Tech tycoons leading the world to apocalypse, while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers, as the richest people on the planet have discovered is where the money is.  The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons and is a handful of friends of the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet famous survivalist – hatching a daring plan, it could be the greatest heist ever or the cataclysmic end of civilization. The Future is also the only reason to do anything, the only object of desire. “On the day the world ended, Lenk Skeltish, CEO and Founder of the Fantail social network – sat down beneath the red woods in a designated location of natural beauty and attempted to inhale from his navel”. In a harsh sound of a character’s name, the power the author bestows upon him, the depiction of his privilege and the sense, beneath it all, that something is not right, with brilliant immediacy. Alderman set out a cast of characters who feel like they already exist somewhere out there in our fragile, free-wheeling present, The Future, a trenchant speculative fiction, where the violent magic lies in the scale and strength of technology  and the ways in which we have allowed it into every aspect of our lives asks: Who commands the world? What have they done to deserve, that? Since something is wrong in the structures of the society, in the destruction we’re wreaking upon the natural world and on ourselves what are we going to do about it?

The Fantail social media network, kept humming by Lenk and his executive assistant, Martha Einkorn, Medlar, the world’s most profitable personal computing company and its CEO, Ellen Bywater, and Anvil run by Zimri Nommik and his wife Selah, with a vast web of warehouses and distribution networks. The way in which Alderman’s tycoons believe their inventions are the solutions to our ills. “ Lenk Skeltish was a powerful man who had built his career on the future, knowing it, smelling it, feeling it more present around him than the present. The future was his home and his consolation: the urgency of  tomorrow, the next decade.”

Aldlerman introduces Lia Zhen, an expert in technological survival who is a “Top Fifty Creator on the Name The Day Forum” – a chatroom  devoted to predicting when the end of the world might come. It’s also the forum in which Alderman integrates her thoughtful investigation into how humans have told stories of survival, from the Old Testament to mythologies drawn from hunter-gatherer societies.

Alderman is also steeped in the world of online gaming as she is the co-creator of the excellent fitness game Zombies, Run! Alderman writes of ending, yet she has faith in us humans that we might, finally do the right thing by saying “ How does trust build between people? It is an offering and a receiving. It is putting yourself into the position to be hurt, just a little,  and noticing that they refrain… there is never a good enough reason to trust anyone. Except that we can’t life without doing it.”

The Future by Naomi Alderman, Fourth Estate £20, 416 pages.

mi Alderman, Fourth Estate £20, 416 pages.