Naomi Alderman offers us a glimpse into “The Future”

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Emily Cox: Hi, this is Emily Cox. I'm an editor here at Audible, and I'm so incredibly excited to be chatting with Naomi Alderman, the bestselling author of The Power. We're here to talk about her latest release, The Future. Welcome, Naomi.

Naomi Alderman: Hi. It's wonderful to be here.

EC: Thank you. So, I introduced you as an author, but you have a much more extensive job description that I would love to dig into before we start talking about The Future.

NA: Well, yes. I am also a games creator and writer. My biggest game is called Zombies, Run!, which is an audio game. So, it's relevant to people who like Audible. It's a fitness game on your smartphone, which you play by going out for a walk or a run in the real world, and we do stories from the zombie apocalypse in your headphones to encourage you to go further and faster and to make the whole business of getting some exercise a bit less boring.

EC: Oh, my gosh.

NA: That game has 10 million players. It's been going for more than a decade now. I'm very proud of it. We get letters every day from people who tell us that we have helped them exercise, and as a reluctant exerciser myself, I want there to be things out there to help the people who are not the kind of “yeah, hard body,” kind of “personal best, blah, blah, blah,” but just want to have some encouragement to move and to do that regularly. So, I do that. I’ve been the executive producer on the TV show of The Power. I'm a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University. I make radio programs for the BBC. I think those are the main things.

EC: You're very busy.

NA: (laughs) I'm very interested in everything. (laughs) That's my major problem.

EC: How do you even structure your day? Like, is there a certain segment for writing and ... or writing books versus zombies?

NA: Yeah. It kind of depends what I'm working on, but what I often do is I start the morning with, maybe, some morning pages, which is just sitting and doing a bit of, like, very free writing, or I start the morning with some input. So, reading something, even a poem, really helps to get my brain working in that sort of creative way. And then, I tend to do novels in the morning and games and other stuff in the afternoon. So I find that, if I'm working well and steadily, then I can get my sort of 500 to 800 words a day done before lunch, on whatever fiction project I'm working on, and then after lunch, I can meet up with people and do that kind of collaborative work. That is a wonderful pattern for me. That is a really enriching pattern that is very sustainable.

"If you give yourself the opportunity to have different sections to your day, it's almost like you get a brand new day again. There you go. Productivity tips from a novelist."

Sometimes, I think I should write something called “How to Overclock Your Brain.” Which is what people do with computers to get more stuff out of the computer, like more performance out of it, and part of it is not doing the same thing too much. I also believe that you get more done if you're not doing the same thing again and again and again. If you give yourself the opportunity to have different sections to your day, it's almost like you get a brand new day again. There you go. Productivity tips from a novelist. (laughs)

EC: Well, seriously, that feels groundbreaking. I think wellness might be in your future.

NA: (laughs) Oh, well, I've had a lot of therapy, so I ought to put it to some use at some point.

EC: (laughs) You know, when you referenced the computer, I do love, in The Future, how deep you got into computer science. For a non-computer scientist here, that was very interesting to me.

NA: And I'm so excited that you liked that. I got to a certain point with writing this book. So, obviously, the book is about technology billionaires, and it opens with three technology billionaires getting into a plane because they've been warned by their predictive technology that the apocalypse is coming. And they don't know quite what it is, but they've got to escape, and, obviously, that doesn't go like they expect.

EC: Not to plan.

NA: (laughs) Yeah. Not to plan. But as I was writing this book and thinking about what the problems are with modern technology and the way that we think about it and the kinds of almost weaknesses in human thinking, that it is somehow digging a chisel into and chipping bits out of us. And I say that as somebody who loves technology, but as I was thinking about this, I got to a point of going, "Oh, I think I have to explain how machine learning works." (laughs)

I have three pages in there where I explain how a computer scientist called Donald Michie in the '50s devised a computer made of matchboxes that he could teach to play tic-tac-toe. I want to take the humanities graduates and go, "Come with me. Come on.”

EC: Right, and that's me. Yeah.

NA: Yeah. (laughs) Right. "We're going to learn how this works, and at the end of three pages, you're going to understand it," and subsequently, you're going to go, "Oh, is that all it is?"

EC: Yeah. Sure.

NA: In the UK, we call tic-tac-toe noughts and crosses.

EC: Right.

NA: So one of the things that's so helpful is you can really visualize those matchboxes. So the thing is called Machine Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine, MENACE. M-E-N-A-C-E. And I think if you can visualize it with the matchboxes and like little beads inside the matchboxes and shaking the beads, then you go, "Oh, okay. this is concrete. I get it. I don't have to imagine little pulses of electricity and silicon." I'm so glad you liked that. (laughs)

EC: Well, and it sort of demystified the idea of “AI is going to become conscious and take over the world.” Or didn't demystify that, just it made it feel maybe a little less scary because it's a machine.

NA: It's an incredibly useful tool, and if you read the three pages about the MENACE or just, you know, go google MENACE and learn how it works, then you will see that the machine doesn't actually know anything. It can look as if it knows something without, at any point, having understood the rules of tic-tac-toe, or what it means to win or lose, or how you construct your strategy. And you will also understand why people talk so much about training in artificial intelligence. That sounds like, I don't know, training a dog.

But a dog comes with a lot more innate [knowledge] than what we currently call artificial intelligence, which, to be honest, the training part of artificial intelligence now is everything that all of us have put on the internet over the past 25 years.

And without the training, there's nothing. So, we shouldn't really be calling it “artificial intelligence.” What we should be calling it is “a new, interesting way to search the internet,” which presents its results in a very user-friendly form.

And that's amazing, but even training is kind of the wrong word. What it is (laughs) is input. We're trying to use human words about it because that's how we are. That's what it would be if we read a million books—that would be learning—but that's not what that is. That is input into a machine in the same way as, I don’t know, pouring a bunch of grain into a mill.

EC: Right.

NA: We put some stuff in, and we get it out in a different form at the end.

EC: Yeah. That can help.

NA: Like, that's very useful, that it does that. The grain at the end that's been turned into flour, incredibly useful, but at no point did that mill produce the stuff itself.

EC: Right, and now I feel like I've sat with Marius, and I know him better from hearing you be him in this meeting with me.

NA: (laughs) I love Marius.

EC: Yeah. He was my favorite. I loved him.

NA: I want him to be my friend.

EC: This is interesting, though, because, there's so much about technology in your book. And in your Audible sessions interview with Adjoa Andoh about The Power, you described it as feminist sci-fi. So, where do you think The Future sits, genre-wise? We've been saying literary speculative, utopian, like, what do we think it is?

NA: Right, okay. All right. Literary speculative is good. Like, definitely, I believe there are some pretty good sentences in there, and also it's not just excitement, although there is some excitement. So what does that ... What's a literary novel? (laughs) I don’t know.

EC: I don't know. Yeah.

NA: I mean, I'll tell you what it definitely is—it’s definitely a novel. (laughs) So, I can say that, but also as an author, I find myself sort of mischievously drawn to the idea of writing things that can't be classified by bookseller classifications. The more classifications there are, the more I want to make things that go across the genres.

So, at least three different plot structures are going on in there. There is a love story. There's a noir, where somebody finds herself in a situation that she doesn't understand and way out of her depth, being pursued by an assassin through the mall in Singapore. And there is also a heist in there. It’s mysterious, a concealed heist, where some assistants and ex-wives, et cetera, in Silicon Valley are trying to do the kind of heist where they end up stealing a company. How do you steal a company? Well, if you haven't read the book, you'll have to find out by reading it.

"As an author, I find myself sort of mischievously drawn to the idea of writing things that can't be classified by bookseller classifications. The more classifications there are, the more I want to make things that go across the genres."

EC: Yeah. We're going to talk about that in a few minutes when we get to the spoilers, because that’s what we need to dig into.

NA: Yeah. (laughs)

EC: So, something that I found really interesting about this world that you built is that everyone's really obsessed with catastrophe and survival, but in a really active way. Like, there are disaster cons, there’s billionaires building these multi-generational living bunkers. There's a robust forum community, which you really bring to life. Do you think, is this the era that we're in now and I'm just not tapped into it, or is this where you think we're going, that people are going to be super survival focused?

NA: I mean, I don't think we're quite there yet, but it might be coming. Increasingly, I think, we're living in a world which has sudden systemic shocks to it. Now, do I mean increasingly? I said that, and now I think, "Well, Naomi, what would you have said if you were living through the Black Death? Come on now." Maybe what we are living in, actually, is a world in which we know more about what's happening and what's coming, and that makes us want to prepare.

So, I mean, the Black Death was horrific. The chroniclers tell us that in England, the living did not suffice to bury the dead. So, had that happened to us, we would certainly feel that we were living through the worst of times.

However. had it happened to us, we would've been able to track it, as we know, on little charts and maps online, and we would've seen where each outbreak was, and there would've been lots of discussion about it. So, I think we're probably not living in unprecedentedly dangerous times. Definitely not. However, we're living in times when people are increasingly interested in knowledge and what they can do to protect themselves. So, I thought the idea of the apocalypse industry getting bigger and bigger was reasonable. A good guess.

EC: I think you're right, and it does seem like there have been enough calamities in this near future world that you can see why that dial may have been turned up.

NA: Right. I mean, would you ever be without a single mask or some hand sanitizer in your house again?

EC: No.

NA: That's a kind of prepping—“I've lived through this once.” You know, I don't think you would ever probably be without a certain amount of basic supplies at home, in case there was something where there was a run on the stores. Because having just lived through that, we are all a little bit wise to it now. So, I think, maybe that's good.

EC: Yeah, and there is certainly, obviously, a prepper community.

NA: Right.

EC: It just still feels a little fringy, but I think you might be right, that maybe that's not far from being …

NA: Right, right. I think maybe what I'm saying is that there are things that we do that don't make us self-identified preppers, but we are prepping.

EC: Yeah, yeah. So one of my favorite YA authors, Amy Kaufman—I saw her interviewed. Someone asked her what her survival plan was, and she said, "Oh, I'm going to go down in the first wave. That's my agenda.” And so, I was wondering, have you thought about your survival plan?

NA: (laughs) All right, all right. My survival plan. A lot of my characters in the book spend time discussing what they think is coming, right? And they have conversations about what about if there's a dangerous plague? What about if there are giant bugs? (laughs) What strategies?

EC: Little bugs. Big bugs, yeah. (laughs)

NA: Right. Little bugs, big bugs. (laughs) So, it really depends what is coming. I think, if we're talking about the kind of calamity that we just lived through with the COVID-19 pandemic, I did fine. You know?

I holed myself up in my house. I actually always have a very good stocked larder. At no point did I feel like I was in imminent risk of something bad happening to me, and that was fine. In terms of a zombie apocalypse … (laughing) So, something that is true in The Future and is also true in Zombies, Run! is that community building and conflict resolution are incredibly underrated survival skills, and, basically, human beings will be okay in most scenarios if we can get together with a group of people that we trust who all have different skills and abilities of which conflict resolution and community building is one. That's potentially the most important one, because if we can get together and work together with a group of, let's say, 50, 60, 70 other people, we're golden, and if we can't do that, pretty much none of us is making it on our own. And the ones who might make it on their own are exactly the worst kind of people.

This is the thesis of the book. (laughs) You don't want to live in the world which is created by the rugged individualists who think that they can survive completely alone, and they don't want to live in that world either. Nobody wants to live in that world.

EC: Right.

NA: [A world where] you have to be self-centered, and it's all about individualism. Everybody would be really, really miserable in that world.

"Community building and conflict resolution are incredibly underrated survival skills, and, basically, human beings will be okay in most scenarios if we can get together with a group of people that we trust who all have different skills and abilities."

EC: But then, there's a danger to cities as well, right? You get too many people together and then they actually separate, right? Like, I feel like there’s that push and pull.

NA: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm not exactly a fast runner, so if that were the major thing, yeah, I'm going down in the first wave. But on the other hand, if I'm part of a community where people go, "Oh, no, you know, we're going to look after Naomi in this way, because she's going to look after us in that other way," then I think that's a good time.

EC: Right. Yeah. I really wanted to dig into the religious imagery throughout, because obviously that's so much at the heart of the story. How did your personal religious upbringing inform this story?

NA: Right. (laughing) I grew up very Orthodox Jewish, and I grew up reading the Bible in the original Hebrew, which is extremely useful if you're then going to write about the Torah, the Hebrew Bible. (laughs) I saw somebody out there, an early reader, has given a bad review saying that she disagrees with my interpretation of the Bible. I'm like, "Number one, it's legit to disagree with my interpretation of the Bible. It's also legit just not to enjoy a book."

However, I looked at her disagreement and I thought, "I don't think you've read that in Hebrew." Anyway, (laughing) I think this may be less true in America than in the UK, but I think it's probably still true that teaching Bible stories, the stories from Genesis, is left now to very religious people to teach their children. I think people who are not particularly religious are no longer teaching their kids those stories, which are fundamentally the foundation of our culture, and they're really good stories. I'm not going to say that everybody should read Leviticus, but I would say that everybody should read Genesis. It's just a bunch of really interesting stories, and even if you can't go back to the original Hebrew, if you sit and read like a couple of translations—try to get the least sort of religiously motivated translation you can—and then just to have a read of it and see what the stories are.

They're often not whatever it was you thought you'd heard about Adam and Eve, or whatever. And there are many in there that you probably will never have heard, including (laughs) this one about Lot and what happened in Sodom and what happened to him afterwards and how he started out.

EC: I have to say, I did have a religious upbringing, but I was only familiar with the salt pillar situation. I totally missed the cave. I totally missed the before they left Sodom. So anyway, it's fascinating.

NA: It's such a brilliant, rich story. And so, when I started thinking about writing the book, which was probably in 2016, I had read a New Yorker piece that said that technology billionaires were building these bunkers, survival bunkers, to escape the apocalypse. Number one, obviously, I thought that was disgusting. Number two, I thought, "Hmm, this feels like something from a science fiction story." And a lot of those people read a lot of science fiction, and so I do think science fiction writers have to step up and admit some culpability for what technology billionaires are getting up to. (laughs) Number three, I thought, "Oh, that's Lot in his cave. (laughs) Do they not know that that doesn't go well?" Do they not know that if you are an intelligent and powerful and wealthy person and you say to yourself, "Well, I don't need to try and help people around me because I can just go and live in a cave (laughs) if they're all destroyed," that that ends appallingly badly?

I'm not going to spoil for anybody (laughs) what happens to Lot in his cave, but you can go and read Genesis. It felt like an extremely clear and obvious connection to me. And, you know, those stories exist and have been passed down through hundreds of generations, because they're good stories that have useful information. And it’s a bit strange how, you know, we might know more about Greek and Roman myths, or Viking legends, than we do about the ins and outs of those foundational stories from the Bible, from those cultural touchpoints that actually were more relevant for people who lived in, let's say, English-speaking countries over the past 500 years.

"You don't want to live in the world which is created by the rugged individualists who think that they can survive completely alone, and they don't want to live in that world either. Nobody wants to live in that world."

EC: That's interesting, because maybe the religious traditions of today have sort of made them feel like, "Oh, that's for people who are religious," where they are mythology, actually. Genesis is like just mythology.

NA: Right. Well, mythology and then literature. This is a side point, but they're also incredibly foundational to understanding most Western culture. So, read Genesis, apparently, is my recommendation.

EC: Naomi Alderman says, "Read Genesis." (laughs)

NA: Yeah, and expect it to be extremely odd. Much odder than you have heard from the bit of story about Adam and Eve and the bit of story about maybe Joseph and his brothers that you remember having heard. Expect there to be some things in there where you go, "That's really odd. I don't really understand that. I don't understand how anybody would think that," and then you go, "Okay," but that's the book. It's preserving a lot of interesting ways people thought about things in the past.

EC: Yeah, and that is sort of the central idea of the Enochites, that they are reinterpreting the early stories. Is that cult based on a real cult? Did you take inspiration from anywhere?

NA: In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. Obviously, there have been a couple of famous and tragic stories about the FBI and police being, probably, overly attacking of people who probably were not planning to do anything terrible. So, there's Ruby Ridge and there's Waco, but, of course, that's not necessarily what happens in this story. And actually, what happens to that cult is quite unclear, as things often are in real life. That often, you don't know the whole story of what happened, but I would say that the beliefs are not based on any of those groups. The beliefs are the stuff that comes straight out of my head. (laughs)

So, there's the prophet, Enoch, who used to be called Ralph Zimmerman, and he has a series of visions and understandings about the world, and he wants people to recognize how far we have strayed from what he believes to be something truthful, which was a more hunting and gathering lifestyle. So Enoch has this concept of Fox and Rabbit, which is referenced many times in the book, where Fox is the hunter-gatherers that we used to be, and Rabbit is the settled agriculturalists that we are now. That we live off the products of agriculture, most of us, most of the time, and not the products of hunting and going to look for wild produce.

Enoch wants to draw our attention to the fact that this has caused some very profound changes in our understanding of ourselves. He also talks about the theory of pieces, which is that, in Enoch's view, there is a wholeness to the world, which settled people have ended up breaking up into just, like, tiny fragments. So he would point to the fact that we're using these cell phones rather than interacting in person. He would say, "Well, this is pieces." That we used to have human connection where we would see each other in the whole—you’d see the person's legs as well when you were talking to them.

And Enoch would say, "Well, yeah, we've turned that into pieces, and we're trying to pretend the piece is enough." And he would say that we are deliberately fragmenting our attention. He would look at TikTok, and he would say, "That's pieces. That's what that is." It's smaller and smaller, little tiny bits.

EC: And money, right? Isn't money pieces? It's a divider.

NA: Right, Yes, Yes. Instead of looking at the wholeness of a person, you are just looking at this tiny little bit, these fragments. So, I haven't gone to found a cult in some wild acres in Oregon. However, Enoch's thoughts come out of my head, and there is something troublingly fragmentary about the modern world. And also, I think Enoch would say, (laughs) so I guess I'm saying, (laughs) Enoch would say the problem is the kind of wealth that people pursue and are able to accumulate after we started doing agriculture divides us up from each other. So if you have fewer things, you have to share them in common, and then you have to interact with each other all the time. It's the same idea as the bunkers. The bunkers is the ultimate pieces.

I don't know how it is where you are, but where I am, apparently, at any given moment, 95% of the cars in London are parked, (laughs) and that is why the traffic's so bad. And also, we each feel like we have to buy for ourselves this very expensive item, rather than figuring out, with technology that we now have, how to share them in common, and, you know, thereby have some human interactions as well. So, yes, that is pieces. The idea is that, Rabbit, once we settled, and incidentally, nobody knows why we did agriculture. It was bad for at least 100 generations—it was really, really bad. And the people who had done settled agriculture, their babies died more—they were sick more, they were more malnourished, they got more diseases. It was bad. So anyone who's listening to this, your guess is as good as anyone else's about why human beings decided to do that.

There isn't necessarily a way back for us from that, but it's really important to understand what we give up when we decide to live in these little houses, cells, that are divided from each other, rather than walking from place to place as a community and working together on our survival.

So, yeah. (laughs) Those are the tiny and non-ambitious themes of the novel.

EC: When I was mapping out everything I wanted to ask you, I was like, "I don't know how we're going to do this. This is a long conversation," so thank you for sticking with me, because it’s so interesting.

NA: I love it. These are the things I like talking about.

EC: (laughs) So, as in The Power, you've built a sizable cast of characters and, you know, the way you talk about Enoch, you really do understand each of their individual psyches. How do you develop so many distinct voices at the same time and make sure that they all play nicely together—or not so nicely, in some cases?

NA: Yeah, yeah. I must say that it was probably extremely enriching to be working on the TV show of The Power at the same time I was writing this book, because when doing TV writing, the producers and the writers really quiz you about all of your characters. You know, you start out with a character and they say, "Well, where did this person go to school? Okay, and what about elementary school?" Actually, the more you ask about that, the deeper and richer and more complete it gets. So, that was a very good training, being in the delightful position of working with other writers who are going to have to take on working on your character, that they will need to be able to write in that character's voice. And then, they have all the questions. This person says this, “Did they always live here, or did they go and live over there for a while?” “Has that person ever been to Australia?” You know, all of that. It's just, once you train yourself to think like that, the characters instantly start to get deeper and richer. it's been wonderful.

EC: Being an audiobook listener, what were you looking for in each of the voices and narrators that were cast? It's quite a creative challenge to cast this many people.

NA: It is. So I worked with a wonderful producer, Tiffany Frarey at Simon & Schuster, and she did all the casting, or at least she sent me voices, and I went, “Yes, that is the right voice." So I was very pleased that the characters have read on the page so that you could understand what they were supposed to sound like. I am an avid audiobook listener. I joined Audible in, I think, 2002.

EC: Wow.

NA: So, well before Audible was acquired by Amazon. I've always been an audiobook listener. You know, before there were audiobooks to download for me, I used to borrow books on tape from the library. And before that, there was my mother reading to me when I was a child. That is, to me, one of the prime reading experiences, being read to. So, it was very important to me, actually, that the audiobook be as good as the novel when you read it, and particularly because I've done some of the weird tricks-y stuff in there, like there's an online forum. So, we had some conversations about, "Okay, how are we going to do this online forum?"

"Before there were audiobooks to download for me, I used to borrow books on tape from the library. And before that, there was my mother reading to me when I was a child. That is, to me, one of the prime reading experiences, being read to."

EC: And your voice is on there, right? Like, you introduced the online forum.

NA: Yeah. (laughs) I am on there also saying, it's something like, "A new post is indicated by this sound, (laughs) and a comment by this sound," because I thought, "Well, there's Discord, where people do online audio chat. So why not have an audio forum?"

EC: Mm-hmm.

NA: Yeah, for me, I just, I really want the audiobook listener to have a very good experience.

EC: That's amazing. When I listened to it, I was like, "I hope that Santino Fontana is Lenk," and he is. Because he is the voice of rage to me—as a narrator. So, he was perfect for Lenk Sketlish. It was brilliant.

NA: Oh, that's fantastic. (laughs)

EC: So I really loved that.

NA: Yes, audiobook narrators deserve a lot more love.

EC: Yeah.

NA: I don't even know how many Audible books I own. It’s several hundred anyway.

EC: Yeah. I did want to talk about a few things at the end, and listeners and readers, if you don't want spoilers, you can close your eyes now. Turn off your ears.

*WARNING: Spoilers ahead.*

NA: Closing your eyes will not help. Turn the audio off.

EC: Turn the audio off until you finish. Yes.

So at its heart, this is a heist, as you said, it almost felt to me like a reverse heist. It's actually they're trying to make something disappear and not acquire something. I guess, the ultimate treasure is, like, the salvation of the planet, right?

NA: Mm-hmm.

EC: So I thought it was really ingenious how you imagine this group of friends trying to pull this off, and you completely had me, as the listener, just saying, right until the end. I think Selah was the one who I was like, "Oh, the world really did end. Oh, no." She had me fooled, but I think it posits a really interesting and sort of strangely optimistic vision, which is, do you think that maybe, with the removal of a handful of key influences, we could turn things around?

NA: I think we can turn things around. I don't know if we will, but I think we can. I also think that there's a tendency to feel somewhat worshipful of people who have accumulated that amount of success, and I think we have to be willing to see them as people who got lucky in some ways—not in all the ways. Just because you can invent a product that's very successful doesn't mean that you are the right person to have that much power in the world once it becomes that successful. Am I advocating for removing these people? (laughs) No. I would strongly advocate for the kind of things that Selah does towards the end of the book with Anvil, which is to say, "Break it up.”

Break these companies up. There are many ways to break up big companies in which the people who made them still get paid very handsomely, and yet there is proper competition in a market operating effectively. We also need some market controls. I would also say that, having worked in technology for many years now, I think that there are a lot of very sincere, thoughtful people working in tech companies who want to be working on things that are good, and they got into it because they thought, "Oh, my God, this is changing the world. It's bringing people together, the communication, and if we can just talk, we're going to solve our problems." Or they're just excited by making something new and revolutionary.

And I would super encourage everybody working in tech not to think that your values are just for the weekend. Your values also exist in the office, and if you look at what your company that you started working for with high hopes, if you look at what they're doing and you say, "This is not good," then it sort of is your moral duty to try to organize to make a change there.

I don't think anybody 30 years ago, imagined that digital communications technology, and particularly social media, which nobody had thought of at that point, was going to become this incredibly powerful influence on the world, and that's okay. It’s fine not to have seen it coming. We're here now, and you don't want to be the person in the court of the king who doesn't tell them that's what they're doing is wrong. So I think that's where we are. What I would love is people who work in technology to read the book and to go, "Oh, I don't think I can work on this project anymore, and moreover, I need to get together with some other people who I know feel the same and think about how we can do this differently."

EC: Right. Mm-hmm. Interesting. In the end of the book, like The Power, you kind of zip us forward in time.

NA: It’s a little secret that's in there after the acknowledgements, so I hope that people will stick with it.

EC: It kind of blew my mind. An Enochite president has been elected, and, somehow, the good guys in the book, the people who took over Anvil and, you know, turned things around for the world, are now sort of moving into that we have too much power, and we're in a corrupted zone. Is that a fair interpretation?

NA: All right, all right. The message is everything is in motion, always.

EC: And there's no end.

NA: There's no end.

EC: The world never ends, yeah.

NA: Hopefully the world never ends.

EC: Hopefully. (laughs)

"What I would love is people who work in technology to read the book and to go, 'Oh, I don't think I can work on this project anymore, and moreover, I need to get together with some other people who I know feel the same and think about how we can do this differently.'"

NA: (laughs) And we can and should solve this problem, and yet it would be completely disingenuous for me to suggest that, having solved this problem, we're never going to face another problem.

EC: Right.

NA: We're always in the journey.

*End of spoilers.*

EC: Yeah. So I think I can bring back listeners who skipped the spoilers. We won't dig too much more, but I did love that ending. It left me with so many questions, so thank you for talking about it.

NA: Oh, good.

EC: Yeah. So, as you noted, you have been an Audible listener since 2002.

NA: I have.

EC: And I have two questions. What are some of your favorite all-time top listens, and do you have a favorite listen that came out this year?

NA: Oh, okay. Well, I'm going to get my app and open it up and have a look and see what I've got in there. All right, one of my favorite all-time listens is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I think is read in such an incredibly beautiful atmospheric way. It's just ... it's fantastic. I have been really enjoying going through all of John le Carré's novels in order in audiobook.

EC: Ah.

NA: I've been loving that. Do you know what? (laughs) I like The Great Courses, and particularly Elizabeth Vandiver, who does lectures on the classical world. She has ones on The Odyssey and The Iliad and on Greek mythology, and they are just fantastic.

EC: Cool.

NA: I could go on a lot. (laughs) But in terms of things that were released this year, all right, I really enjoyed Naomi Klein reading Doppelganger, her new book—which, honestly, I mean, as a Naomi, I also feel …

EC: You feel that pain. Right, sure.

NA: Yeah, I do, yeah. Well, I don't get it like she gets it, but the human brain is a weird thing, and I also feel somewhat implicated by Naomi Wolf being extremely anti-vax. It makes me feel like I need to do something to kind of … I don't know, (laughs) like talk about it. So I love that book.

EC: I haven't finished listening to it, but I feel like it kind of digs into some of the things that your book is concerned about, actually, just from a fiction, non-fiction perspective.

NA: Right, right. I found, in Doppelganger, the same thought that is in The Future, which is that technology companies are doing kind of enclosures by taking our data and our stuff that we've got on the internet for free, using it to train their programs or, you know, selling it as a bundle, and so yeah, she and I had exactly the same thought about that, which was kind of amazing.

Okay, (laughs) I don't know if you have this in the US. Do you have Alan Partridge?

EC: Okay, so my husband's English, and he quotes Alan Partridge every day.

NA: (laughs)

EC: And we do have it in the store, but, no, people aren't as familiar with it.

NA: Okay, so there's three series now of Alan Partridge From the Oasthouse, and if, as an American, you want to listen to something, which absolutely sums up the concept of tragic comedy. Alan Partridge is an aging radio DJ who has a self-importance that conceals a real self-doubt. I guess what he is, is Larry David (laughs) in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but for British people.

It’s quite subtle and understated, and he's never going to be getting himself into really weird, embarrassing scrapes—just slightly humiliating moments. Moments where he knows that he's revealed himself, metaphorically, in a way that he didn't intend to, and From the Oasthouse is the best that that character has ever been. That's just one of those things that the day it comes out, I get it—I listen to the whole thing, probably that day or the next day, and then I savor it and go back and listen again and again. So, yeah.

EC: Amazing. I need to listen to those. I've seen some of his shows over the years.

NA: I always found the comedy in the show just a little bit cruel for what I can tolerate, whereas the comedy in From the Oasthouse is—it’s got a kind of warmth to it. And also, there's a bit in the most recent one where he's trying to figure out how to outwit his ex-wife in terms of getting to see the grandchild before she does—and it's heartbreaking, and then it's hilarious. And then it's heartbreaking again, and then it's hilarious again. And, yeah, it's just wonderful.

EC: Mm-hmm.

NA: Oh, I'll tell you what else is really good. I really enjoyed the other book about crypto, which is Number Go Up by Zeke Faux. It's very, very funny. I do like Michael Lewis, but I think, on this topic, Number Go Up is a better book and funnier and looks at the subject more in the round. So I really enjoyed that.

EC: You must listen on a fast speed to get through as much as you listen to.

NA: I do listen on a fast speed. It's one of my great pleasures, you know. I would rather be listening to an audiobook than watching TV or surfing the internet ... it’s one of my two ideal things. Either, if I'm driving or if I'm walking, (laughs) or if I'm doing anything with my hands, I'm listening to an audiobook. And it frequently happens, incidentally, that I've bought the book in two versions, where I've got it as paper or as an ebook, and I also have the audio, so I can just switch between, whether I can read with my eyes or then, if I get in the car, I can immediately go and put the audiobook on.

EC: Yep. I do the same. I love that. Thank you so much for joining us. This was a really fun conversation. I could keep talking to you forever, and I'm sure that our listeners feel the same way.

NA: Well, let's do it again, then. (laughs)

EC: Yeah, next book.

NA: And this was a real treat. Thank you so much.

EC: Well, thank you so much. And, listeners, I can't wait for you to pick up The Future, now available on Audible.