Alderman...keeps her authorial plate full and our minds zipping along. This heady, propulsive, and cannily constructed thriller easily doubles as an ecologically focused, end-of-the-world howdunnit ... Alderman’s futuristic world is both captivating and corrupt, and she delineates it with her trademark smarts and humor ... With a compelling love story at its center, and the possible end of the world truly nigh, The Future takes on the corruptive power of unmitigated authority and posits another option.
Less grim; instead, it harbors a stubborn sense of optimism, theorizing that if only people of conscience helmed the richest and most powerful companies, they might be able to steer the ship of humanity to safety ... I could nitpick the details in Alderman’s approach...but I’d rather not. The Future is so pleasing and page-turning a read, so full of intrigue, emotional depth and a delicious conclusion that I didn’t want it to end.
No...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.
Immensely readable if frustrating ... The crosscuts, shifting points of view and cascade of cataclysmic events are presumably intended to heighten the novel’s tension, or perhaps impart a sense of Alderman’s fragmented depiction of the future. Instead, it’s all confusing and underscores her emphasis on ideas rather than human interaction ... When Alderman chooses to linger on a character, she creates some breathtaking scenes ... Alderman hedges her bets in the novel’s slingshot ending, which I found perversely reassuring. It turns out that, even in a fictional utopia, some problems can’t be solved by the application of money, tech and good intentions — human nature among them.
A fable ... Alderman goes full tilt into globe-trotting Jason Bourne mode here ... Fans of The Power might feel nostalgia for the slick, literary economy of that thoughtful page-turner. Here, the action gets clobbered by the reams of glossy tech and the long, involved clarifications of what’s happening: plots and gadgets having to explain themselves aren’t the catchiest ... Alderman is a fabulous, witty writer on the digital world ... But I found myself yearning for the sharper intellectual acuity and moral gravity of Alderman’s previous work.
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 ... Reads like a first draft: unevenly paced, digressive, clogged with mini lectures about all sorts of thing ... It’s a shame, because Alderman is addressing some large and interesting questions, and a novel about the distorting pressure online life and social media apply to society is nothing if not timely. But the execution is lacking; after The Power, The Future feels like a backward step.
Alderman is one of the most consistently inventive contemporary British writers, combining literary and historical erudition with an instinct for narrative pace honed in her parallel career writing video games ... More than satire; Alderman moves easily between an ironic, comic register and more reflective asides. She writes with warmth and wisdom; beyond the entertaining action sequences and the sci-fi gadgets, she posits an alternative future that acknowledges both our human weaknesses and our resilience.
Mind-twisting ... Alderman presents readers with a future that feels terrifying, inevitable, and ultimately within humanity's power to grasp and correct ... Pulse-pounding.
A daring, sexy, thrilling novel that may be the most wryly funny book about the end of civilization you’ll ever read ... Alderman keeps the plot moving forward despite constant shifts in perspective and time is a testament to her creative skills as a writer and a game developer. The novel never slides into parody, despite the three rather clever parallels to some of our real-life billionaires and tech leaders. Clearly, Alderman cares deeply about our future and believes that we already have the skills in place to course-correct. By the end of the novel, you might too.
Kinetic ... While Alderman’s erratic chronological jumps can be hard to follow, the narrative is eminently quotable ... The endless intrigue and surprising twists keep the pages turning.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
