The Future

by Naomi Alderman

We have no shortage of good projects; there are thousands of people

working on these things already, and they are proven and scalable. The reason

you feel despairing about this and think it’s impossible”—now Badger Bywater was wearing a tinfoil hat—“is because they w...

I think I’m starting to feel it now. My feet and my fingertips are tingling. I’m going to lie down. I’m going to look at photos of Ted until I fall asleep. I don’t think I’ll be with him or any of that bullcrap. But I won’t be here anymore. Bye.

stream of piss go, steaming and almost pleasantly fragrant, a smell of baking to it.

WTF LOL

Don’t make your mind impatient—make it still.”

quote worth noting

We are always in the process of catching up to the future. Only when we get there, it’s never what we imagined. Sometimes, just once in a while, it’s better.

you could die while wanting desperately to live, with many important things left unfinished. The future would come while you were looking the other way and there were so many things that could kill you.

And humans. We keep on pressing the button long after all pleasure or satisfaction is gone. More money, more influence, more fame, more power.

cognitive errors, systemic bias, your fault detector can’t tell you whether it’s faulty. If you walk along staring at the cracks in the pavement, you’re going to fall.

Sometimes everything you fear becomes true. Sometimes you really are alone, in a cave, with the world gone, realizing that if you’re going to get what you want, you’re going to have to take it. Sometimes there’s nothing for it but the unspeakable.

Lenk drew breath and Zhen understood that sometimes you can know the future. You can know it in the inability of people to change. In their desire to have things over. If you can’t tolerate uncertainty, you will try to make things certain. Sometimes the only way to make them certain is to make them bad. It hadn’t taken much for Lenk and Ellen to get to this stage.

The only way to know the future is to control it.

The suit said: “You might need to be here for a long time.” “All alone?” “Sort of alone. I’ll be here.” “I was never meant to come here,” said Zhen. “But you could never have stayed away, once you knew,” said the suit.

This is always the secret; this was how these technology fortunes had been made: make it all so easy and enjoyable and frictionless that you never start to ask yourself the big questions about whether this is really how you want to be spending your life.

don’t look back, look forward. And yet. Surely it was safe now.

We are all falling, all the time, from the half-understood past to the unknowable future. The other name for falling without fear is flying.

Everything is always in motion. Nothing remains still. Despite what anyone says, history never, in fact, ends.