An AI program predicts the end of the world in this wobbly rollercoaster ride from the author of The Power
After a trio of small-scale novels Alderman hit the big time with her fourth, 2017’s The Power: a global bestseller, winner of the Women’s prize for fiction, chosen as book of the year by Barack Obama and Bill Gates. The novel’s premise is that one day teenage girls develop the ability to make electricity inside themselves, and can project this power outward to hurt or kill. It traces the various ways this changes things: a world in which men rather than women must live in constant fear for their physical safety. Written as a blockbuster thriller, full of incident and variety, it rattles along very readably.
Alderman stays in SF techno-thriller mode for her new book, The Future, but the rattle is less readable this time round, and the “what if?” less engaging. The novel opens, boldly enough, with the end of the world. Three tech trillionaires are fleeing the disaster, jetting off to their lavishly supplied survival bunker. They are the improbably named Lenk Sketlish, CEO of a hybrid of Facebook and X/Twitter called Fantail; Zimri Nommick, CEO of Anvil – that is, Amazon; and Ellen Bywater, CEO of Medlar, “the world’s most profitable personal computing company” (a medlar being a small – micro? – soft type of apple).
