The Future, Naomi Alderman

I only wish this book would become a reality. A vast plan is to place the richest 3 billionaires on an excluded island while their technology companies are used to help bring back the world from a most certain apocalypse. And it only takes 3 years to get the ball rolling. One can dream… but oh what a fine dream it is. Sure there’s Fantail – a program with boss Lenk – who is Zuckerburg; there’s the cult Enoch started by Martha Einkorn’s father that could be any whackjob currently in the cult or dictator world. The book has them all… and so well done. Reproducing the abusive environment she grew up in by working with a sadist? Perhaps. Creating AUGR -  a software survival program designed to protect billionaires? Zhen – a survivalist secretly provided the software to make sure it worked. Of course. Humans can be creatures driven to kill even when they cannot eat – they keep pressing the button long after the pleasure or satisfaction is gone.. more money, more influence, more fame, more power… it doesn’t end. The human condition - GREED. Seeing a world through an invisible filter, encouraging them to stay away from the world as the software did with the big 3. Left alone on an island and unable to trust one another, so they isolated themselves. Big business thinks about profit – not about the kind of world they want to leave behind. In the end, the goodness of past generations begins to fade as new dictators and rulers try once again to destroy the world in its utopia. It is its nature.