My bookshelf·Index No. 0152

The Future

On My Shelf, Not Yet Read

Three tech billionaires have bunkers, and their prediction models are telling them when to run. Around them, a handful of people who know the systems from the inside — a survivalist forum obsessive, a daughter, a lover, an ex-employee — put together a plan while everyone else is watching the countdown. Alderman spends the book on how the doomsday-prep industry works as a business, which is funnier and grimmer than the collapse itself. She threads in retellings of Lot and Noah, on the theory that the story where a chosen few get advance warning and everybody else drowns is the oldest one we have.

The Future
By Naomi Alderman. Simon & Schuster, 2024. 432 pages.