A dystopian science fiction book about the future where tech CEOs collaborate with survivalists to withstand a global emergency seems like a good enough book to start off 2025. The premise alone drew me in, but it was Alderman’s craft as a writer, with interesting uses of multiple genres of writing and some clever turns of phrase that kept bringing me deeper into the text. Given that it’s set in an indeterminate future, events such as COVID-19 are in the rear view mirror as part of the world’s past. It’s a trip and a treat to read a book where mass death is just a bit of world building.
To be honest, I lost track pretty quickly of which of the three CEOs was the head of each company. When I first read about each of them, my main focus was to think which one was meant to be a parody of Musk or Bezos or Zuckerberg or Gates or Cook. As the products and services these men and their companies offer continue to blend and melt into more and more digital slop, it’s hard to keep them separate anyway. In a way, it doesn’t matter which one is which because they’re all pretty much irredeemable as people. They have unique flaws, but at the end of the day, you are still rooting for them all to fail. Alderman describes one of them by writing “In another era he might have been an academic or even a monk, and the world would not have demanded parties from him” (p. 38). So you’ve got one who may have trouble socializing and would probably prefer to be working full time. Another needs guided meditation to manage his anger. You get the idea.
In contrast to these three men and their entourages, you have a younger woman who has made a living reviewing survivalist gear and promoting tips for how to live in catastrophic times. She’s one these tech freaks and their hangers-on have their eyes on for multiple reasons. You can probably tell from the pacing of the first few chapters (if not the back cover blurb) that all the characters’ paths will cross eventually. You can probably also tell that the world-rending cataclysm implied in all of the prepping will eventually come to pass. Getting there is the fun part. Along the way, you’ll also meet a Romanian professor who, in a moment of exasperation with his students, barks “'Perfect' is machine dream” (p. 209). His students have been discussing how it might be possible to find a perfect romantic match through social media sites or dating apps. His response lets them know that their imperfections are what make them human and that striving for some kind of perfect satisfaction is a fool’s errand. So, he’s a foil for the tech CEOs in that he is comfortable with technology yet knows that it has limits. I felt the same feeling when another character offered this critique of one of the AI programs that was purportedly going to save the world: Supposed machine-recognition that had actually turned out to be tens of thousands of people in India or Venezuela or Ghana, going through photos or translating documents or transcribing voicemails or reviewing automatic writing outputs (p. 332). It’s just that kind of analysis that I love to read because it lets me know authors like Alderman know exactly what they are critiquing with this novel. In that regard, it was no surprise to see Paris Marx, host of Tech Won’t Save Us, mentioned in the Acknowledgments. Alderman's tech criticism is not just part of the plot.
Alderman is strategic in using that section, too. Unlike some authors who place their Acknowledgments up front, she saves them for the end because even when the book is done, the plot continues. That’s right—after the Acknowledgments page, there is a separate chapter that functions as an epilogue. Beyond that, there’s a message tucked into the back matter that shares an actual email address you can apparently use to contact one of the characters. I’m going to see what else I can learn from him as I continue to think about the characters and scenes in this thrilling, dark, and hilarious book.
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