Author Naomi AldermanAnnabel Moeller/Supplied
A feminist, big-ideas thinker raised in a strictly orthodox Jewish household who’s as conversant in the Bible and classics (she has a degree in the latter) as she is in tech (she’s written video games), English writer Naomi Alderman is a woman for these challenging times. In 2013, she did a mentorship with Margaret Atwood that led to deep, peripatetic friendship and influenced her speculative, Obama-endorsed novel The Power, now a TV series that she helped write and produce.
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Her latest, The Future, posits a plausible enough scenario – three tech billionaires develop an AI program to predict an environmental apocalypse that each believes they alone can survive in their respective bunkers – that its title should perhaps have been The Near Future.
Despite her big brain, Alderman comes off as a warm, open person who relishes thinking on her feet – or on the passenger seat of a car on an English motorway, which is where she was when she spoke to The Globe en route to a weekend getaway.
This novel is coming out in what I understand has been a hard year.
I’m having a terrible year. My mother died in March. She had a stroke the night of the U.K. premiere of the TV version of The Power. I was doing publicity for the show knowing she was dying in hospital. We’d talked about it beforehand, because she hadn’t been well, and she said, “I want you to go and do it.” And I said, “Please try not to make me sit shiva during the week of the show.” And she didn’t. She survived until I got back from America and then died three days later.
Condolences. And I imagine events in the Middle East aren’t helping things.
I feel glad that my mother isn’t alive to see it. She moved to Israel in the sixties, when there was a real hopeful air about what the future might be. She remembered going to shop for her vegetables at the Arab souk in the old city. Obviously there were wars as well, but at the same time there was a feeling that it could all be resolved.
The roots of a lot of what’s going on go back to those European countries that failed to defend their Jewish populations during the Holocaust, and so it would be great if the countries that mucked it up were to get in and offer some passports to people who want to get out. The world has opened its doors to people coming from Ukraine. Britain has given passports and visas to people from Hong Kong. There is, I think, starting to be an understanding that a lot of wealthy, peaceful countries in the world managed to be wealthy and peaceful because they’ve placed their trauma somewhere else.
Do you have family there?
Lots. Four of my cousins have been called up. It’s horrific. Nobody has a child and then hopes that that child will be sent into a war zone.
I think in life you discover what it is that you can offer to the world. And what I seem to be able to offer is a view from a different perspective, or the ability to think about solutions on a larger canvas. I’m just a novelist, so people can always ignore it. But at the same time, certainly with The Power, I had a lot of people saying to me, “Wow, I never thought about that before, and it’s changed this.”
Maybe a segue here is the fact that this book, as well as your previous ones, uses a lot of biblical references. It seems like a deep font for you.
I was mentored by Margaret Atwood, which is one of the greatest gifts a writer could receive. In our first conversation we shared our favourite weird parts of the Old Testament. I grew up reading the Bible in Hebrew. The language is wonderful and the stories are fantastic. There are people out there who believe every word is literal truth and love. But you can also say to yourself, “This is one of the most extraordinary pieces of literature that people have passed on hand to hand, from generation to generation, probably for the past 5,000 years.”
I don’t know how it’s possible to understand 18th- and 19th-century literature without a good familiarity with the Bible, because that was the lingua franca of the culture. It’s very strange how that territory of our literary history has been ceded to the ultrareligious. And the rest of the culture has gone, “Oh, no. We don’t want that. We’re going to teach about Thor instead. We’re not touching stories about Abraham because that’s too religious and weird.”
The way that I grew up was that I would hear men giving interpretation of texts. Women were rarely, if ever, in a position to do that. So there’s a part of me that’s very satisfied to be giving my own interpretation of those texts. Because I’m a woman, it’s extremely radical.
Your mentorship with Atwood was a decade ago. Have you stayed in touch?
We love each other. The Future came out of the extraordinary experiences I had travelling with her. We went to the Canadian Arctic – to Nunavut. To Newfoundland. We met with Chief Mi’sel Joe. We went to Kuujjuaq and through the Torngat Mountains – if you haven’t been to Torngat, go to Torngat.
When we were first planning these trips, I remember saying, “Oh, God, Margaret, is hanging out with you going to make me an environmentalist?” And she said, “Yes.” And that’s what happened. She took me to places where there was truly wild nature. Where’s there’s that feeling of, so much is lost, and we have to not lose the rest of it.
I periodically go and look at how I could apply for Canadian citizenship. I know no country is perfect, but you seem like you combine the best parts of Britain and America with the sense of having also had some therapy.
You did a lot of prepper research for this novel – any useful tips?
This is a secret about walking around with Margaret Atwood. Her dad was an insect guy, so she spent half her year in the wilderness. She can bake a pie, a proper pie, on a campfire. That’s difficult. Usually you’d end up half-burnt and half-raw. Walking around the streets of Toronto, she’d go, “You see this plant? Remember this leaf shape? This is good to eat.”
But the most important prepper skill – because we’re a social species – is conflict resolution. Everything else you can learn together, particularly if there are still books and the internet. If you can’t do conflict resolution, there’s not going to be much point in your knowing any of the other things.
Tell me your current thoughts on AI.
I am one of the thousands of novelists whose work has been used without permission to train these first language models. As far as I’m concerned, that’s theft. You publish a novel with the expectation it’s going to be read by people, not strip-mined by corporations.
It’s also a really fun little technology. It’s enjoyable to sit down and say to ChatGPT, “help me plan my day” or “tell me the must-see places in Milan” if you’re there for a day.
I suppose my final thought about it is – I never have a final thought about it, I’m just kidding – but my final thought for now is that there’s a tendency when something can speak, or give you a response, to treat it as if it’s a god, or a fortune teller. And that’s very dangerous. Like a sat-nav, AI is only a tool.