That’s the premise of Naomi Alderman’s immensely readable if frustrating new book, “The Future,” set a decade or so from now. Alderman likes Big Ideas: Her previous novel, “The Power,” imagined a world where, overnight, young women develop the ability to deliver electrical shocks, upending gender, cultural and political dynamics. Do they use this ability for good? Or are brutality and the urge to power hard-wired into our species?
“The Future” is a thought experiment of a similar vein. If technology could only be liberated from the chokehold of capitalism, might we save the world in a year or two? Its epigraph comes from a translation of Lao Tzu by Ursula K. Le Guin, another science fiction writer who didn’t shy away from exploring the dynamics of power and gender in her imagined worlds.
Alderman’s novel starts by introducing us to those three tech CEOs: Lenk Sketlish, the Harvard-educated founder of the social network Fantail; the brilliant, philandering and emotionally detached Zimri Nommik, who created the data-driven purchasing giant Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who since the death of her beloved husband has helmed Medlar Technologies, the planet’s most successful personal-computing corporation. The Pynchonesque monikers and the correspondences between real-world figures and corporate history (Medlar’s co-founder is ousted from the company he started) seem to place us in the realm of satire. But the story immediately takes a turn to heavy-handed parable, when it jumps to a survivalist online forum called Name The Day. There a frequent poster recounts the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, drawing parallels between the fate of those cities and the current state of the planet:
“Abraham was saying something … about how even if you do happen to be incredibly powerful, you can’t just walk away when things go bad. That’s not what your power is for. … If you’ve got power, use it to help.”
And so, after a lengthy preamble, we finally meet the novel’s protagonist — 33-year-old Lai Zhen, a “Hong Kong Chinese slash British slash American lesbian.” Zhen is a popular contributor to Name The Day, where she’s the top-ranked expert in technological survival. A survivor of the fall of Hong Kong (following a takeover by mainland China) and subsequent internment in a refugee camp, Zhen spends her time making and posting videos with titles like “What Goes through Your Mind When You’re Being Shot At.” Lonely and disaffected after a romantic breakup, she’s wandering through a Singapore megamall when shots pierce the window of an electronics store.
Zhen quickly realizes this isn’t a random shooting: She’s the target. She escapes, with a clever shout-out to the fate of Lot’s wife back in Sodom. It’s a great scene and setting, reminiscent of William Gibson’s glittering dystopias and engulfing paranoias. Yet before we can absorb what’s happened, there’s a flashback, then a flash forward, then some more survivalist postings, then some backstories, the history of a survivalist cult, a recurring and tedious debate regarding Neolithic hunter-gatherers vs. the first agriculturalists, and some welcome hot sex between Zhen and Martha Einkorn, Sketlish’s personal assistant.
The crosscuts, shifting points of view and cascade of cataclysmic events are presumably intended to heighten the novel’s tension, or perhaps impart a sense of Alderman’s fragmented depiction of the future. Instead, it’s all confusing and underscores her emphasis on ideas rather than human interaction. Zhen and Martha are the only two characters who really come to life. The tech tycoons are straw people for Alderman’s central thesis: “If you’ve got power, use it to help.”
Their altruistic counterparts are also drawn in broad strokes. In addition to Martha, there’s Zimri’s Black wife, Selah, and Ellen Bywater’s nonbinary child, Badger, both of whom feel like authorial nods to inclusivity rather than fully realized characters. A foul-mouthed Russian computer genius friend of Zehn’s exists mostly to explain how AI can never develop consciousness.
At one point, Zehn reflects on the work of Ayn Rand. “Her most famous book was a fantasy that if a few wealthy and powerful people disappeared, the world would end.” “The Future” engages in an equally simplistic form of wish fulfillment. Instead of Rand’s Objectivist triumphal vision of capitalism and the cult of the individual, Alderman suggests that, with enough money, kindness and yes, tech, our world could be transformed.
“There is a beautiful world on the far shore, where we’re not destroying all the species anymore and our cities are clean and beautiful and full of wild birds, and our cars are all electric and all shared, and the streets are safe for kids to play in, and we get to keep TV and the internet and concerts and ballgames and all that good stuff, and fine, we’re eating mostly vegan food but it’s good, and if we can just get through the pain barrier as quickly as possible, then we’re there.”
Isn’t it pretty to think so.
Still, when Alderman chooses to linger on a character, she creates some breathtaking scenes. Her glimpses of a future just a few nanoseconds removed from our own are terrific — a Davos-style conference on selling post-apocalypse tech; wildlife protection corridors patrolled by swarms of drones that keep away humans; survivalist bunkers as bonkers as they are eerily beautiful. She effectively skewers the tech triumvirate, whose hubris and greed masquerade as altruism.
Alderman hedges her bets in the novel’s slingshot ending, which I found perversely reassuring. It turns out that, even in a fictional utopia, some problems can’t be solved by the application of money, tech and good intentions — human nature among them.
Elizabeth Hand’s most recent novel is “A Haunting on the Hill.”
Simon & Schuster. 415 pp. $28.99
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