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Future imperfect
New Zealand Listener
|November 18-24 2023
The Power author delivers busy, confusing, fun read.
Naomi Alderman is a British novelist and game writer who received a lot of praise for her 2017 novel The Power, which won the Women's Prize for Fiction that year and was then adapted for TV by Amazon. The beginning and end of The Power were indeed very good, the middle not so much. And Alderman's latest offering, The Future, suffers from not dissimilar issues in that a good third of it could have been chopped out by a brave editor without affecting it in the slightest.
The near future of The Future, as you might expect, sucks. The world ends on page one. Humanity lives in a climate change technodystopia just clinging on, presided over by three tech-magnates: Lenk Sketlish, the survivalist founder of social media platform Fantail; Zimri Nommik, philandering CEO of logistics/online shopping global giant Anvil; and Ellen Bywater, who is the head of PC manufacturer Medlar Technologies and has imaginary conversations with her dead husband.
THE FUTURE
by Naomi Alderman (HarperCollins, $35)
This story is from the November 18-24 2023 edition of New Zealand Listener.
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