“This is the essential problem. We can imagine the future. And once we’ve imagined it, we can’t stop.” These words appear towards the end of Naomi Alderman’s sixth novel, The Future, transcribed to a survivalist forum from a famous sermon by a doomsday cult leader who called himself Enoch. The Enochites came to a collective tragic end some years before the events of the novel, but Enoch’s ideas about the trajectory of human civilisation live on in corners of the internet, and resonate throughout the book as parable and commentary on humanity’s gleeful acceleration towards its own destruction.
Alderman is one of the most consistently inventive contemporary British writers, combining literary and historical erudition with an instinct for narrative pace honed in her parallel career writing video games. Like the work of her mentor, Margaret Atwood, her novels have moved confidently between alternative past, recognisable present and speculative future, but it was the latter, in the form of 2016’s The Power, that propelled her to mainstream commercial success. It’s unsurprising, then, that she has chosen to continue in a similar vein for her follow-up. The Future is a complex novel of ideas slyly hidden inside a satirical dystopian tech-thriller; if its premise is less sharply focused than that of The Power, which asked what happens in a world where men fear violence from women, its central questions are nevertheless a variation on the same theme: what happens when all the power, including the power to survive the end of the world, is concentrated in the hands of a select few? If it is our curse, as a species, to imagine the future, are we capable of imagining a better one, and what would we be willing to sacrifice for it?
Part of the joke, of course, is that The Future is obviously set in our familiar present, just with fancier gadgets. In this near-future of displacement and environmental crisis, global communication and commerce is dominated by three companies, Anvil, Medlar and Fantail (barely disguised versions of Amazon, Apple and Facebook/Twitter), and their respective chief executives, Zimri Nommik, Ellen Bywater and Lenk Sketlish. Though nominally rivals, these three are also uneasy allies by virtue of being the wealthiest people on the planet, and the novel opens with each of them receiving an alert from an exclusive early warning app telling them that the collapse of civilisation is imminent and it’s time to head to their bunkers.
The nature of the apocalyptic catastrophe is not revealed until much later, as the novel switches at a clip between past and present, between continents and characters, and between events in the real world and philosophical discussions on the Name the Day forum. There’s an overtly televisual aspect to this style of storytelling – short scenes, a large and diverse cast, wisecracking dialogue, occasionally cartoonish violence – which can feel fragmentary at first. But as the reader gradually begins to piece together the elements of the plot and guess at the author’s sleights of hand, they also begin to understand the bigger questions the novel is addressing – about the nature of civilisation, the risks and rewards of trust, and what we might learn from our historical and mythological antecedents.
The biblical story of Lot, who escaped the destruction of Sodom, recurs as a motif throughout; it’s a particular obsession of Martha Einkorn, Lenk Sketlish’s right-hand woman at Fantail, who also happens to be the daughter of Enoch. Martha and her sometime lover, Lai Zhen, a former refugee turned survival-tech influencer, are the most fully drawn characters in the novel, while the billionaires never really evolve beyond parodies of their real-world counterparts. This is a flaw that often afflicts attempts to satirise the tech-bro lifestyle – Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel The Circle, which The Future sometimes recalls, suffered from it, as did the film Glass Onion – since the reality is already so outre the satire fails to bite.
But The Future is more than satire; Alderman moves easily between an ironic, comic register and more reflective asides. She writes with warmth and wisdom; beyond the entertaining action sequences and the sci-fi gadgets, she posits an alternative future that acknowledges both our human weaknesses and our resilience, one in which “the fight is the destination”.
The Future by Naomi Alderman is published by Fourth Estate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
