The Future by Naomi Alderman

Published by Simon & Schuster on November 7, 2023

In the infancy of their companies, tech entrepreneurs improved our lives with devices and apps that we now regard as indispensable. After the entrepreneurs became billionaires, they arguably did more harm than good. They stole our data, used AI to deceive us, and invented ways to control our behavior. Nobody likes tech billionaires.

The Future takes place in the near future, maybe a couple of decades from now. Its focus is on tech billionaires and their need for control. The über-wealthy characters believe they are in the best position to survive whatever catastrophe will be the tipping point that ends most life on Earth. They find survival assistance in software called AUGR that predicts catastrophes and plots the best strategy to stay alive.

Martha Eikhorn has access to AUGR. When she gives it to her lover, Lai Zhen, AUGR saves Lai from an assassin’s attack in the novel’s best action scene. Martha grew up as a fundamentalist who learned survival skills to prepare for the end of days. Martha’s story of using her skills during an encounter with a starving bear is mesmerizing.

Martha works for Lenk Sketlish, founder of a social media empire. Albert Dabrowski founded Medlar, a tech giant that manufactures phones and laptops. Ellen Bywater, a genius at corporate takeovers rather than tech, forced Dabrowkski out of his company. Zimri Nommik founded Anvil, which seems a lot like Amazon, before he built AnvilChat and AnvilParty to “snap up everything in his all-consuming maw.” He became the richest person on Earth by using data harvesting methods to manipulate advertising clicks.

The tech billionaires don’t care if the world ends as long as they inherit the post-apocalyptic landscape. To that end, they have created large animal habitats that are kept free of humans. They claim they are protecting plant and animal species, but they have established hidden bunkers inside the habitats where they plan to ride out the apocalypse. They are counting on AUGR to give them time to fly to their bunkers before the rest of the world knows that the shit has hit the fan.

The billionaires are counterbalanced by characters who would like to save the world rather than saving their own skins. Martha and Lai are among the good guys. Ellen’s child Badger Bywater is fed up with their (Badger’s preferred pronoun) mother’s contribution to the planet’s destruction. Zimri’s wife Selah has a similar view about her husband. A couple of additional characters who believe that tech, like nature, should benefit the common good round out the cast..

A clever plot has the bad guys and at least one good guy scurrying for hidden shelters when AUGR announces that the world is ending. One of the good guys compromises one of the hidden shelters in another strong action scene. The plot misleads in a good way, taking the reader on a journey to an unexpected destination

The novel ends on a surprisingly positive note. It turns out that responsible people, when given a bit of power, can improve the world for everyone. You just need to get the three worst ones out of the way. The unfortunate reality is that there are way more than three people leading the planet toward its destruction and most of them work in industries (like oil and munitions) other than tech. And the reality has always been that power corrupts responsible people soon after they acquire it. Still, it’s nice to imagine a better reality. In any event, the last few pages acknowledge the reality that political and religious extremists will always stand as barriers to progress.

The novel incorporates discussions of philosophy, including a series of blog posts about Lot and Sodom that interpret Genesis as a blueprint for survivalists. Those posts are a springboard for thoughts about hunters versus agriculturalists, urban versus country living, civilization versus individualism, symbolic expression versus the world unfiltered. The story might go a bit overboard with its discussion of Fox and Rabbit stories told by the founder of the fundamentalist religion from which Martha escaped, but I give Naomi Alderman credit for exploring broad ideas that most creators of apocalyptic survivalist fiction (and truly ghastly prepper fiction) avoid. But then, this isn’t really a post-apocalyptic or prepper novel. The market is saturated with those. Alderman was wise to tinker around the edges of the concept without writing another one.

I’ve read a few novels in recent years that imagine fictional versions of tech giants who create companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. This is a smarter story than most. Whether the reader agrees with any of the philosophical discussion is less important than the fact that the novel tells an engaging story while trying to say something worthwhile about the relationship between the present and the future.

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Baumgartner by Paul Auster

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on November 7, 2023

It’s customary for authors to write a meditation on aging as they cope with their own journey into twilight. Paul Auster is 76 and thus of an age that encourages writers to contemplate their mortality. Yet his prose is still sharp, his insights as strong as ever. If, like Sy Baumgartner, Auster sometimes forgets to zip up his fly, he hasn’t forgotten how to write. Like Baumgartner, “he can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same.”

Baumgartner begins the novel as a philosophy professor on leave from Princeton. He lives a “day of endless mishaps,” beginning with a pan that scorched because he forgot to turn off a burner, a burned hand as he picks up the pan, and a tumble down the basement stairs as he tries to guide a new meter reader. The unfortunate events take his memory back to his first apartment at the age of twenty and his first purchase of cooking utensils, including the pan that is now ruined, and his first glimpse of Anna. They married five years later and his true life began, a life that ended with her death nine years ago.

Much of Baumgartner’s current life is spent coping with grief. Learning that someone’s fingers were severed in a work accident, Baumgartner begins to think of phantom limb syndrome as “a metaphor of human suffering and loss.” He views the loss of Anna as having severed his arms and legs from his torso, leaving him “a human stump, a half man who lost the half of himself that had made him whole.” He learned to put on a game front in the years following her loss, even learned to chase women, but the artificial appendages he has attached to his limbless torso feel nothing when he catches one. A year after his tumble down the stairs, he has learned to understand that “if you are the one who lives on, you will discover that the amputated part of you, the phantom part of you, can still be a source of profound, unholy pain.” He has been hiding from that pain — slowly replacing everything in his house that might remind him of Anna — but “to live in fear of pain is to refuse to live.”

Baumgartner has a dream — or he assumes it’s a dream — about answering a disconnected telephone and listening to Anna explain the dark void of the afterlife, a void she breaches only because he still thinks about her. The dream propels him into motion, reinvigorates dormant limbs, eventually allows him to open his heart to Judith, “something altogether different and new, and how could anyone who has lived as long as he has ask for anything more than that?” He later prepares to give access to Anna’s literary work to a college student who he sees as a surrogate daughter, a young woman who embodies Anna’s spirit and whose reverence for Anna’s work matches Baumgartner’s veneration of Anna’s life.

Baumgartner spends much of the novel’s second half recalling his family history (including a nostalgic examination of his mother’s life, a woman whose maiden name was Auster). He writes an essay about a trip to Ukraine, where his grandfather Auster lived before emigrating to America. He hears a haunting story about the city of his grandfather’s birth, a city that was taken over by wolves after all its residents had been killed or fled. He chooses to believe the story, for its symbolism if not for its absolute truth. Auster’s point (in this and other parts of the novel) seems to be that the stories we hold in our memory are the stories we need, even if they are not factually precise.

Apart from the novel’s exploration of its title character, Baumgartner is a celebration of good people, from the kind meter reader who helps Baumgartner when he falls down his basement stairs to a carpenter who learned Spanish to converse with Latin American teammates when he played minor league baseball and “has a gift for spreading life wherever he happens to go.” Most good people will not make it into history books, but they are no less important in the overall scheme of human existence. Despite the evil that wiped out the city of his grandfather’s birth, despite the darkness of political leaders that threatens to overshadow decency, Auster’s focus is on the positive, however tenuous positivity might be in a life that inevitably mixes joy with pain.

The novel ends on an ominous note of ironic ambiguity that nicely sums up Baumgarter’s approach to life. What happens next is for the reader to imagine. In the course of a single life, a life full of love and loss, what happens next is relatively unimportant. Baumgartner’s story is only one of billions. However it might end, its importance lies in the fact that Baumgartner existed, that he contributed, that he loved and was loved in return. As Baumgartner asks, how could anyone “ask for anything more than that?”

RECOMMENDED

Betrayal by Phillip Margolin

Published by Minotaur Books on November 7, 2023

Betrayal is a legal thriller minus the thrills. Phillip Margolin goes through the motions of plot development in a story that features a lawyer, but the plot is weak, trial drama is negligible, and the lawyer’s competence is questionable.

Robin Lockwood found time to train for MMA bouts when she was in law school. It’s impossible to do two full-time endeavors and expect to do either of them well, so it isn’t surprising that Lockwood got the snot pounded out of her when she was asked to fight a superior opponent as a replacement for a fighter who dropped out. Lockwood quit the fighting game and became a criminal defense lawyer. Unfortunately, her skills as a courtroom fighter are as weak as her cage fighting skills.

Years later, Lockwood’s MMA opponent, Mandy Kerrigan, is on a downhill slide. She’s arrested for multiple murders related to a young man who sold her performance enhancing drugs that turned out not to be as undetectable as she was promised. She was suspended from fighting because of her positive drug test. The killer invaded the drug dealer’s home and not only took out her dealer but also the dealer’s sister and parents. Naturally, Kerrigan wants Lockwood to defend her.

The case against Kerrigan is ridiculously weak. Someone saw her knocking on the front door of the house where the victims were killed, but nobody saw her enter or exit the home. The killer entered through the back door, not the front, making the presence of anyone on the front porch less than compelling evidence. Kerrigan’s DNA isn’t found inside the home. None of the victims’ blood is on her clothing. The police don’t have a murder weapon. Kerrigan might have had a weak motive to kill the kid who sold her the PEDs that caused her suspension, but she has no motive to kill the other family members. Lockwood acts as if the case is formidable, but in the real world it probably wouldn’t have been charged.

Other crimes contribute to the plot. A mobster is operating a scheme to defraud insurance companies by staging accidents, sending the alleged injury victim to a crooked doctor, and using a crooked lawyer to settle with a crooked claims adjuster. When the scheme causes a driver’s death, the mobster threatens to murder the fake injury victim and the lawyer, while the husband of the dead driver decides to murder the mobster. This seems like a lot of unlikely killing over an insurance scam, but the various threats and deaths are arguably relevant to Kerrigan’s trial. Since Lockwood is looking into the mobster, she is at risk of being yet another victim. Fortunately she knows how to punch people, at least if she’s in a cage.

The sister of the PED seller had bullied a high school girl. That girl killed herself, creating the unlikely possibility that the suicide victim’s parents murdered the bully and her entire family for revenge. The dead father in the family owed gambling debts, while the heir to the family’s estate is a felon who was recently released from prison. Alternative suspects thus abound, further weakening the dubious case against Kerrigan.

Margolin often tells the reader that death penalty trials require enormous preparation, but we rarely see Lockwood doing much of anything. She interviews a few witnesses and assigns an associate to review discovery that she should be reading herself. We learn more about the outfits she wears than the actual work she does to prepare for trial.

Lockwood is trying to get past the dramatic death of her fiancé three years earlier. To that end, she has been chastely dating (more like jogging with) the prosecutor who, predictably enough, is assigned to prosecute Kerrigan. They meet to resolve the conflict while establishing that they are both true professionals and caring humans who put ethics above all else. In other words, they’re pretty dull, although they make a predictable decision to shag at the first opportunity.

Legal thrillers generally succeed or fail based on the drama of trial scenes. In Betrayal, trial scenes are cursory. They also lack energy. It shouldn’t be possible to suck the drama out of a murder trial, but Margolin manages to do it. Lockwood also manages to overlook an obvious bit of evidence against her client, calling into question her ability as a defense attorney. Maybe she was concussed too often when she was fighting in MMA matches.

Legal thrillers also benefit from discussions of the Inside Baseball of trials. Margolin gives the reader some procedural information that everyone knows but ignores the strategy and tactics that make trials so fascinating. In short, while Margolin offers the skeleton of a story that might have been interesting, he adds insufficient flesh to bring the story alive. I would only recommend the novel to die-hard fans of legal thrillers who need something to read while awaiting another novel by Turow or Lescroart.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Kennedy 35 by Charles Cumming

Published by Mysterious Press on November 7, 2023

Kennedy 35 is the third installment in Charles Cumming’s BOX 88 series of espionage novels. The protagonist, Lachlan Kite, is now the head of BOX 88, an off-the-books, ultra-secret organization that brings together agents from American and British intelligence agencies.

Kite is married but separated from his wife. He begins the novel in Sweden, where his wife is a physician who recently gave birth to his daughter. He hopes to spend several weeks with his family, perhaps repairing his relationship with his wife, but his plans change when he gets a message from Eric Appiah, a friend from Senegal who went to school with Kite. Appiah does some freelance work for BOX 88. If me wants to meet with Kite, the meeting must be important.

Having learned a lesson about trying to maintain a relationship while concealing the nature of his work, Kite tells his wife as much as he can about Appiah. His story takes him back to 1995. Kite was sent to Senegal with his girlfriend, Martha Raines, who was there to complete his cover as a backpacking tourist. He was to play a collateral role in a plan to kidnap Augustin Bagaza, a Rwandan Hutu who shared responsibility for the genocide of the Tutsi people. Bagaza is in Senegal with his Congolese Hutu girlfriend, Grace Mavinga, a woman who delighted in murdering the Tutsi. France was complicit in the genocide and may have an interest in protecting Bagaza to safeguard its shaky international reputation.

About half of Kennedy 35 follows Kite’s mission as he travels through dangerous cities, maintaining surveillance of Bagaza in anticipation that BOX 88 operatives will snatch him before he and Mavinga can flee the country. Kite’s role in the mission becomes more dangerous when Philippe Vauban, a French journalist with PTSD whose Tutsi girlfriend was murdered by Bagaza, suffers a psychotic episode and decides to embark on a mission of revenge.

Cumming crafts tense scenes as Kite moves from boring afternoons in a small Senagalese resort to the adrenalin rush of surveillance and tradecraft in the space of a few days. The story from 1995 ends with a shootout and Mavinga’s flight from the country.

The rest of the novel takes place in 2022, beginning with Kite’s contact with Appiah. An American writer/podcaster, Lucian Cablean, has tumbled to the story of Bagaza’s disappearance in 1995 and has heard rumors about Kite’s secret organization. To protect BOX 88, Kite meets with Cablean, learns of a friend’s death, discovers that Cablean has also been targeted, and tracks down Martha Raines and Mavinga. The second half of the novel is interesting but less compelling than the story set in Senegal.

The 1995 story works because Cumming has mastered the creation of atmosphere. The smells, sounds, and tastes of Dakar become part of the story, complete with potholes and noisy motorbikes and unreliable taxis, dance clubs populated by wealthy men and beautiful young hookers. Cumming also captures the pain of a genocide that American media barely reported. Some genocides are important to Americans and others involve victims who don’t have white skin.

While the novel’s second half features less action, Cumming does imagine a clever plan to protect the secrecy of BOX 88. While the novel is self-contained, the ending might be described as a cliffhanger, as it ends with Kite taking a disturbing telephone call that seems likely to upend his life. I didn’t need that incentive to look forward to Cumming’s next novel, as he has firmly established himself as one of the better spy novelists currently working in the genre.

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The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown by Lawrence Block

First published in 2022; published by Subterranean Press on October 31, 2023

Fredric Brown wrote pulp fiction from the 1930s to the 1970s. Lawrence Block is a prolific crime writer whose most productive years began in the 1970s, although he won most of his awards in the 1980s and 1990s. The burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr is one of his ongoing characters.

Bernie owns a used bookstore in Greenwich Village. He’s fortunate to own the building that houses the store so he doesn’t need to worry about rent increases. Bernie hasn’t burgled much in recent years because he can’t pick a digital lock and security cameras are everywhere.

One night, Bernie falls asleep reading Brown’s What Mad Universe, a 1949 novel about an alternative universe that predates the modern understanding of the multiverse. When Bernie wakes up, he finds himself in an alternate universe that is similar to his own but better. A couple of Greenwich Village businesses that closed are still operating. A fence who died long ago is still alive. Amazon doesn’t exist so his store is doing a brisk business. Security cameras and digital locks are mostly nonexistent. And his best friend Carolyn wants to have sex with him. In his universe, Carolyn is a lesbian; in this one, she still is but she has the hots for Bernie.

Bernie takes advantage of the changes to steal a famous diamond, unencumbered by digital locks and security cameras. The convoluted plot then introduces jade figurines that alternate Bernie may already have stolen, an insurance scam, a few murders (the victims seem to be from Alice in Wonderland), and a classic reveal in which multiple suspects gather in the bookstore so that Bernie can set things right before returning to his own universe.

While the novel’s dip into science fiction is a bit odd (Block dabbled in the genre in his early years but generally stuck to crime fiction), the story flows effortlessly. Block riffs on Candide’s notion about the best of all possible worlds. The novel’s message (Block spells it out to make sure the reader takes his point) is “If you want something badly enough, you’ll get it. And then you won’t want it anymore.” When we scratch an itch, the itch goes away. A corollary is that we don’t always know what we want until we get it.

The book is ultimately about friendship. I don’t know if it’s politically correct for two people to have a cisgendered relationship after a lifetime of feeling no sexual attraction because of their sexual identities, but Block is too old to give a crap about being politically correct. His point is that we are all free to scratch our itches, that it’s nobody’s business if we do, and that friends are allowed to mark and change the boundaries of their friendships without judgment. While this is the strangest of the Bernie Rhodenbarr novels I’ve read, it proves that Block, at the age of 85, still has worthwhile stories to tell.

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