After a trio of small-scale novels Alderman hit the big time with her fourth, 2017’s The Power: a global bestseller, winner of the Women’s prize for fiction, chosen as book of the year by Barack Obama and Bill Gates. The novel’s premise is that one day teenage girls develop the ability to make electricity inside themselves, and can project this power outward to hurt or kill. It traces the various ways this changes things: a world in which men rather than women must live in constant fear for their physical safety. Written as a blockbuster thriller, full of incident and variety, it rattles along very readably.
Alderman stays in SF techno-thriller mode for her new book, The Future, but the rattle is less readable this time round, and the “what if?” less engaging. The novel opens, boldly enough, with the end of the world. Three tech trillionaires are fleeing the disaster, jetting off to their lavishly supplied survival bunker. They are the improbably named Lenk Sketlish, CEO of a hybrid of Facebook and X/Twitter called Fantail; Zimri Nommick, CEO of Anvil – that is, Amazon; and Ellen Bywater, CEO of Medlar, “the world’s most profitable personal computing company” (a medlar being a small – micro? – soft type of apple).
After this doomsday opening we step back in time. Lai Zhen, a tech journalist and online influencer, meets Martha Einkorn, Lenk Sketlish’s right-hand woman. The two become lovers. Zhen is investigating what the tech bosses are up to, and comes close enough to the truth for an assassin to be sent to kill her. Martha, we learn, was raised by a doomsday cult in Oregon. Her father, Enoch, the cult leader, preached the coming end times, when the urban world would fall like Sodom. He divides the world into foxes and rabbits, and urges humankind to rediscover its wholeness. Martha escaped the Enochites as a teenager, eventually rising to the eminent commercial position in which we find her at the start of the novel, but when she was a child Enoch taught her a raft of survival skills which will, the reader does not doubt, come in handy as the story develops.
It turns out the opening phrase, “On the day the world ended …”, is a quantum of misdirection. The problem Lenk, Zimri and Ellen have is not the apocalypse itself: “They believe they can survive a global environmental breakdown. They think they’ll inherit the Earth after it’s done.” The problem is getting enough advance warning so as to be able to reach their survival bunker before the hammer comes down on the anvil. To that end they have developed a sentient AI called AUGR, a program that triages all the world’s data and risk points with a view to predicting the world’s end ahead of time. It is a warning from AUGR, rather than the actual end of the world, that opens the novel, a state of affairs that will play out in the second half. I avoid spoilers, but, really: you don’t need a magic prophetic computer to see The Future’s plot twists coming.
The Future reads like a first draft: unevenly paced, digressive, clogged with mini lectures about all sorts of things – the biblical story of Lot, machine learning (with diagrams), humanity’s shift from hunter gathering to farming. Alderman’s attempts to leaven these expositions with action are flashily unconvincing: bullets fly, characters run around, sex scenes interpose (“she was going to have a wild sex time with one, possibly two rich and powerful women … her vagina was voting yes”). Ramond Chandler famously advised writers of thrillers that “when in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand”; but Alderman is no Chandler, and these interludes read like frantic attempts to re-engage the reader’s flagging attention rather than properly plot-propulsive engagements. Kiss-kiss-bang-bang is an art in its own right and The Future does not master it.
Zhen, notionally Chinese-American, sounds throughout like a Londoner (“I don’t fancy giving you material about my life for your wank bank,” she tells Lenk at one point). A young Martha escapes a wild bear by climbing a tree – but as every schoolchild knows, bears can climb trees, and indeed do so faster than their scrambling human prey. Zhen kills an enemy by spraying her in a shopping mall with hi-tech artificial snow, thereby freezing her solid. Alderman wants us to think of Lot’s wife, who is often mentioned, but the frank unlikelihood of the kill bounces us out of the story.
It’s a shame, because Alderman is addressing some large and interesting questions, and a novel about the distorting pressure online life and social media apply to society is nothing if not timely. But the execution is lacking; after The Power, The Future feels like a backward step.
• The Future by Naomi Alderman is published by 4th Estate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
