THE FUTURE, by Naomi Alderman
There are few figures in the Bible more cruelly evocative than Lot’s wife, who is transfigured into a pillar of salt for looking back at Sodom. The poet Anna Akhmatova mourned “her swift legs rooted to the ground”; Kurt Vonnegut wrote of her backward glance, “I love her for that, because it was so human.” Naomi Alderman’s “The Future,” like much great science fiction, turns the symbolic into tangible, chemical reality. Early in her novel, a woman is frozen to death with a chemical refrigerant made of paramagnetic salts: a Lot’s wife for the Information Age.
Alderman’s Sodom is our own polarized, plutocratic world. Some names have been changed — instead of Bezos or Musk, we have Lenk Sketlish, Zimri Nommik and Ellen Bywater as our unsavory tech tyrants — but the pressure points are the same: A.I., algorithms, deadly pandemics and the existential threat of climate change, all bound up with the rise of an increasingly unaccountable billionaire class. Whether by divine will or not, “The Future” finds the earth barreling toward fiery destruction.
The stage is therefore set for a reckoning not unlike the one in Alderman’s previous novel “The Power,” which charts the worldwide paradigm shift that occurs when women gain the ability to shoot electricity out of their hands and begin to rebel against abusers and dictators alike. Alderman, who began writing “The Future” two years before the Covid-19 pandemic and more than four years before the emergence of ChatGPT, evidently has a knack for anticipating the zeitgeist. The white-hot, giddy fervor felt by the women of “The Power,” published in the United States in the same month as the first Harvey Weinstein allegations, seemed to encapsulate the anguish and hope of the then nascent #MeToo era.
But no such fever pitch is reached in Alderman’s new novel, whose outlook is decidedly more reformist than revolutionary. Instead of a bottom-up social movement led by young women, change in “The Future” comes from the top down, engineered entirely by a small group of do-gooders close to the tech giants — family members, a personal assistant, a disgruntled ex-C.E.O. — who secretly leverage their positions to sabotage their malignant overlords.
What follows is a dubious effort to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Alderman has an undeniable talent for concocting a twisty, rollicking narrative, replete with assassination attempts, desert island bunkers and machine-learning prophets. Yet for all its conspiratorial thrills, “The Future” mostly reads like a manifesto for technocracy wrapped up in a genre-fiction bow. Littered throughout are jargon-heavy talking points arguing that “tech people are the only people who can fix this” and advocating for “proven and scalable” solutions led by “a growth of corporate responsibility,” as if the world could be saved by Vox.com explainers. The novel’s vision of eco-utopia seems to involve little more than replacing one group of rich people with a slightly less odious group of rich people.
The book suffers not just from its dogmatism but also from its homogeneity. Like “The Power,” it distributes the narration across several characters, all with different life experiences, races, sexual orientations. This was one of the previous novel’s great strengths: By showing the revolution from many angles, not just power but also its abuse, Alderman introduced an ambiguity that was uncomfortable but unflinching. In contrast, “The Future” blurs the line between the characters’ free indirect speech and Alderman’s own moralizing asides on social media or human psychology. It is difficult to see the novel’s pretenses of cultural diversity — a dash of Hong Kong refugee trauma here, a sprinkle of London multiculturalism there — as anything more than tokenism when it is ultimately Alderman’s wisecracking, wonkish tone that dominates.
The book’s most impressive quality is its vivid, tactile imagination of our ultra-computerized future. Its military technologies, which include swarms of lethal, locust-like drones and missiles that leave no trace, would make the Pentagon blush. Alderman’s encyclopedic knowledge of everything from cryptographic history to biblical hermeneutics lends the novel a savvy, scholarly gravitas.
But here, too, didacticism creeps in. No sooner is the tantalizing specter of a techno-ethical dilemma raised, such as the difference between human and machine, than it has been neutered with a facile, essentializing quip, leaving scarce room for awe or contemplation. If “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” as the science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke suggested, then Alderman appears insistent on turning it back into technology. This is even true of her treatment of actual mythology: Sodom and Gomorrah become fodder for petty online quarrels, the golden rule of ethics is reduced to a “vastly valuable social technology,” a woman turning into a pillar of salt is more pun than poetry.
Though it purports to affirm the human capacity for empathy and curiosity, “The Future” is built like a machine: calculating, doctrinaire and hollow on the inside.
THE FUTURE | By Naomi Alderman | Simon & Schuster | 415 pp. | $28.99
