Cover image of "The Future," a novel abut a survivalist future

Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and other prominent tech industry billionaires have built (or are currently building) doomsday bunkers to survive the apocalypse they believe is coming. There is no indication that any of them acknowledge the role they’re playing in raising the odds that it will happen. And the tech billionaires portrayed in Naomi Alderman’s novel, The Future, are similarly heedless. They dominate the world economy in the near future to an even greater degree than Musk and the others today. The novel tracks their behavior as conditions in the world worsen inexorably and they make plans to retreat underground in isolated luxury around the planet. Alderman’s is a survivalist future.

Two overarching themes

Naomi Alderman is not a fan of billionaires, social media, the gap between rich and poor, or the cruel treatment of animals or destruction of the environment. All this becomes obvious in the pages of The Future. But two themes emerge most clearly. She celebrates nature, which leads her to devote page after page to lyrical descriptions of the natural beauty all around us. And she condemns acquisitive behavior run wild. This has given us people with fortunes reaching into the hundreds of billions while countless millions languish in poverty. This all leaps off the page as the world’s three most powerful tech billionaires come together to conspire about how to survive the coming apocalypse.

Those three characters mimic today’s tech leadership in a general way. None matches anyone specific more than superficially. Lenk Sketlish is CEO and founder of the Fantail social network. He comes closest to having a counterpart in today’s tech world—Mark Zuckerberg, clearly. Zimri Nommik, CEO of the logistics and purchasing giant Anvil, has “more money than any other person on Earth.” (His analog might be Amazon and Jeff Bezos, but the resemblance is not at all close.) Zimri is cheating on his ex-model wife, Selah, who is planning to walk away with an enormous fortune from the divorce she’s planning. And Ellen Bywater is the CEO of Medlar Technologies, the world’s most profitable personal computing company (Apple, of course.) She was previously a corporate raider who seized control of Medlar, pushing aside its founder and making him fabulously wealthy in the process.

The plot thickens when Lenk Sketlish, Zimri Nommik, and Ellen Bywater come together in a secret meeting in London to plan a joint strategy for the end of the world.

The Future by Naomi Alderman (2023) 429 pages ★★★★☆

Cutaway diagram of a multi-story doomsday bunker a little similar to some of those cited in this novel in preparation for a survivalist future
Cutaway diagram of a multi-story survivalist bunker a little similar to some of those cited in this novel. Image: The Globe and Mail

Two women take center stage

To track these developments, Alderman focuses our attention on the lives of two prominent women. One, Martha Einkorn, is the “executive assistant” to Lenk Sketlish. She grew up in an apocalyptic religious cult dedicated to survivalism. It was led by her father, who may or may not be as crazy as Lenk Sketlish. He’s one of the world’s richest men, and as you might suspect, he’s neither a nice guy nor stable emotionally. Her title aside, Martha Einkorn actually runs Fantail. Lenk is the “ideas guy.”

The other character hugging our center of attention is a younger woman named Lai Zhen. Originally a refugee from Hong Kong after its “fall,” she has become one of the planet’s most popular vloggers. Like huge numbers of others, she is a prepper, and her posts have attracted millions of followers.

When Martha and Lai meet at a high-level conference in London, sparks fly. The same conference where the three CEOs are meeting in secret. The two women fall in love. And that inconvenient fact dictates much that takes place in the course of the complicated series of events that follows. All five major characters are involved in ever-changing permutations and combinations.

About the author

Photo of Naomi Alderman, author of this novel about a survivalist future
Naomi Alderman. Image: David Levene – The Guardian

Naomi Alderman is an English novelist and game writer who is also a TV executive producer. She was born in London in 1974 and educated at Lincoln College, Cambridge, where she pursued an interdisciplinary course in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. After work as an editor for a publisher and a law firm, she studied creative writing at East Anglia University, a subject she later taught at the university level. She has written at least six novels.

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