If this book interests you, I would suggest that you read Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires first. Get a little data on billionaires and their doomsday bunkers. It will set you up nicely to appreciate Naomi Alderman’s The Future.
The billionaires in this tale have their origins in known public figures. There’s one obvious Jeff-Bezos-like guy and one with definite Elon Musk vibes. Under normal circumstances, these guys would expect to be the main focus of the story--they've spent the last however many years being the star around whom the planets circle, caught by their gravity. That's why I love that Alderman takes an unlikely group of folks close to them and sets them conspiring at the centre of the novel. There's the ousted CEO, the personal assistant, the soon-to-be-ex-wife and the nonbinary child who hasn't bought in to their mother's plans. They don't sound powerful, but these four know enough and are close enough to the action to make real change.
The personal assistant, Martha Einkorn, is an especially inspired creation. Her father ran a survivalist cult which Martha escaped from as a young woman. But like father like daughter—she is a respected (if anonymous) member of a survivalist internet group and delivers biblically based sermons on that forum. She points out that you can't really survive alone and that leaving society isn't all it's cracked up to be. She is also the link to Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, after their hook-up at a conference. Zhen gets caught up in the billionaires’ survival plans to their consternation.
You know those stories about time travel to the past, where someone accidentally kills some small creature and when they return to their own time, they are met by lizard people? Or the butterfly effect, where a butterfly flaps its wings in a tropical forest and a hurricane is created in another hemisphere? This book explores how some people make such an impact on our society that their absence would change history's course. The Marxist who wrote Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires would agree with Alderman, that we are better off fixing the world we actually live in rather than trying to engineer personal escape plans to bunkers or off planet.
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