Niall Harrison Reviews The Future by Naomi Alderman

The Future, Naomi Alderman (Simon & Schuster 978-16680-25680, $28.99, 432pp, hc) November 2023.

Early in Naomi Alderman’s latest novel The Fu­ture, the protagonist, Lai Zhen, falls in lust, and perhaps love. A sardonic survivalism vlogger who escaped ‘‘the fall of Hong Kong’’ and then did a significant amount of growing up in an offshore British refugee camp, she finds herself at a confer­ence in London a couple of decades from now, interviewing a tech company spokesperson about how their product can be a disaster survival tool. It turns out that Martha Einkorn is in fact more than just a spokesperson, she is the personal assistant to the company’s billionaire founder and CEO, and it seems the simmering attraction is mutual, which is how Zhen finds herself having dinner in a pent­house suite, desperate for but not quite believing in their oncoming liaison. She excuses herself to the bathroom to gather her thoughts, where she starts to daydream about what kind of wedding Martha might prefer, and then catches herself:

Her therapist had explained that human beings long for certainty so much that we’re willing to even undermine and sabotage ourselves in the search for it…. 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.

This is what The Future is about: not just a particular eco- and tech-crisis-ridden near future (‘‘boom times for the end times’’) that appears to be a likely outcome from where we are now, but how the abstract concept of ‘‘the future’’ shapes human thinking, and subsequent human action. How we fear uncertainty so much that, as Zhen’s therapist notes, we will chase certainty to destruc­tion. To distract herself from unproductive wed­ding speculation, Zhen doomscrolls and checks her notifications, only to realise that she’s merely swapped one self-sabotaging, certainty-creating behaviour for another, and that she has now been in the bathroom for an unattractively long time.

Similar patterns play out at different levels throughout the novel. The Future begins with a prologue in which three tech billionaires receive notifications from a ‘‘predictive protection’’ app about an incipient global disaster, and begin evacu­ations to their secret bunkers and private islands. The nature of the catastrophe is left unspecified for much of the novel, but it’s made clear that, if they haven’t been deliberately attempting to bring it about, they have at least been planning for it, and in a way welcome the certainty of its arrival. We never really spend enough time with the three for them to become rounded characters, but it is noticeable that they are neither vacuous grifters against whom it’s easy for the reader to feel morally superior, nor awe-inspiring geniuses bending the world to their will. They are simply humans, with some talent, but ultimately the random beneficiaries of positive feedback loops built into global capitalism. They have the same fear of uncertainty as Zhen – as all of us – but thanks to the reach of the systems they control, when they try to make the future more certain, they don’t just sabotage themselves, they sabotage the world.

How Zhen and Martha’s story is entangled with that of the billionaires is the meat of the novel, most of which is a lot of fun. In execution, The Future shares much with Alderman’s previous abstract-noun investigation, The Power (2016): short chapters and thriller pacing, efficient vibrant characterisation, a fondness for broad-brush satiric extrapolation that sits somewhere between Margaret Atwood and early Neal Stephenson, and a willingness to push the premise to an unsequel-able place. Like much of Alderman’s fiction, The Future also has a theological dimension: one strand of the novel is excerpts from Reddit-style message board discussions about Enochites, ‘‘a new Judaism-based Genesis-inflected American religion,’’ whose beliefs about simplicity and com­plexity layer interestingly on top of the running arguments about certainty and uncertainty.

And The Future also neatly fits Jared Shurin’s recent argument that cyberpunk is now best defined as SF ‘‘about the influence of technology on the scale, the pace, or the pattern of human affairs,’’ as well as his insistence that cyberpunk always ‘‘presents the possibility of dynamism and of change.’’ Without going into detail, change is where The Future ends up, and it doesn’t feel like a big reveal to say so because I guessed some of the specifics of how it would end up there after the first few chapters, and I suspect others will as well. What I can’t decide is whether that lack of suspense is deliberate: whether Alderman intends us to be able to guess, from the timing of certain events, and the way certain characters are introduced, and certain recurring phrases, that this is going to be an example of how it doesn’t all have to crash and burn. Whether she is deliberately giving us that certainty. Maybe she is, and also maybe it doesn’t matter: either way it’s a novel with an interesting argument. But I did just occasionally feel that I was watching the urge to imagine the metaphori­cal wedding sabotage the suspense of the journey.

This review and more like it in the November 2023 issue of Locus.

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