Naomi Alderman is best known as the author of The Power in 2016, a novel that tells the story of how women acquire the ability to produce electric shocks through their hands, thus putting an end to men’s monopoly on violence. Alderman’s most recent novel The Future (2023) is an entertaining blend of techno-thriller, solar/hopepunk and climate fiction that also considers patriarchy, but the primary focus is on the insidious power exerted by powerful tech/social media companies and their CEOs. This is not strictly speaking a novel about food, but, like so much fiction that explores futures altered by socio-ecological breakdown, food features in the novel in interesting ways.
The plot revolves around three ruthless, narcissistic and absurdly rich executives whose companies Anvil, Medlar and Fantail bear an uncanny likeness to Facebook/Meta, Amazon and Twitter/X and their CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. As is the case with these real-world companies, the enormous spread and considerable fortunes they have amassed have allowed them and their executives to wield the power of governments on a planetary scale. To cement their command over the global economy, they have doctored their algorithms to nurture feelings of anger and entitlement that accelerate cash flow but also socio-ecological breakdown across the planet. While Alderman assures the reader that all similarities between her novel and the real world are entirely coincidental, it must be noted that Musk is currently being investigated by the EU for having manipulated X to give priority to posts supporting far-right messages, Bezos has censored US news media, and Zuckerberg has declared that he wants Facebook to become a political forum, at the same time as the company will cease to fact-check posts.
In the novel, the CEOs are greenwashing their dirty algorithms and their obscene fortunes through the creation of wildlife habitats and by supporting various NGOs, but they are also building doomsday bunkers where they can find refuge the day things finally collapse. They are enormously intelligent people and know well that the future they are helping to produce will eventually fail. There is even a sense that final socio-ecological collapse is a goal of sorts; a way to demonstrate their ultimate and world-shattering power. As Alderman writes, these are people who “want—in their heart of hearts—for the world to come to an end.”
While the novel is heavy on incisive satire, it is also big on hope. People very close to the CEOs have begun to organize and secretly attempt to manipulate the algorithms that curate social media communication. As a first experiment, they infect the existing social media ecology with an algorithm that “isn’t trying to sell anything and has been told not to make people angry.” Instead, it very subtly alters social media posts so that eco-friendly messages become more vocal, and eco-hostile, anger-inducing, fossil-capitalist celebratory posts become less effective. This creates a slight yet significant shift in the global (social media) conversation. It is not the final solution to climate change in the novel, but it is a start.
Work in empirical ecocriticism has (perhaps unsurprisingly) suggested that post-apocalyptic, dystopian climate fiction creates an awareness of the climate crisis, but also the sense that nothing can be done to change the situation. The ongoing journey towards collapse may be tragic, but also somehow inexorable. The Future resists that imaginary by insisting that it is not too late to change the current trajectory. What needs to be resolved is what Alderman (and other scholars) has termed the “third information crisis”. If this crisis can be resolved, radical politics can rise to the surface, in the process helping (changing) governments, societies and people to shift their relationship to the planet and each other.
The novel notes that food is part of that shift. In one vision of the future voiced by one of the characters:
There is a beautiful world on the far shore, where we’re not destroying all the species anymore and our cities are clean and beautiful and full of wild birds, and our cars are all electric and all shared, and the streets are safe for kids to play in, and we get to keep TV and the internet and concerts and ball games and all that good stuff, and fine, we’re eating mostly vegan food but it’s good, and if we can just get through the pain barrier as quickly as possible, then we’re there.
Even more (food)utopian is the discovery of a new type of algae:
We found this algae and cultivated it. It’s the answer. It strips out nuclear waste. Poisons. Chemical weapons. Everything currently being made and a few things that haven’t been yet. The algae breaks nutrients to the atomic level and then builds them up again into a pure, beautiful, protein-rich, omega-3-filled, all-around food source.
This algae appears in the margins of the novel. Within the overall story, it is not a solution to anything, but it signals that solutions are possible. This is ultimately the utopian message of the novel: solutions abound. Accepting that, and acting accordingly, is the challenge.