60 pages • 2 hours read
Naomi AldermanThe Future
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Conflict Between Authenticity and Artifice
Throughout the novel, authenticity and artifice exist in tension with one another. In an age dominated by technology, the desire for authenticity motivates many of the characters. Martha Einkorn, the Enochites, and even Lenk Sketlish view technology as a destructive force, and not without just cause: In the novel, technology contributes to the destruction of the natural world and increases wealth inequality and social isolation. However, technology is also portrayed as a necessary part of life: Lai Zhen’s entire career is predicated on the utility of technology for survival. Throughout the book, the characters struggle to resolve the tension between authenticity and artifice.
Martha, often posting as OneCorn, expounds on her philosophy regarding the artificial, as represented by settled cities, versus the real, as represented by natural forces. In her interview with Zhen, Martha suggests that “[t]he wilderness doesn’t have symbolic drawings to tell you where to find food or where it’s safe to [urinate]. Where you find a sign in the real world, it’s a sign made by the thing itself” (54). Martha mistrusts the dependence on and proliferation of artificial signifiers. Still, she comes up against the unavoidable fact that technology appears to be indispensable in the modern world. Her original plan—to disrupt the big three technology companies with a virus—leads to widespread humanitarian and ecological disaster. Humans’ dependence on these companies creates a compelling argument in favor of technology and its artificial signposts.
Lenk, too, grapples with these tensions and contradictions. Though he has built the largest social media company in history, he yearns for a connection to something more authentic, the natural world. This tension essentially defines Lenk’s career and his personality. He delights in creating the next sensational tech tool, but at the same time, he tasks Martha with building a bunker on a deserted island so he can live off the land. Zhen believes that Admiral Huntsy Island grants Lenk more than mere survivalist credentials; she believes that it “is Lenk’s attempt at penance” (325). Lenk wants to make amends by saving something from the disasters his own company helped to precipitate.
The novel never resolves the tensions between authenticity and artifice. The tensions instead come to symbolize the paradox of contemporary life, the competing values that dominate and divide the modern world. Tellingly, the author situates the fateful meeting between the tech moguls—the meeting that will lead to their stranding on a deserted island—in an artificial mountain, “a great fiberglass mountain with snowy peaks advertising some brand of all-weather gear” (58). They might not have all-weather gear on Admiral Huntsy Island, but they do have their survival suits.
Corporate Collaboration and Competition
The word “collaboration” can indicate working together toward a common and productive goal, or it can mean a traitorous entanglement with an enemy. The relationship between the big three technology companies is a collaboration in both senses. While Fantail, Anvil, and Medlar are ostensibly competitors, they often collaborate in various projects—both explicitly and covertly—to maximize their profits and protect their assets, as well as to boost their image. Their shared desire to secretly turn user experience and data into profit simultaneously requires them to collude. However, it also pits them against each other as each vies for supremacy. Unsurprisingly, the CEOs of these companies—Lenk Sketlish, Zimri Nommik, and Ellen Bywater—contend with their own complicated, often torturous, relationships. None of them trust one another, while all of them depend on one another. Like their companies, they share an ignoble goal: to secure their safety and power in the event of an unforeseen disaster. This, too, pits them against one another and forces them to rely on one another.
The novel repeatedly makes clear that money buys not only privilege and access but also personal well-being and security. When the three CEOs demonstrate their new weather-altering technology, it is obvious to many onlookers that the agenda behind the development of such altruistic technology is actually to protect their interests. Badger, Ellen’s child, puts it even more bluntly: “They’ve weaponized the weather” (42). Zhen later observes that these people, with their extraordinary wealth, have won the “golden ticket,” a reference to Charlie’s ticket to the famed chocolate factory of Willy Wonka: “They’re all getting ready to use the golden ticket. They’re feeling guilty about it or fine about it, but they’re preparing” (95). If anyone can survive an apocalyptic event, it will be these three.
The novel explicitly indicates that this future apocalyptic event will be the result of the collaboration between the three corporations. That is, their collaborations have already created a kind of dystopia wherein social isolation is the norm and environmental and humanitarian disasters occur regularly. Zhen’s own years as a refugee are the direct result of government surveillance against protestors through these companies’ software and devices—all in the name of generating greater profits. As both Zhen and Martha observe repeatedly, the underlying purpose of these companies is to create an atmosphere of dissension that then breeds more opportunities for profit:
The internet of Medlar and Fantail and Anvil was designed to cut away the middle. There were no clicks or eyeballs in the sensible, reasoned middle ground, and all the money in the world in encouraging users to rush to treat the extremes as if they were the center (72).
This kind of unspoken collaboration between the big three leads to direct competition, and confrontation, between everyone else. The divisiveness keeps them wealthy and safe—for a time.
Ironically, the CEOs’ downfall is engendered by their own technology. The plane that is supposed to whisk them away to safety crashes, brought down by innovative new missiles they helped create: “Medlar had created some chips for them. Anvil had undertaken transportation logistics. Fantail had agreed to censor mention of them” (303). Still, even on the deserted island, the CEOs remain secure in the knowledge that all three companies “could remain vibrant and compelling forces with considerable user engagement in the new socioeconomic reality” (313). Even after the apocalypse, these companies are well-positioned to capitalize on whatever might be left. This certainty also contributes to their demise: Each of the CEOs wants to dominate the new world order, so none of them trust one another. By refusing to work together—that is, by valuing profit and power above cooperation and mutual confidence—they seal their respective fates.
The Problem of Defining the Future
The Future, and the future it depicts, alternates between optimism and despair. Martha’s posts as OneCorn present a kind of cautious optimism; they are not only a warning but also a hopeful reminder of what the future can be. The doomsday preparations undertaken by the CEOs belie an optimism of what the future might hold for them and their companies. In addition, the motif of survival that runs throughout the novel implicitly supports a belief in the future. Still, the novel never settles on one definition of what “the future” actually means. At different times it indicates the impending apocalypse, the slow undoing of the social contract and environmental stability, or the commandeering of whatever potential remains. Throughout the novel, “the future” operates as a metaphor, mercurial in nature and vast in scope, as slippery as it is unknown.
As the book progresses, an onslaught of environmental, political, and humanitarian begs the question of what the future might look like, if there is one. When Zhen ruminates on the similarity of her childhood with Martha’s—they both had mothers who died when they were young—it resonates with the fear of an approaching, and unknown, catastrophe: “The future would come and kill you while you were looking the other way” (196). This also reflects the notion that without (an understanding of) the past, there can be no future. As Zhen sees it, “We all live in history” (294). Zhen’s ability to survive the unthinkable on the island is a direct result of her past experiences. Being a refugee after the Fall of Hong Kong prepared her for a career as an expert in survival, which in turn prepares her to navigate the island. Still, even with all of her connections to the past, Zhen is eager about the future. When Lenk wants to show her his secret about the island, Zhen’s curiosity wins out over her fear: “This, too, is the pull of the future, the joy of simple wanting-to-know” (320). Even in the aftermath of an alleged apocalypse, there remains optimism about what the unknown future might bring.
At the same time, all the characters seek to know the future. The CEOs purchase software they believe can predict the apocalypse. Zhen uses her survival skillset to keep herself safe, because “[t]he only way to know the future is to control it” (341). Likewise, Martha thinks, “The only way to really control the future is if you’re the only one making it happen” (372). Behind Martha’s decision to fabricate the apocalypse lies a desire to create the kind of future in which everyone can survive—and thrive. Thus, before she and her friends set their plan in motion, they try to secure their own ideas about “The Future,” as they call it. The capital letters emphasize both its importance and its diffusiveness, as “it was composed of more than seventeen hundred individual bets and stock positions” (371-72). They succeed in “control[ling] the future” for a time (372), but ultimately, that position becomes untenable: Martha must relinquish control of her carefully curated future in the face of Zhen’s ordeal, allowing Zhen to expose her. In addition, the novel itself presents two very different endings, calling any optimistic vision into question.
The future is always approaching, but it is folly to imagine that one knows what the future will actually bring. As OneCorn puts it, “Every time, we begin again, again. The beginning does not foretell the end. There is no end” (267). This not only echoes the novel’s first sentence (“On the day the world ended” [3]), but it also foreshadows the conclusion of the book, wherein “there is no final battle” (415). Ultimately, the novel reads like an ouroboros, the snake devouring its own tail: “[T]he fight is the destination, the constant tense balance between the present and the future” (415). The Future represents the never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth, of struggle and triumph.
