The Future by Naomi Alderman

Published by Simon & Schuster on November 7, 2023

In the infancy of their companies, tech entrepreneurs improved our lives with devices and apps that we now regard as indispensable. After the entrepreneurs became billionaires, they arguably did more harm than good. They stole our data, used AI to deceive us, and invented ways to control our behavior. Nobody likes tech billionaires.

The Future takes place in the near future, maybe a couple of decades from now. Its focus is on tech billionaires and their need for control. The über-wealthy characters believe they are in the best position to survive whatever catastrophe will be the tipping point that ends most life on Earth. They find survival assistance in software called AUGR that predicts catastrophes and plots the best strategy to stay alive.

Martha Eikhorn has access to AUGR. When she gives it to her lover, Lai Zhen, AUGR saves Lai from an assassin’s attack in the novel’s best action scene. Martha grew up as a fundamentalist who learned survival skills to prepare for the end of days. Martha’s story of using her skills during an encounter with a starving bear is mesmerizing.

Martha works for Lenk Sketlish, founder of a social media empire. Albert Dabrowski founded Medlar, a tech giant that manufactures phones and laptops. Ellen Bywater, a genius at corporate takeovers rather than tech, forced Dabrowkski out of his company. Zimri Nommik founded Anvil, which seems a lot like Amazon, before he built AnvilChat and AnvilParty to “snap up everything in his all-consuming maw.” He became the richest person on Earth by using data harvesting methods to manipulate advertising clicks.

The tech billionaires don’t care if the world ends as long as they inherit the post-apocalyptic landscape. To that end, they have created large animal habitats that are kept free of humans. They claim they are protecting plant and animal species, but they have established hidden bunkers inside the habitats where they plan to ride out the apocalypse. They are counting on AUGR to give them time to fly to their bunkers before the rest of the world knows that the shit has hit the fan.

The billionaires are counterbalanced by characters who would like to save the world rather than saving their own skins. Martha and Lai are among the good guys. Ellen’s child Badger Bywater is fed up with their (Badger’s preferred pronoun) mother’s contribution to the planet’s destruction. Zimri’s wife Selah has a similar view about her husband. A couple of additional characters who believe that tech, like nature, should benefit the common good round out the cast..

A clever plot has the bad guys and at least one good guy scurrying for hidden shelters when AUGR announces that the world is ending. One of the good guys compromises one of the hidden shelters in another strong action scene. The plot misleads in a good way, taking the reader on a journey to an unexpected destination

The novel ends on a surprisingly positive note. It turns out that responsible people, when given a bit of power, can improve the world for everyone. You just need to get the three worst ones out of the way. The unfortunate reality is that there are way more than three people leading the planet toward its destruction and most of them work in industries (like oil and munitions) other than tech. And the reality has always been that power corrupts responsible people soon after they acquire it. Still, it’s nice to imagine a better reality. In any event, the last few pages acknowledge the reality that political and religious extremists will always stand as barriers to progress.

The novel incorporates discussions of philosophy, including a series of blog posts about Lot and Sodom that interpret Genesis as a blueprint for survivalists. Those posts are a springboard for thoughts about hunters versus agriculturalists, urban versus country living, civilization versus individualism, symbolic expression versus the world unfiltered. The story might go a bit overboard with its discussion of Fox and Rabbit stories told by the founder of the fundamentalist religion from which Martha escaped, but I give Naomi Alderman credit for exploring broad ideas that most creators of apocalyptic survivalist fiction (and truly ghastly prepper fiction) avoid. But then, this isn’t really a post-apocalyptic or prepper novel. The market is saturated with those. Alderman was wise to tinker around the edges of the concept without writing another one.

I’ve read a few novels in recent years that imagine fictional versions of tech giants who create companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. This is a smarter story than most. Whether the reader agrees with any of the philosophical discussion is less important than the fact that the novel tells an engaging story while trying to say something worthwhile about the relationship between the present and the future.

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The Power by Naomi Alderman

Published by Little, Brown and Company on October 10, 2017

The Power is a story told in the far future about a transformative time that is very near to our present. In the far future, men are docile and nurturing, while women (scientists assume) have evolved to be aggressive and violent so they can protect their babies. But the story told in The Power is an attempt to reconstruct history by a historian who wrote a fictional account of a world run by men. The historian had to write his account as fiction because no one in the future was prepared to accept patriarchy as a plausible state of affairs. The historian views the Cataclysm (an apocalyptic conflict that everyone agrees occurred) as a gender war. The novel-within-a-novel explains how the Cataclysm might have happened.

The Power imagines that women suddenly develop an “electrostatic” power that men lack — essentially, the power to transmit a controlled burst of electricity. Men resent (and fear) a power that they lack. The initial message, of course, is “welcome to the world of women” or “how does it feel when the tables are turned?” The message might put off the vocal minority of science fiction fans who think sf should have frozen its themes in the patriarchal 1950s, but since science fiction has long appealed to open-minded readers, I suspect that most readers will judge this novel on its merits.

The story follows a number of characters, including Roxy Monke (the daughter of a crime family) and Allie (who lives in foster care). Roxy is 14 when, defending her mother from an attack, she discovers her power. Unfortunately, the power doesn’t save her mother from their assailants.

Like Roxy, 16-year-old Allie has had her fill of abusive men when she finds her power, changes her name to Eve, and hitchhikes across the country. She eventually becomes known as Mother Eve, a cult figure who helps found a mother-centric religion, premised on the belief that the power is divinely inspired.

As girls discover and master their power, they learn how to awaken it in older women. Men feel threatened; two girls in Riyadh are killed for practicing their deviltry (i.e., making sparks fly between their hands). Women in Moldova create a new country as a refuge for formerly sex-trafficked women. A male journalist named Tunde Edo tries to act as a witness to all of this and to document it when he can.

The last two noteworthy characters are a woman named Margot, who conceals her power for a time to further her political career, and her daughter Jocelyn, whose power doesn’t function well (at least until she has a religious moment with Mother Eve).

The government’s initial reaction the power reflects the natural resistance of oppressors to change: isolate the girls, don’t let them reproduce, develop a vaccine to remove the power. Preachers denounce the power as the work of Satan. Do men feel threatened because they fear the women, or do they feel threatened because women no longer fear men? That’s one of the many questions that make The Power such an interesting novel.

The Power is not a simplistic story in which women are good and men are bad. Eve is a charlatan, barely a step above a fraudulent faith healer. Margot is Machiavellian in her approach to political power; she quickly understands the relationship between governmental power and industrial power. She develops her own private army of empowered women and is far from the first person to learn that conflict can be profitable.

Power corrupts, and when women rise to power, they are as easily corrupted as men, and just as vicious when they stifle dissent. As history demonstrate, the oppressed too often become oppressors when they gain the upper hand.

The characters are credible, but so is the reaction of society, which is drawn from current events. As women become used to their powers, a male supremacist movement arises, supported by angry bloggers, which spawns extremist groups of women, some of whom think that the final solution is to get rid of all but the most subservient men, who need to be spared for procreative uses. The movement members on both sides are irrational, but they reflect the blogger-driven supremacy movements that have gained such a loud voice during the last year. Extremism begets extremism, and extremists on either side of a social issue can be inhuman, a point the novel illustrates convincingly.

The Power is smart, biting, nuanced in its exploration of gender roles and perceptive in its understanding that history is written by the victor (or at least by those who are currently empowered). It’s also a good story that uses intelligent characters to raise serious questions about the role of gender in societies across the world.

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