Book review: The Future, by Naomi Alderman

Set in the not-too-distant future, this tale of the corporate bosses who control cyberspace makes for a timely and provocative read, writes Stuart Kelly

Although Naomi Alderman’s new book announces by its title – The Future – its concern, like most works of futurology, it has both feet firmly in the present, and even opens with the positively archaic. Its epigraph comes from the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu (from around 400 BCE): “to order, to govern, is to begin naming; when names proliferate it’s time to stop”. This is perhaps one of the fundamental differences between Eastern and Western philosophy. It is evident as well in the Analects of Confucius. On being asked about the first duty of a ruler, Confucius says it is “the rectification of names”: “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success”. This is more than just a distaste for euphemism (for example, saying collateral damage for civilian casualties) and more than poetic resonance. The rectification of names is a bulwark against anarchy, against Humpty Dumpty’s assertion that a word “means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”.

With which words does The Future begin? “On the day the world ended, Lenk Sketlish – CEO and founder of the Fantail network – sat at dawn beneath the redwoods in a designated location of natural beauty and attempted to inhale from his navel”. There’s certainly a lot to parse there.

Let us begin with the name. Lenk might be reminiscent of link, and links both connect and bind. The -ish of Sketlish makes it seem vague or inexact, and the sk- part does not have wholly positive connotations: skirmish, sketchy, skellum, skelp, skulk, skull, skittish. Would you trust a “Lenk Sketlish”? The exuberant, askance naming brings to mind characters like Kilgore Trout and Montana Wildhack in Kurt Vonnegut or Tyrone Slothrop and the Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke in Thomas Pynchon. There is a kind of double coding here in that the names suggest there is no need to take this seriously and don’t take this seriously at your own peril. The theorist Sianne Ngai has proposed “cute” and “zany” as two of our newly-minted and pernicious aesthetic categories; and both are deeply connected to technological culture.

Naomi Alderman PIC: PA

Sketlish is part of a kind of pantheon, alongside Zimri Nommick of Anvil and Ellen Bywater of Medlar; the corporate bosses who control and monetise the new cyber-frontier. (The names have sly meanings: a medlar, for example, is a kind of apple best eaten rotten). There are certain traits, such as rampant egomania, performative philanthropy and Machiavellian business ruthlessness that some might think they share with real life members of the silicon-plutocrats. All three share an interest in bunker-like havens in which they might sit out the end-times in relative comfort.

The heroes, such as they are, are Martha Einkorn, Sketlish’s deputy who is the child of an apocalyptic cult of Luddites called the Enochites and Lai Zhen, a survivalist and “influencer” who lived through the Fall of Hong Kong and is being targeted online and in reality by the Enochites.

The plot moves at a hectic pace, interspersed with online forums discussing Enochite philosophy and its particular obsession with exegesis of the story of Lot in the book of Genesis as a foundation myth. For the most part I was delighted to enjoy the ride, the wisecracks, the sudden twists and the extrapolations about the not-too-distant. To be honest, I pay as little attention to the specifics of the geekery as I do about figuring out how Sauron’s ring works in Lord Of The Rings. Likewise, the characters can sometimes seem slightly less than human, which is forgivable in that one of the themes of the book is the wilful self-diminishing of our technological reliance.

For a book which is as much fun, and as piercing as this is, it is disappointing to register some dissatisfaction. Part of the book slips into a manifesto about how to regulate and dismantle tech monopolies, and the kind of projects – making computers easy to fix oneself (the way cars used to be), subsidised vegan meals, paying countries to preserve their rainforests, sharing consumer goods and so on and so forth – that would improve lives. Would these earth-shot ideas work? I don’t know, but I doubt it. Of the warped timber of humanity, no straight thing may be made: or to put it another way, the Communist manifesto has always looked good on paper.

That said, this is a provocative and spry book. It sits easily next to The Circle and The Every by Dave Eggers, Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story and William Gibson’s The Peripheral. We are all painfully aware about how technologies, in various ways, are changing our everyday lives, even if we have a minimal digital footprint. It seems ironic that we are using the novel as a space in which to debate these ideas and the consequences of being embedded in the datasphere.

The Future, by Naomi Alderman, Fourth Estate, £20