The Future by Naomi Alderman

WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW

Naomi Alderman, author of the bestselling feminist sci-fi novel The Power, turns to climate change and corporate greed in her latest novel The Future. It is a heist story with the objective of saving the Earth from a group of super wealthy tech gurus.

The villainous corporate elites learn that a great cataclysm is coming that will lead to the collapse of human civilization. Think of thinly-veiled straw men for Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. Wars, famine, misery, and destruction are coming. Although they don’t know how exactly it will unfold, they prepare to live in isolated bunkers until things cool down.

The heroes are a group of other powerful people who are appalled by the actions of the three villains and decide that the only way to save the world is to eliminate them. They hatch a complicated plan to remove them, similar to the intricate mechanics of the Ocean’s Eleven heists.

Caught in the middle of the heist is Lai Zhen, a Youtuber who specializes high tech survivalism, planning for societal collapse. One conspirator has an affair with her and accidentally gets her wrapped up in their scheme. Her role is that of a common person that doesn’t learn the truth until the end, similar to Julia Roberts’s character in Ocean’s Eleven.

There are some questionable elements to the plot and world-building but lets examine those later. Let’s focus on the ideas of the novel and what it is trying to do.

Source: https://www.petertatchellfoundation.org/does-sodom-gomorrah-condemn-homosexuality/

The novel loves religious references and has characters repurpose them for their own ends. Sodom and Gomorrah is the focus for much of the novel. One of the conspirators Martha Einkorn, posts her own retelling of the Biblical story and her own interpretation. Her upbringing in the hyper-religious sect called the Enochites, who believe God is going to strike down the wicked via climate catastrophes.

The other conspirators are not religiously inspired. Instead, they are powerful people close to the evil tech gurus that have gradually become more appalled at their irresponsible and destructive actions. Their motivation is to eliminate the villains and replace them with themselves.

Perhaps the story is not intended to be analogous and merely uses it to explain the perspective of the religious zealot conspirator Martha Einkorn. Yet, examining the motivations of the protagonists here is revealing.

In the novel, the conspirators seem to play the role of God. The three evil tech gurus are the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is interesting that it is not whole cities or societies that are punished, but only three people.

Perhaps The Future is intended to be a reversal. Instead of God seeing everyone in cities as guilt by association, he smites only the wicked few. One has to wonder at this worldview. Instead of sparing a city if it has 10 good people, you smite 10 bad people to save the city.

There are some pretty serious implications using this view as justification for horrific crimes in this novel and throughout history. It also presents an interesting question: do you believe evil exists in society because of a small group of really bad people? Can a whole world be destroyed by such a tiny cabal?

Saving the world becomes an assassination campaign. If we get rid of the bad people, everything will be alright. Ask yourself: who does that sound like? There are some pretty obvious examples of it in the news today. Some desire to lead the campaign to destroy these evil folks, others are accused of being these evil folks and are blamed for the world’s ills.

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-throws-more-fuel-145555785.html

It is a fascinating simplification to see the world’s downfall caused by the actions of just three people. In the story, this is where true power lies on planet Earth, and this is where our future is decided. The rest of us do not matter and bear no responsibility. This ignores that people consume the products the three evil gurus produce. People elect the leaders that implement policies to the benefit of these select wealthy.

Do the people bear no responsibility? Do they not matter at all? In this novel, they do not.

A lot of the social commentary comes in the form of internet message boards for survivalists, with Martha Einkorn one of the big posters. The conversation there is what you’d expect from in internet message board: obnoxious, angry, ill-informed, trite, and loaded with vulgarities that apparently are used to prove the posters are edgy. They may be elites but they don’t sound like elites. That’s important I guess.

The other allegorical story is the fox and the rabbit (as far as I know, it is not Biblical). The fox represents the survivalist and the hunter-gatherer society. The rabbit builds permanent settlements, establishing rules of ownership of property, agriculture, and technology to make life more comfortable. It represents agricultural societies and civilization as we know it today.

Martha—via the message board—explains the fox is the smarter, healthier creature and is always curious and sees world and nature for what it truly is. The rabbit is sicker, forced to adjust to new diet, becomes greedy with notions of ownership, and steadily becomes more detached from the world and nature. It is that detachment that leads to the rabbit and civilization inadvertently destroying its own world.

A self-serving story with some questionable logic. Martha also admits the original storyteller, her father Enoch, altered it after she discovered a fallacy in it. So, one could take the whole thing as bullshit. It is clearly an important allegory because the symbols made their way to the cover of the book.

In their crusade to save the world, the conspirators commit a number of crimes: kidnapping, false imprisonment, and fraud to name a few. Once the evil tech gurus are gone, ownership and control of their tech empires transfer to the conspirators. While their ultimate motivation is to save the world, one cannot help but notice they all personally benefited greatly from the scheme. The one innocent person in the heist, Lai Zhen, is nearly killed while stranded on the tropical island with the evil tech gurus.

The world-saving plans work. This ending is explained via infodump. It was easy once the right people were in charge. Conveniently, the solution requires no sacrifice on their part.

Is kidnapping, false imprisonment, fraud, and assault justified in this case? The novel uses a lot of pages to convince the reader the world is on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the end there is no compelling proof. There was a device in the novel that could have offered that proof but instead it provides evidence of the opposite.

Source: https://www.archdaily.com/998267/architecture-after-civilization-design-in-the-post-apocalypse

Martha uses a survivalist software program called AUGR (as in augur) to convince the three tech gurus a massive catastrophe is about to happen and they need to go to their bunkers and stay there until it passes. The problem is AUGR doesn’t work. It’s prediction was completely fabricated.

The conspirators don’t know the world is ending. They just think it is. Worst of all, they don’t know if things are going to collapse in their lifetime. It is based on mere speculation and feeling. In justifying her actions, Martha admits:

But doing it slowly would have been horrific to live through. Hundreds of years of misery: rising seas and famine and drought, refugees from one war bringing so much pressure onto another country that it created more wars.

Here, the conspirator is admitting there is no imminent collapse at all, just her personal fear of a slow and miserable age. In her mind, the dark age is inevitable unless she takes over her bosses company and changes its direction.

As an ethical question, as well as a matter of criminal law, this is an incredibly weak justification. There is no imminent threat, the evidence of a lingering threat is based on fear and speculation, and there is absolutely no guarantee that elimination of just three people will solve it. It also assumes the conspirators have the near god-like power to prevent it once the three villains are gone.

In the novel, it all works out but if presented as a hypothetical, it is lacking in moral justification. Even if conditions improve, the conspirators ought to be held responsible for their crimes, not rewarded with wealth and power.

Is the novel aware of this issue? Absolutely not. Here is a passage from the ending of the novel:

They laughed as children do when they are thrown high in the air. We are all falling, all the time, from the half-understood past to the unknowable future. The other name for falling without fear is flying.

Martha and her lover Lai Zhen laugh at the end. It is a feeling of triumph to no longer fear the future. That fear is alleviated thanks to the brilliant stewardship of three tech empires. The characters don’t seem concerned with the moral implications or potential consequences of their actions.

The ends justify the means, especially if the victims of your actions are bad people. The harsh critique of the three villains provides the basis for the three self-interested parties to sit in judgement. One could argue Martha in particular has a god complex.

The writing and stylistic issues undermined the buildup of tension in the novel. More broadly, the novel is loaded with social commentary.

The exposition is also not particularly compelling. The style is short, blog-like, easy to consume for those with extraordinarily short attention spans. The dialogue is low-brow at best. There is no sign that the characters are truly as brilliant, well-educated, and insightful as the novel presents them. Nearly all of them sound like crass undergrads who believe they know everything about the world before their twenty-first birthday.

Frankly, it’s painful to read at times. There is a lack of self-awareness recognizable in all these characters.

Important plot points are told rather than shown. For example, several important events happen “off stage.” This is a basic storytelling issue that gets a lot of manuscripts rejected.

The novel also uses several deus ex machina technologies to help get past certain plot issues and questions. The setting is near future but whenever the plot runs into a problem, there is an algorithm or new tech innovation that allows it to proceed. It results in an ending that is ludicrous.

It is also problematic to have POV character lie to the reader as Lai Zhen does while she is stranded on the island. Her internal voice speaks as if she believes the plague catastrophe is real and everyone is truly dead. Except, she reveals at the end she knew none of it was real. She was lying to the reader.

In the end, the The Future has stylistic issues, plot conveniences, and disturbing moral ambiguity at its heart. It’s entitled protagonist, Martha, has a god complex and is guilty of serious crimes without justification. The thick social commentary is an anchor on the momentum of the story.

Everyone has an opinion and most have the means to express it. Sharing your opinions on current events rarely enhances a story. Sadly, that is the era we reside in today. Maybe we will soon turn back to just telling stories and leaving our baggage at home.