Review By Kayleigh
This book is a thrilling near-future book that scarily reads like nonfiction.
Favourite Quote:
The thing she’d never said was the greatest lesson Zhen had taken from all that – you could die while desperately wanting to live, with many important things left unfinished. The future would come while you were looking the other way and there were so many things that could kill you.
Goodreads Synopsis:
When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?
Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what’s going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?
Martha’s and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.
By turns thrilling, hilarious, tender, and always piercingly brilliant, The Future unfolds at a breakneck speed, highlighting how power corrupts the few who have it and what it means to stand up to them. The future is coming. The Future is here.
I love Naomi Alderman’s writing. The Power was one of my favourite books in 2019. You should read it. And then you must read The Future. The book jumps between different perspectives and characters: between billionaires in charge of massive companies (think companies like Apple, Meta and Google) who really control our world and our lives. What happens when their lives are threatened, and they flee to their safety bunkers (I one hundred percent believe these kinds of bunkers totally exist, and the very wealthy have them hidden around the world). If these controlling billionaires disappeared, what could happen in the world? Would it crumble? Could people build something better?
This book is set a few decades from today, which is one of my favourite time periods to read or watch. The future still feels similar to now: climate change is a huge issue, civil unrest and wars are raging, and most normal people are working to survive. Sound familiar?
We meet the billionaires and some key people who work for them, sleep with them and have sold their companies to them. Everyone wants something from each other. Interspersed is a character who has become an influencer, so to speak, in the prepper/ survivalist world. It seems like a lot of people in the world are waiting for the world to end.
Throughout the book, there are some interesting conversations and pathways about learnings from the bible, the parable of the fox and the rabbit, archaeological discoveries, and how patterns repeat themselves until someone is brave enough to change them. It left me thinking about the story and characters long after I’d finished the book.
While there are a lot of characters to meet in this story, and some of the writing felt a little heavy on background info and, therefore, some of the plot was dragged on, I found this book fascinating, especially as I thought about Naomi writing this a couple of years ago at least and then reflecting on events of the last few months of wars around the world, billionaires getting richer as their employees use food stamps, and the wealthy dying in a submarine explosion as floods devastated other areas of the world. I started reading this book before I made dinner one evening. By the time I looked up from the pages, a couple of hours had passed, and I ended up just eating popcorn so I could get back to the book.
Thank you, HarperCollins Canada, for the ARC in return for an honest review.
