NEW YORK (AP) — Novelist Naomi Alderman is a “what if” kind of writer, as in: What If Women Were Able to Let Electricity Escape Through Their Fingers, the premise of her acclaimed bestseller “The Power ”?
For her upcoming book, simply and descriptively titled “The Future,” she envisioned a handful of villains — including a hapless husband and a deposed executive — who would overthrow the masters of Silicon Valley and run the tech world itself.
“I’ve seen the rise of these companies that started with people poking around the internet and now looking at them. How did we get to this point,” the British author said in a recent telephone interview. “Many of them seem to be using their companies for nefarious purposes, such as destabilizing democracies and radicalizing people in all sorts of directions. So I was thinking if there was a way they could work better.”
Simon & Schuster announced the novel Tuesday, calling it a blend of “intelligence and storytelling, a marriage of heart-pounding narrative propulsion with an intellectually dazzling critique of the world we’ve made, in which a few billionaires profit from the lives of many.” and willingly lead us to our ruin.”
“The Future” is scheduled for release in the fall of 2023.
Alderman, 48, is also known for “The Liars’ Gospel” and “Disobedience”, adapted into a movie starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. An Amazon Prime Video series based on “The Power” is expected next year, after a lengthy delay, partly caused by the pandemic and the departure of actors Leslie Mann and Tim Robbins. They were replaced by Toni Collette and Josh Charles.
The pandemic also disrupted her own writing. Alderman had been working on a novel — tentatively called “The Survivals” — about tech billionaires on the run from a deadly plague, but it changed after a real one spread in early 2020. The tech leaders remain, but the pandemic has decentralized and the “book has definitely gotten less dark,” especially as the councilor “wanted to find some hope,” she explained.
“The Future” is her first novel since “The Power”, published in 2016 and written under the mentorship of Margaret Atwood. Alderman’s books have expressed a sort of alternative vision to Atwood’s, who has envisioned the worst in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Oryx and Crake” among others.
“Margaret has talked a lot about how bad it can get, so we don’t need a lesser writer to do that,” Alderman says. “I’m interested in the most radical ideas about how we can make things better and which paths we can take.”