This one jumps around a lot, but never gets hard to follow. You just have to meet each character as they’re thrown at you, and see where it goes.

Some of the first ones we’re introduced to are billionaires Lenk, Ellen, and Zimri. We can easily see similarities to real people – and real companies – that exist in our real world today. I’ll leave that alone for now, except to say that reading this book may inspire some to take a “social media” break.

Then we start going a little deeper on some of the other people in their orbits: Lenk’s assistant Martha bubbles up to become one of the real main characters here. And, about a third of the way into the book, she makes allies with Zimri’s wife, Ellen’s youngest child, and an ousted founder of the company Ellen took over. They all know how the companies in question are ruining society, and start contemplating if there’s anything they can do to turn the tides.

But also, we meet one other character who isn’t initially tied to any of them: Lai Zhen. She’s an online guru who reviews and discusses survival methods and new survival tech. A growing and fervent portion of the population believes the end is near, and are actively prepping for it. Lai Zhen is one of their minor celebrities.

Lai Zhen eventually becomes entangled with this bunch through Martha, and a very quick dalliance that the two women strike up. Unbeknownst to Lai Zhen, Martha uses her to test out one of the technologies her secret cohort is working on. Later, when they enact their master plan, they don’t realize Zhen still has a working version of the technology… which then forces her to become part of the plan.

There are a few big twists in the rest of the book, but most of them are really just learning who knew what and when. Needless to say, there’s a lot of mistrust amongst the billionaires, as they all see each other as competitors. And Lai Zhen doesn’t fit into their circle at all.

So, this is a sci-fi book, but the future here seems not too far from our own time. And all of it seems very plausible. Some of the context – and even some of the plot – is told through posts on a message board.

There are also a lot of Bible references, with one character being fairly obsessed with the story of Sodom. The idea that Abraham negotiates with God to save the city for 50, 40, and even just 10 good people becomes something that our second set of main characters really toys with. The idea that the world, for all the bad it includes, is still worth saving.

If you like science fiction, or hating on tech bro billionaires, this book is probably for you. It’s a fun read – pretty fast-paced with a lot of locale changes.

This book was intense in the best way! I couldn't put it down. I can't wait for all of my friends to read this book, so we can talk about it. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital ARC of this book in exchange for a review.

I spent a long time trying to get into this and read about half but ultimately decided to spend my time elsewhere. I thought this would be right up my alley, but I just couldn't get into it. I didn't connect with the characters and it was a little too gloom-and-doom, I think.

Naomi Alderman celebrated for her previous work, The Power, returns with a compelling and thought-provoking novel, The Future. This book delves into a world where the ultra-rich hold sway over technologies that could either save or doom humanity. Alderman's narrative, weaving through the lives of Martha Einkorn and Lai Zhen, creates a tapestry of suspense and intrigue that keeps the reader hooked.

Martha's escape from a cult-like compound into a world dominated by powerful corporations sets the stage for a narrative rich in themes of power and control. Lai Zhen's character, an internet-famous survivalist in Singapore, adds an international dimension and a touch of the thriller genre to the story. The intersection of their lives, driven by technology and shadowy corporate interests, makes for a gripping read.

Alderman's portrayal of a world where billionaires manipulate technologies to shape the future is timely and chilling. Her exploration of how power corrupts and the ethical dilemmas faced by those at the helm of such power is brilliantly executed. The novel's pace is exhilarating, with moments of humor and tenderness that add depth to the characters.

However, the book has its challenges. The narrative drags at points, losing some of its initial momentum. While intriguing, the focus on billionaire machinations sometimes feels overdrawn, leaving the reader wondering about the practicalities and realities of such scenarios.

In summary, The Future is a mixed bag of brilliant ideas and occasional lapses in engagement. For speculative fiction fans and readers interested in the intersection of technology and power, this novel offers a fascinating, though sometimes uneven, journey. Alderman's skill in creating a vivid, possible future is undeniable, and the book, despite its shortcomings, is a worthy addition to her body of work.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster for providing an e-Arc of The Future by Naomi Alderman for my review.

The Future
by Naomi Alderman
Pub DATE: Nov. 7, 2023
Simon & Schuster
Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGAlley for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
A Most Anticipated Book of Fall at Associated Press, Booklist, Chicago Tribune, Goodreads, Good Housekeeping, Literary Hub, Time, The Week, and W Magazine

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.
I am not regularly a SCi-Fi reader but this one is really good!
4 stars

I am not familiar with Naomi Alderman’s other works, but heard good things about The Power. And I heard so much about this book that I decided to give it a chance. Thank you, NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for a copy of the ebook; I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Like many dystopian fiction novels, the future looks grim for us. The survivalists are dominant on the web and social media, billionaires have contingency plans for when the world goes to pot, and it doesn’t include most of the rest of the world’s population. When “preppers” Martha and Zhen meet, they put together their knowledge and band together with some other survivalists to change things.

There’s some ultra-secret software that the billionaires have that tells them when and how to escape when civilization fails, and somehow the software shows up on Zhen’s phone. Who could have sent it to her? And why? Because with this knowledge, there may be time to fix things for mankind. It’s a race against time.

Overall, this was a really good speculative fiction story. In the middle section, there are quite a few descriptions of algorithms and how the software works that slows the story down somewhat. However, that did not detract me from enjoying the story overall as a break from my normal reading. I’d give it a solid 4 stars.

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The Future is grim for 3 billionaires and a sex partner survivalist in Naomi Alderman’s The Future. The first part of the book was interesting as I liked Lai Zhen’s story. The machinations of a few people to get a good future outcome. Maybe you might have to lead some people astray to save the world. It’s an interesting concept but it didn’t hit the mark with me, Thanks to Simon & Schuster, NetGalley and Naomi Alderman for the ARC. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I'm not going to describe the plot because I don't want to give anything away.

The book is fast paced and follows a number of characters through a non linear timeline. The plotting and writing are excellent and the characters well formed and interesting. While it takes a bit to catch on, the book is very engaging and immediately pulls you in.

As its title suggests, this novel is set in the near future. Humanity has access to lots of really cool gadgets designed to make life easier. However, the planet is teetering on the edge of what seems like its inevitable extinction. Alderman’s focus is on the destructive marriage of technology and capitalism, a union that seems all too familiar to us today. She questions whether we can control rich and powerful tech moguls to save the planet. Of course, it is no surprise that the villains in this story are the tech CEOs. What is surprising, however, is that the heroes are also techies. I guess it takes one to know one.

The protagonist is Lai Zhen, a 33-year-old expert on survival. Her backstory qualifies her for this, since she survived the fall of Hong Kong to the Chinese. Through her lesbian lover, Martha Einkorn, she becomes involved with a group of disaffected activists, who have come to see the three powerful tech companies (Fantail, Anvil, and Medlar) as the main problem with the demise of the planet. This group joins in a clever plot to save the world from the three tech CEOs, who have been essentially controlling the world. Yet they have basically given up on the mess they have created and now plan to wait out Armageddon in secure and lush bunkers. Alderman shows this deeply flawed trio little mercy. She depicts them as brilliant, conniving, narcissistic, cowardly, and greedy. Ironically, they embrace the delusion that they are altruistic. This seems to be a witty and satirical skewering of today’s technological leaders.

The world Alderman’s characters inhabit is a believable extrapolation of what already exists. However, the world she depicts at the end of the novel is almost too good to believe. Clearly, she is more interested in ideas, satire, and wit rather than on giving her readers a coherent story. Her use of shifting points of view and multiple timeframes fragment her storyline. Likewise, multiple subplots about the parables of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice do little to enhance the narrative. Add in plot elements on survivalist cults and the historical tension between hunter/gatherers (she calls them foxes) vs. agriculturists (rabbits) and you get bit of a mishmash. Notwithstanding these flaws, Alderman does manage to maintain tension and intrigue to her ultimate and, indeed, clever conclusion.

I immersed myself in a white-knuckle exploration of a dystopian world molded by billionaires gearing up for an impending apocalypse. The narrative introduces three tech CEOs orchestrating their survival, weaving in elements of private weather control, technological prophecy, and covert weapons. A diverse group, including the daughter of a cult leader and a non-binary hacker, takes center stage, hatching a daring plan to counter the billionaire's destructive agenda. The book's swift pace, short chapters, and unexpected twists create a gripping experience with surprises at every turn. Alderman masterfully constructs a world rich in technological advances, avoiding predictability while offering a thought-provoking reflection on real-world economic power dynamics. I highly recommend this original and pertinent read.

Alderman’s books are always a wild ride of real life scenarios with a hint of science fiction or fantasy that propels the story into something more. She does tend to sit on a political line in her musings and while I absolutely love it, it’s not for everyone. Especially sitting at a hard 400+ pages, I can see people who tend to skim getting bored/missing important details with something like this. It won’t be to everyone’s taste but it was scrumptious for me and I have yet to be disappointed in Alderman’s books. I enjoyed the flipping of perspectives and adding in threads from social media apps included. She truly understands our society in a way that slightly disturbs me while also giving me hope that there are good people in the world. And to top it all off she gave me one of the loveliest “eat the rich” montages I’ve seen in a while. I highlighted SO much in this book and will be thinking of it for quite some time.

Favourite quotes:
“Never underestimate the crazy of the internet.”

“…the pieces can be enough to comfort in a broken world.”

…”a lot of rich people want to pretend to be poor people. Or comfort themselves that they could live like poor people if they had to.

I'm an absolute SUCKER for a Science Fiction narrative, and I am so thankful to Simon and Schuster, Naomi Alderman, and Netgalley for granting me advanced access to this behemoth before it came out on November 7, 2023.

I have a love/hate relationship with books in a dystopian future. I had that with just this book alone. Parts of it were really intriguing while others were hard for me to get through. I liked the plot and the setting. I could almost immerse myself in this world. I was bogged down by the writing style, which was always trying to be clever and only succeeding sometimes. I don't have to like the characters to enjoy a book. In this case not like the characters made me not care much about the story eventually.

Set in the (maybe) not so distant future, the Future tells the story of what it will take to fix all that humans have done to the earth and society. Will the three wealthiest and most powerful titans of industry protect the world or will they protect themselves?
I loved The Power and loved this book just as much. I found myself thinking about this story long after I finished it. I’m sure that some won’t love the dystopian theme, but to be honest, it seems to be where we are headed.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher and author for this ARC!

ARC The Future
By: Naomi Alderman
🐺🐰
I received an eARC through NetGalley and Simon & Schuster.

I don’t remember requesting the ARC since it was a total surprise when it showed up on my account. However, I was told there was no way to remove it, so I had to read it.

When I first started reading it, I was pleasantly surprised that I was enjoying it since it’s not really a book I would have picked for myself.

That being said, I ended up DNFing it at 50%. I enjoyed it at first, but then it lost me. It got too technical, which makes sense since it’s about technology and the 3 major technology companies - like a future version of Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft (or maybe Apple).

The timeline goes back and fourth so it’s hard to keep track. We know something major is happening in the beginning of the book. Then it starts to give back stories of multiple characters before the big event happened. But even that timeline goes back and forth; the backstory to the backstory.

There are multiple POV on top of the multiple timelines. I was able to keep up with most of that until it got to the technical explanations - I don’t need to know the technicality of a computer “learning” or not. And I couldn’t understand what they were doing with Happymeal. It just completely lost my interest at that point.

I just don’t think this book was for me. I wanted to find out how they got to the big event without the exact details of technology involved.

Therefore, if you are a coder or a mechanic engineer, or if you like technological or “Big Brother” dystopians, or conspiracy/prepper stories, you might really enjoy this book. I wish it wasn’t as detailed on the technology parts or I probably would have tried to completed it.

I watched "The Power," and I loved it, so I was excited to check this book out. Sadly, it missed the mark for me. I struggled to get and stay engaged. The book could've benefitted from a tighter edit, as there were a lot of unnecessary details that pulled me out of the story. Characters were shallow and underdeveloped. From the Biblical standpoint, there were some inaccuracies (such as pertaining to Genesis 13).I didn't care for the Covid references. Too soon, and I read as a way of escaping things I hear about in my day-to-day life. As a whole, I found the story hard to follow without a clear timeline and, in general, boring.

Wow this book was wild - and also really hard to describe without spoilers! I guess I’d say that rather than your typical post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, it’s mostly more pre-apocalyptic which is an interesting twist right there. It’s the not too far future, and three billionaire tech CEOs (think fictional stand-ins for Facebook, Amazon and Apple) are busy running the world while also prepping their bunkers just in case the world goes to hell; meanwhile other characters who are close to those CEOs are also worried about the state of the world. And, we have one regular person, who’s an internet celebrity of sorts in the survivalist/doomsday prepper world.

And that’s about all I want to say about the plot, you just have to let this book take you on its wild ride! You might be confused at first, but I promise, just go with it! It’s a great story with some great twists, plus very thought-provoking! It definitely gets dark, but I think it’s actually less dark than Naomi Alderman’s book The Power. And I can’t wait to discuss it with some friends.

Corporate greed meets the apocalypse in this thrilling tale from Naomi Alderman. Imagine a world where the upper echelon of massive corporations have hidden bunkers around the world in case of disaster, while simultaneously NOT stopping conditions that could lead to such disaster in the first place. Here is the world of The Future.

The Future is a hard read at times, as it takes events that feasibly could happen and turns it to a sci-fi dystopia that none of us meer peasants would want for ourselves or our loved ones. The book does start slow, about the first half is character and world building, setting the scene so to speak. This bit could at times get rather philosophical, and made for a slower reading pace. However, once things get going, the accelerator is pressed to the floor as the reader is sped through events in an exhilarating fashion. Ultimately, this redeemed the book for me because that first half was tough. This is definitely a book to make you think, and it is ok it put it down and come back to it if your brain needs to catch up with the at times, heavy concepts. If you can push past the slow start, this book definitely pays dividends in the second half and I would recommend it.

Thank you to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster, and the Simon Books Buddy program for this ARC. I am leaving this review voluntarily and all views expressed are my own.

A novel that will have you pondering the world's future. From impeding doomsday situations to prepping to survival prepardedness, we bounce around the viewpoints of multiple characters. There were times while reading I was hooked, and other times when the story really slowed down for me. That ending, though, really did pack a few surprises

This was a thrilling read! A cult escapee, a famous survivalist, a hacker, a coder, and an ex Silicon Valley employee; all of these people are woven together with religious allegories, differing perspectives, and advanced technology to create an epic and clever plot that feels all too possible.

I could not predict the twists and turns this book had in store and I was hooked from beginning to end. It poses many questions and really made me think, is the future really unpredictable and out of our control, or not?