Naomi Alderman is best known for her bestselling, Women’s Prize-winning 2017 science fiction novel (and Prime series) The Power, in which she imagined a world in which girls and women inexplicably gain the power to emit potentially lethal electrical charges. Almost overnight, this shifts the balance of physical power and, more gradually, societal power from men to women – a conceit she explored in intriguing ways.
Next came her 2023 novel The Future, which toyed with what might happen in a not-too-distant tomorrow if today’s increasingly dystopian social media and technology-infused world got even worse, to where corporations, platforms and their ultra-wealthy owners – the controllers of all our most personal data – ran everything and could do whatever they wished.
In this speculative dive, the sprawling plot revolves around three unpleasant tech gazillionaires. Two are recognisable distortions of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos; the temperamental jerk Lenk, just a vowel-to-consonant shift away from Elon, runs a kind of X/Facebook hybrid. An unappealing short-statured man with a roving eye runs a ruthless company very like a bloated Amazon. Then, there’s a woman who runs the world’s most successful personal computing company, called Medlar, which happens to be a small, apple-like fruit. Alderman gleefully utilises broad opportunities to dig deep into technology and the tech sector.
The twisty plot involves much high-level hacking, nuts-and-bolts tech talk and convincingly imagined high-tech innovation. Alderman shows a sound knowledge of the companies and individuals spoofed, and a good grasp of today’s technological discontents and threats and how they might play out in an oligarchical world. But, unusually for the genre, the novel ultimately imagines how technology could be redeployed for the good of humanity, to make a better, kinder, more socially and environmentally responsible world. If only.
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I marvelled at the enormous amount of research that must have gone into producing the novel, on everything from the history of computing to key concepts and issues in complex areas such as social media algorithms, hacking, information security and networking. My job for decades was to report on those topics. I recognise diligent, wide-ranging swot work.
In her new nonfiction book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today (and Other Lessons from History about Living Through an Information Crisis), I can see where some of Alderman’s research and idea overflow went. This is a collection of 11 brief essays and an afterword, adapted from a five-part series Alderman did in 2024 for BBC Radio Four on what she terms the “Third Information Crisis”.
What I really enjoyed was her stimulating development of her central thesis, placing our current information age into her framing of a third information crisis, times when humans have been inundated with new information and forced to adjust to sweeping and disruptive changes, but which also enabled the most profound human growth
Like those episodes, these essays tilt towards the conversational rather than the formal. However, what succeeds as radio isn’t as compelling in print. While an enjoyable if uneven read, the book feels like a project where someone said: why don’t we turn this radio series, some insights from Alderman’s recent Open University classics degree, and other fruits of her magpie, curious mind, into a book, with some light editing?
I’d have preferred to see her take her deep tech research and sharp grasp of potential real-world tech outcomes, so evident in The Future, and really delve deep to produce longer, tighter, less radio-conversational essays more securely anchored in and trenchant about technology.
Instead, she does something quite different. Of course, it isn’t fair to want the book Alderman specifically decided, quite deliberately, not to write. Yet curiously, she addresses that point in her afterword, entitled “the thing I haven’t talked about” (all her chapter headings are in lower case). She begins that final section by summarising what she did choose to write: “a book about how information crises affect the humans going through them and have done repeatedly, even when the information crisis happens very organically, driven by people just noticing for themselves ...”.
That casual voice is the tone of much of the book, as if emerging from the wireless while you do the washing up. It’s such a contrast to the more constructed, incisive narrative voice in her fiction that this book doesn’t feel as if it comes from the same person who wrote The Power and The Future.
If a reader wants less on the implications of Lenk/Elon thoroughly poisoning a major social media platform, and more on how not to lose a good friendship to a polarising flame-war topic, then Alderman has that advice here. She recently posted on Bluesky that the friendship section, part of a chapter called “all right, but what am I supposed to do about all this?”, was the one most important to her.
For me, not so much; it’s too much like a Substack post or podcast discussion. What I really enjoyed instead was her stimulating development of her central thesis, placing our current information age into her framing of a third information crisis, times when humans have been inundated with new information and forced to adjust to sweeping and disruptive changes but which – crucially, for her – also enabled the most profound human growth.
The first such crisis was the development of writing; the second, the advent of the Gutenberg printing press; and we are living in the third. Alderman is convincing on how and why the first two were ultimately fruitful, if sometimes catastrophic and violence-filled crises. All three weren’t “just neutral technical improvements” but have and are changing us “psychologically, socially, and emotionally in profound ways that simply cannot be reversed”.
From this context, she selects “burning at the stake” as her chief symbol for “things that demean you as a human if you do them to others”, which does risk trivialising that post-Gutenberg religious doctrinal horror or overstating some of today’s grievances. However, it works as a vivid caution as she explores some of the many ways the third information crisis spins us into a psychological vertigo “shaping how we think, how we feel, even what we’re able to perceive”.
She has a fascinating chapter on how literacy led to the world-changing Axial Age of Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed because it enabled words and ideas to be widely shared. “Writing enables people to speak after they’re dead, in their own precise words” which is “a bit weird” and makes for “a confusion between people and symbols”, which leads her to consider how online discourse can seem detached from an actual person, making it easier to bring forth the stake.
Another wonderful chapter, “the idea of a library”, uses Jorge Luis Borges’s 1975 story The Book of Sand as a way to explore the ephemeral, empty addictiveness of the infinite-scroll internet, and proposes the slower gratification of libraries as an antidote. A public library is “designed to serve the public” and isn’t trying to sell users anything or force them to remain on site for as long as possible, Alderman says. She imagines how technologies, apps and services could be recalibrated to serve people, not yoke people to corporations – a chapter that leans in to the concerns of The Future.
Other chapters consider privacy and the right to be forgotten; loneliness; community; the speed at which information comes at us all now; the pros and cons of finding your people online; and a chapter on “the rise in utter nonsense”. There’s wisdom, fresh insight, frequent “aha” moments and unexpected, usefully provocative takes.
Also, her regular emphasis on this third technology-driven crisis being (generally) neutral, capable of positive and negative impacts, is a needed counterbalance to hand-wringing panic at all the microchip has wrought. However, more of the considered polish of an award-winning novelist would have served these topics, and the background erudition buttressing Alderman’s arguments, much better.
But that’s the book Alderman chose to write here. Her afterword notes: “The thing I haven’t talked about very much in this book is the way in which our current information crisis is shaped by enormous business interests, by money that is being put into exacerbating some of the normal information-crisis problems for profit, and by bad actors who have also worked out what happens during information crises and are using that knowledge to try to create chaos.”
That’s the substructure of The Future, and Alderman’s research-backed, creative take on all those angles is exactly what I would (still!) like to hear. Alderman argues that “a lot of people [are] already writing and thinking about” these things. True, but those people are mostly academics and journalists, not the successful science-fiction creator Naomi Alderman.
Science fiction writers have always profoundly influenced technologists and what they develop, shaped what the general public (reader, TV or film viewer) expects technology to be and do, and defined what tech is or might become. I fervently hope Alderman eventually ignores her own advice, burns a few deserving corporations and tech billionaires at the stake, and writes, with her unique expertise, the companion book that does talk about the thing she hasn’t talked about here.
Further Reading
The Future by Naomi Alderman (Fourth Estate, 2023). Alderman’s most recent novel. A wild, often funny eco-techno-thriller that begins with the end of the world and tech billionaires fleeing to their doom-prepper bunkers.
Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow (Verso Books, 2025). Academic and science fiction writer Doctorow coined this grimly funny term to describe how and why the big tech platforms, and our experiences on them, get deliberately crappier by the day.
More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker (Basic Books, 2025). Becker eviscerates the outlandish obsessions of tech billionaires and their desire to “optimise” the future.
