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The Future
| Title | The Future |
| Writer | |
| Date | 2024-10-12 10:03:35 |
| Type | |
| Link | Listen Read |
Desciption
A Most Anticipated Book of Fall at Associated Press, Booklist, Chicago Tribune, Goodreads, Good Housekeeping, Literary Hub, Time, The Week, and W Magazine The bestselling, award-winning author of The Power delivers a dazzling tour de force where a handful of friends plot a daring heist to save the world from the tech giants whose greed threatens life as we know it. When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left? Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what's going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future? Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization. By turns thrilling, hilarious, tender, and always piercingly brilliant, The Future unfolds at a breakneck speed, highlighting how power corrupts the few who have it and what it means to stand up to them. The future is coming. The Future is here. Read more
Review
This is a very clever and insightful book about the near future. For much of its length it looks dystopian, until suddenly it's not. There are clues at various places that things are not as they seem, but they are a bit subtle, and you might miss them if not paying close attention. I don't want to be a spoiler, but you really have to read it all the way through to fully appreciate what the author is doing here. The social commentary is sharp indeed.One thing that sucked me into it from early on, is that when I tried to put it down (we all have to eat sometime), it was like waking up from a dream, where you're in that twilight state of mind where you are trying to separate the dream from reality, wondering if you're really awake. It all seems so real, that it is easy to visualize the leaders of the biggest tech companies thinking and behaving in exactly this way, especially since they often do the exact things described here.The author must have read Piketty, and thought about the implications of unchecked inequality and billionaires left to their own devices, unable to separate the public good from their own greed and insecurity. The reader is invited to see things occasionally from the billionaire's perspective, how they might believe they are behaving responsibly when the reality is just the opposite. Everyone makes mistakes, but the billionaire's mistakes are magnified a billion-fold by their unimaginable wealth.The plot is a little complex, best read during a holiday or vacation when you have time to binge all the way through it. The moral of the story is that a small group of concerned people can change the world. As I gather with my children this holiday season, I sure hope that part isn't a dream.
