Teetering on the brink

Imagine a future where weather can be controlled, gnat-sized drones guard private property, and apps feed growing stores of data that reveal much about their users than they realise – all in the palms of several wealthy and powerful individuals obsessed with control and seeing steps ahead of other people. Meanwhile, climate change wreaks havoc here and there in the world, almost as if heralding the end times.

A scary premise and maybe a bit too close for comfort. But that's what makes Naomi Alderman's The Future a timely novel. We have climate disasters, drones, and we're already seeing how our data on web portals and social media platforms is being used. Alderman's imagined future foreshadows our own and it looks bad.

Countdown to catastrophe

The Future begins with three moguls – heads of the in-universe versions of Facebook, Amazon and probably Microsoft – about to depart for a safe haven upon receiving warnings of an impending cataclysm. Meanwhile, a survival expert and online celebrity being stalked by an assassin in a Singapore mall receives help from an AI someone installed on her mobile device.

As the novel goes on though, one senses that events are not unfolding in a linear fashion, and there's more to the teased cataclysm than meets the eye. What also emerges is an elaborate plot hatched by several people to bring the world back from the edge, which rides along a bustling narrative and ruminations on civilisation.

This novel is cleverly plotted and moves along at a clip. The main characters do get fleshed out but the pacing doesn't give us enough time to relate to or empathise with them. We end up being more invested with where the novel is going than the characters' aims, situations and motivations, but we're still able to pause and reflect on those because their world mirrors our own.

The ambitions of the tech moguls eerily resemble what we imagine our one-percenters to be, including how grasping they are even as concerns for the planet grow and how they are preparing for the apocalypse, the type that would spur cries of "Eat the rich!" at protests.

The conundrums of living in a tech-prevalent society are brought to the fore as the hunted survivalist evades her pursuers, using techniques to stay off the grid as much as possible while investigating her pursuers and the AI aiding her escape in Singapore.

Pieces of us

Alderman also tosses in the idea of "pieces": that all of humanity was meant to be whole and one with nature but we were splintered from it and each other by the trappings of civilisation, from fences and borders to digital firewalls and well-crafted propaganda. Our gateway to this idea comprises mysterious postings on an online forum reproduced on the pages and a main character's flashbacks to her life in a cult whose leader preached about pieces and the end of us.

Piecing together chunks of the story and ideas about the pieces in your head can be vexing, given that the gaps between one chunk and the next can be a bit big, forcing those who are more invested to backtrack. That we jump between multiple characters' viewpoints doesn't help either. We risk losing track of either the story or the ideas as we are propelled towards the end.

The pieces scattered across this novel take a long time to fall into place but when they do – much, much later, the payoff comes as a huge relief. However, there seems to be no end in sight for the future Alderman envisioned because it is too far ahead, too many uncertainties lay along the way, and who can reliably predict the future anyway?

Pondering a fractured future

Long after one closes the book, the gears in our minds keep turning. If one considers the idea of living in a fragmented society, what better sandbox for this idea to play out than in the Klang Valley, comprising townships so far apart from one another and, for some, so demographically distinct that they are talked about as if they are different states?

Townships connected by miles of highways and public transport so inefficient that dwellers resort to driving cars, enduring gridlock, toll and parking charges, and hefty vehicle maintenance costs? Where the water supply can be crippled by one incident of pollution?

And if one zooms out to the whole country, the region, and the world, what of the divisions in society, exploited by tycoons, politicians, state actors, and pundits with narrow and self-centred agendas? Is this what it means to be civilised?

Slowly but surely, more pieces materialise and come together.

This review was based on an advance reading copy. Get your copy here.