“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?
