Novel: “The Future”: a vanishing point for the super-rich

What would the three richest tech billionaires do if they knew that the collapse of all social and political systems was imminent? A few years ago, the New Yorker magazine reported that more and more super-rich people were taking precautions against such an impending event. Bunkers seem to be particularly popular in New Zealand.

In Naomi Alderman’s novel “The Future”, the three CEOs of the companies Anvil, Medlar and Fantail, which can easily be read as fictional versions of Amazon, Apple and Facebook or Twitter, escape to a deserted island in the Pacific. Zimri Nommik, Ellen Bywater and Lenk Sketlish are not alone on this island, which they previously designated as a nature reserve and equipped with resources necessary for survival. The survival expert Lai Zhen, who shouldn’t have access to this last refuge, also ends up there in one of the robot-like survival suits, is stuck in the natural paradise with the three billionaires and really upsets the post-apocalyptic order.

Alderman reverses Ayn Rand’s premise and asks whether the world could be a better place if the richest people were suddenly no longer there.

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Naomi Alderman’s novel is based, as she herself explained in an interview, on a reversal of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas throws off the world” (1957), an important foundational work of neoliberal doctrine and laissez-faire capitalism.

In it, Rand describes a world that is ending because the supposedly most important men in the economic-social pecking order, especially a major entrepreneur, suddenly disappear. Alderman turns this premise around and asks whether the world could be a better place if the richest people were suddenly no longer there.

What sounds like a shortened critique of capitalism only develops bit by bit in the 500-page and quite exciting novel. 50-year-old Naomi Alderman, most recently successful with the film adaptation of her bestseller “The Gift” as an Amazon series, focuses her story in “The Future” on the people around the beautiful and rich billionaires.

On the one hand, there is Martha Einkorn, the executive assistant of the social media company Fantail, who is fed up with her smug boss Lenk Sketlish. Sedlah, the wife of software billionaire Zimri Nommick, is swapped for a younger lover. And Albert, the programmer behind Medlar’s online business, was booted out and sidelined. The owner’s widow rules the data-based company with a hard hand and is in constant conflict with her queer child Badger, who has no interest in the business and prefers to chant anti-capitalist slogans.

For long stretches, “The Future,” with its sprawling staff and a wild potpourri of intertwining storylines, is above all a wonderfully told queer love story between Martha Einkorn and Lai Zhen. Lai becomes involved in the plans to get rid of the hated CEOs by chance. Naomi Alderman designs a world in the near future in which digitalization is a little more developed than in our present. This is sometimes accompanied by a lot of action, but is then also enriched with long chats from a forum for survival strategies in which Lai Zhen is something of a star in the prepper community.

Naomi Alderman, who repeatedly includes historical and religious references in her novels, also tells the story of an end-time sect and its interpretation of the Bible. While Martha was growing up in this sect, Lai in Hong Kong experienced the destruction of this metropolis in the wake of a civil war-like conflict with the Chinese rulers, including fleeing to Great Britain. These different storylines, which are sometimes set in London, then in Bucharest, in New Zealand, Hong Kong, in San Francisco, in the American pampas, on a remote island in the Pacific and always simply on the Internet, offer a captivating story including a complex world -Buildings.

But the great thing about Naomi Alderman’s novel is her description of our digital world. The data streams, algorithms, AIs and apps that are used here to create value as well as to survive after the great collapse are part of the action in which people are constantly programming, hacking, stealing and encrypting. Because the crises that continue to overlap, from military conflicts to economic disasters and pandemics, are not becoming fewer, but are becoming more and more. Is there ultimately a threat of the end of our world as we know it?

Naomi Alderman knows how to build this up to the end with a clever arc of suspense in this wild mix of science fiction-tech love story thriller. The view of a different, more sustainable and better world, which is served at the end as a kind of epilogue, comes across as a bit tired and too compliant with the system. The alternative, in Alderman’s fiction, is nothing more than better capitalism. The system question is not really asked in the book. In this respect, this ending is disappointing, but the novel is still worth reading.

Naomi Alderman: »The Future«. Heyne, geb., 544 S., 24 €.