My Goodreads review: The Future

[ankh_hpl]

The Future by Naomi Alderman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


[Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.]

This is possibly one of the most disturbing near-future SF novels I've read in a long time, although it's also one of the more didactic. At times, I felt as though I was reading something by the late lamented Sheri S. Tepper. Like Tepper, Alderman has a gift for tight plotting and three-dimensional characterization. Like her, she also has the occasional tendency to tell rather than show. How much this may bother the individual reader depends on how much the reader agrees with Alderman -- or, perhaps, how willing a reader is to ignore this & keep following the relentlessly twisty plot all the way to the end.

Although the first part of the novel is structured around three tech billionaires -- in charge of companies I kept trying to link to real-world tech empires -- the real viewpoint characters are one level down. Most of these are female, gay, nonbinary, or some combination. These are the people doing the real work (or possibly undoing someone else's work) of changing the future. Some of their detailed backstories are not pretty, and they are interspersed with the ongoing action of the main plot in ways it took me a while to get used to. Few details are extraneous, however. As the apocalyptic story line plays out, most prove to be essential to the reader's understanding.

There are plenty of Big Ideas in this one (sometimes too many), but most examine what happens when people start trusting their technology more than they trust themselves. Alderman offers plenty of quotable observations about this, without slowing the plot down much. She also has a good bit to say about the uses & abuses of social media, and the ways people still manage to create strong relationships within it. There is also quite a lot of religion -- one of the viewpoint characters grew up in a fundamentalist cult -- handled in an unexpectedly balanced way. Religion, like technology, may have its uses as well as its flaws.

There's no quick way to summarize the plot of this one without committing spoiler, so I won't. Readers looking for a multilayered SF thriller with compelling characters won't be disappointed, but the plot's not entirely linear & first few chapters are a slow burn. Recommended for those who don't mind a lecture or two with their thrills, & aren't afraid of thinking




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