath with Zhen while she crawls around an air duct, a killer pursuing her – until we realise that it’s a scene cribbed from Die Hard.
The Future also has the habit of naming – or branding – each bit of technology. Characters communicate via SmartPin, check their AnvilClip, shop on TogBuzz, wear MembraSkin, use Torcs and ChatAI and AUGR to make decisions. A neat exercise in worldbuilding for Alderman, and an established quirk of the genre, but tiring for the reader who has to translate “thinscreen” to “Apple Watch” in their mind at every mention.
There are some moments of ingenuity. The Future is very much an international story, with Singapore, Madrid and Switzerland all described rather delightfully. The final section, set on a desert island, is an imaginative bit of adventure writing, while those initial mentions of climate change and our over-reliance on technology induce a shiver of recognition.
Once Alderman gets too specific, however, the terror fades: you wonder how lines such as “isn’t this how Elizabeth Holmes got, um… in trouble with Theranos” will age. And in a scene that was presumably meant to be frightening, a character is spirited into the sky by a swarm of drone-bugs, drifting to a cartoon death.
The Future, then, is a brass rubbing, taking the outline of an established genre and fudging the details. Alderman warns us that the seas are rising, that forests are burning – then baulks at having to render such disasters. Instead, she hopes we’ll be satisfied with explosions and smartwatches, and take it for granted that the true horrors are elsewhere.
A chase scene in an air duct is thrilling – till you realise it’s cribbed from Die Hard