The Brooklyn Rail

Naomi Alderman has become one of the great writers of twenty-first century speculative fiction. Her last novel, The Power, focused on a gender-based power-shift that changed the world. More complex than the Amazon Prime series would have you believe, The Power suggested that a different future—one where the patriarchy was replaced by empowered women and girls—wouldn’t necessarily be better. Of course that’s a very oversimplified description of what’s going on in that novel. Alderman writes complex novels and her new one, The Future, is 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.

I have a practice of picking up new books and judging them by the first and last lines. It’s not always reliable but when the first line draws me in, I often want to read the rest of the book and I’m often rewarded with a good read. Alderman starts The Future with: “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.” Lenk is one of three tech titans—some of the richest, most powerful people in the world—at the locus of Alderman’s complex plot. Lenk rages silently at a meditation teacher as she tells him: “Remember that we are only ever anxious about things that might happen in the future. But the future is not here. The future is imaginary and all its promises and fears are imagined.” For Lenk, the future is all-important. A tech visionary, he has made his billions through a seeming ability to predict and manipulate the future. His colleagues and competitors for the title of “most powerful tech person” are Zimri Nommik who runs the shipping, logistics, and purchasing giant, Anvil, and Ellen Bywater who specializes in taking over tech companies and is currently running a ubiquitous computer company Medlar Technologies. These are people who are both brilliant and completely amoral, so self-focused as to want to control the weather and build themselves luxury bunkers and early warning systems to survive the coming apocalypse. That it’s an apocalypse that they have abetted and encouraged seems part of the plan.

Counterpoint to these three tech giants are four characters who form a sort of allegiance to try to save the world. Lai Zhen is a thirty-something woman who makes a living creating survivalist videos. With online followers in the millions, she is uniquely positioned to provide a compelling and fascinating throughline as she survives in a rapidly disintegrating world. Because Lai Zhen survived the “Fall of Hong Kong” and spent part of her childhood in the terrible oppression of a refugee camp, she’s developed survival skills that inform her worldview and give her a resilience that serves her well through whatever the world throws at her. She is also one of the most human characters in the novel and we can’t help but root for her. Martha Einkorn is a woman with direct access to power. As a teen, she ran away from her father Enoch’s apocalypse cult and worked her way up to become Lenk’s trusted and powerful personal assistant. Selah Nommik is the “trophy wife” of Zimri Nommik and also a brilliant coder and environmentalist. Badger Bywater is the nonbinary and youngest child of Ellen Bywater with a social media presence focused on direct critique of their mother’s company.

Shifting back and forth through time, across different formats, and different points of view, The Future can be dizzying but Alderman provides clear section headers and breaks to guide the reader through. There are exciting chase scenes—Lai Zhen running from a gun-toting Enochian assassin through a Singapore mall, Martha running from a hungry bear in the forest of her childhood, and the billionaires fleeing from the apocalypse and each other on a tiny island. Interspliced throughout are excerpts from a discussion board on the survivalist site “Name the Day.” Many of these are posts by Martha Einkorn (under a screen name) and much of what she writes about is focused on apocalypse and the story of Sodom, Lot, his wife, and his daughters. Enoch was a biblical man and Martha is well-versed in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). Martha’s posts present a narrative that focuses on the concept of salvation and destruction, positioning human history as a sort of endless war between hunter-gatherers and farmers. It’s unclear just how much of this view of human history Martha embraces or if she’s just working through her father’s troubled theology. Whatever her internal beliefs, she does think the world is worth saving—in direct opposition to Lenk’s narcissism: “They weren’t leaving the world, the world was leaving them.” For Martha, no matter how powerful a person is, “you can’t just walk away when things go bad,” although she also asks: “Is it OK to decide to give up on a place? How little goodness is too little? When is there no future left?”

Lai Zhen and Martha meet at a survivalist tech conference and have a very brief but heart-crushing affair. Martha leaves without saying goodbye, installing secret high tech survival software in Lai Zhen’s phone. Lai Zhen uses this software to save her life and is driven to track down the source of the software and to try to understand Martha’s motives. There are moments in the novel that touch on deep fears and grief that many of us are feeling right now as we witness catastrophic events and climate disaster. In one scene, Martha and Lai Zhen are visiting the ruins of a Temple of Orpheus discovered in East London. The temple was the subject of Lai Zhen’s graduate work and also “dated from the dying of the light: the period when Roman forces were pulling out of Britain and the old saw that the young would know less than they did.” It’s hard not to see End Times parallels: if our society collapses into chaos, what darkness might come after? Or, as Martha says, “There is always a future to imagine until it is gone.” Humanity’s ability to destroy our environment is horrifying. After a recent visit to Ebony G. Patterson’s exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden where lush, living plants were interspersed with clear crystal replicas of extinct plants, I read the following passage: “the new Anvil factory in Myanmar dumped runoff into the Irrawaddy River. And then no Irrawaddy dolphins were sighted. Selah Nommik watched a twenty-year-old video of the laughing, shining gray mammals leaping in the water. That’s what Anvil left: videos and bones and plastic packaging. She thought: it’s not him that will die, it’s the world that will end.” In a recent NPR interview, Rosanna Shaw talked about the loss of the California sea lion, the beaches eroding away their habitat and the wealthy Californians whose sea walls threaten both beaches and sea lions with extinction. When they’re gone, they won’t come back. For Shaw, doing the hard work of environmental activism isn’t about hope but about courage—the courage to do the work and to tell the story. I don’t know that I agree with Shaw’s take on hope. I believe courage informed by hope is central to the human condition and necessary for our survival. As Martha writes on the message board, “What comes after despair? Hope, if you’re lucky…. If you’re not lucky, what comes after despair is brutality.”

Perhaps what saves us from brutality is not just hope (or courage) but instead our common humanity. As Martha writes in one of her considerations of the story of Lot (or more importantly, Lot’s wife): “It’s not possible to survive destruction alone… Humans are driven to reach out to each other.” One night, when Albert, the former CEO of Medlar, posts about ending his life on a message board, Martha uses her resources to find him. And although he’s written “The species is going to die. Just let it…” Martha saves his life and together they begin a plan that includes Badger, and Selah, “Four people who regularly sat in rooms with three of the very richest people in the world, with control over them—between them—a majority of the international technological infrastructure of the world … conspiring on an idea.” Together, they create an algorithm that makes minute changes, shifting the tone of internet comments to highlight positive rather than negative emotions. When the plan fails spectacularly, things begin to rapidly get worse. Anxiety builds in the novel, aided by a repeated refrain from Martha’s posts on Sodom “Would you save the city for fifty? … forty?” As the story speeds up, Lai Zhen ends up in Canada and with a friend destroys Zimri Nommik’s bunker. She’s having coffee when she sees on the news that the three tech billionaires have disappeared in a presumed plane crash. Without giving away too much, Lai Zhen ends up on a remote island with Lenk, Ellen, and Zimri in a sort of Survivor death match while out in the rest of the world, drastic change is happening. Alderman introduces surprising plot twists and eventually, a breathtaking ending. The novel asks a central question—what would it take to save the planet and ourselves? Alderman shows one imaginative path of salvation but at the core is a deep awareness of what it means to be human: “The only future we ever own resides in our trust in others, their trust in us.”