PanThe New York Times Book ReviewNo...fever pitch is reached in Alderman’s new novel, whose outlook is decidedly more reformist than revolutionary. Instead of a bottom-up social movement led by young women, change in The Future comes from the top down ... What follows is a dubious effort to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. Alderman has an undeniable talent for concocting a twisty, rollicking narrative, replete with assassination attempts, desert island bunkers and machine-learning prophets. Yet for all its conspiratorial thrills, The Future mostly reads like a manifesto for technocracy wrapped up in a genre-fiction bow ... The book suffers not just from its dogmatism but also from its homogeneity ... The book’s most impressive quality is its vivid, tactile imagination of our ultra-computerized future ... Though it purports to affirm the human capacity for empathy and curiosity, The Future is built like a machine: calculating, doctrinaire and hollow on the inside.
