Naomi Alderman doesn’t do small. She doesn't write those quiet, domestic novels where a woman stares at a cracked teacup and realizes her marriage is over. No. In an Alderman book, the woman probably smashes the teacup, burns the house down, and then rewrites the laws of physics. Honestly, after the global explosion of The Power, everyone was waiting to see where she’d go next. And where she went was straight into the bunkers of the ultra-wealthy.
Her latest work, The Future, isn't just a book title anymore. It’s basically become a shorthand for how we talk about tech-optimism gone sour. We’re living in 2026, and the "Information Crisis" she warned us about? It’s here. It’s loud. And it’s kind of exhausting.
Naomi Alderman and the "Information Crisis"
You've probably heard her talk about this on the BBC or in her latest non-fiction project, Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today. Alderman argues that we’re currently weathering the third great information crisis in human history. The first was the invention of writing. The second was the printing press. Now? It’s the internet and AI.
Each time, we freak out. We get angry. We stop being able to talk to each other because the medium—the very way we share ideas—changes our brains.
She’s been vocal about how digital communication erodes empathy. "If you have a person in front of you, you can have a conversation," she told The Guardian. But a tweet? A "ranty YouTube video"? That’s just a brick thrown through a window. It’s why her version of the future feels so jagged. It’s a world where we have all the data but zero connection.
The Billionaire Problem
In The Future, Alderman takes aim at the "rabbit" mentality of the tech elite. She uses this fox vs. rabbit metaphor that’s actually pretty brilliant. Rabbits are hoarders. They’re terrified. They build fences and bunkers because they think they can outrun the end of the world. Foxes? They just live. They trust.
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The tech giants in her fiction—thinly veiled versions of the Musks and Zuckerbergs of our world—are the ultimate rabbits. They’ve got the private weather systems and the predictive analytics. They think they’ve "solved" the future. But Alderman’s point is that you can’t survive a dead planet, no matter how nice your bunker is.
- Lenk Sketlish: The social media mogul.
- Zimri Nommick: The tech tycoon.
- The Reality: They represent "power toxicity."
Alderman is convinced that if you give any human that much power, they simply go crazy. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s just biology. Look at the real-world cage fight threats between billionaires. She actually lamented that she didn't put that in her book because reality was more ridiculous than her fiction.
Why "The Future" Isn't Just Sci-Fi
People often pigeonhole her as a sci-fi writer. That’s a mistake. She’s an archaeologist of the present.
The software in her book, AUGr, which tells people how to escape assassins or navigate collapses, feels uncomfortably close to the AI assistants we’re all carrying in our pockets today. She’s been working in tech for over twenty years. She co-created Zombies, Run!, for heaven's sake. She knows how the sausage is made.
And what she sees is a tool being used to make "a few dudes rich" instead of benefiting humanity.
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Breaking the Apocalypse Habit
Most dystopian stories are about the "after." The wreckage. The leather jackets and the scavenged cans of beans. Alderman isn't interested in that. She wants to know how we avoid it.
Her vision is surprisingly hopeful, which is weird to say about a book that starts with the end of the world. She’s looking for the "Fox" way out—a future based on trust and collective action rather than high-tech walls. She talks about "leaving the tiger places for the tigers" and creating wildlife travel corridors. She wants cities with living hedgerows and tricycles (she loves her trike).
It’s a vision of the future that is actually... quiet. And green.
The Naomi Alderman Method: Religion Meets Tech
One thing most people miss about her is the deep religious undercurrent. She grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon and eventually "wrote herself out" of religion with her first novel, Disobedience.
But you can’t take the scholar out of the writer.
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She treats the Bible like a "superpower." She looks at the story of Lot and sees the first survivalist bunker. She looks at the internet and sees the Tower of Babel. By mixing ancient parables with 2026-era code, she finds a depth that most "tech-thrillers" lack. It’s why her work stays with you. It feels old and new at the same time.
What's Next?
She’s currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and she’s still deep in the world of interactive storytelling. But her main focus seems to be shoring up the "old institutions"—public libraries, the BBC, things that provide a buffer against the firehose of internet nonsense.
She’s not just writing books; she’s trying to figure out how to be a good citizen in a time of "intense social and psychological turmoil."
Actionable Insights for Navigating Your Own Future
If you want to live in the world Naomi Alderman is trying to build, you don't need a bunker. You need a different toolkit.
- De-escalate the "Information Crisis": Recognize when a digital platform is making you angry for profit. Step away from the "ranty YouTube video" and talk to a real person. Face-to-face empathy is the only thing that actually updates our "internal models" of other people.
- Reject the "Rabbit" Mentality: Stop thinking of security as something you buy or fence off. Real security comes from community and trust.
- Engage with the "Text": Whether it's a religious text, a historical document, or a piece of code, look at it directly. Don't just take the "preacher's" (or the influencer's) word for it.
- Find Something and Tend to It: Alderman’s advice for avoiding despair is simple: Preserving a garden, writing a letter to a representative, or protecting a local park. Small acts of "tending" are the antidote to the "cataclysmic" mindset.
- Invest in Public Goods: Support libraries and shared spaces. These are the "FutureSafe" zones that actually matter.
The future isn't a fixed point we're crashing into. It's something we're actively coding every time we choose trust over fear. Naomi Alderman has given us the beta version of a better world; it's up to us to actually run the program.