how do we make sense of the world we live in? many of us rely on a diet of news and information. evidence, facts, truths — we think of these as the building blocks of reality. but in a world in which it is increasingly hard to distinguish the real from the fake, sometimes the most telling observations come from the writers of contemporary fiction — like my guest today, novelist and computer games creator naomi alderman. her latest story is an apocalyptic techno thriller. is the apocalypse that she imagines all too possible?

naomi alderman, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. i want to start at the beginning. you were raised in a very traditional, observant orthodoxjewish community in north london where, i think it's fair to say, women and girls were expected, by and large, to stay in the background. now, you today have a very powerful, unique, creative voice. you use it loudly. how difficult was it to find that voice, to make that move away? now, i should say, i do come from a traditional observant background. however, my father is a professor of history. so from that perspective, i came from an intellectually very open culture, even whilst, yes, i have been to a talk as a young woman on the subject, "the beauty of a woman is in her silence." so, yes. and you were brought up

in a religion and you talk about it quite openly in stuff you've written about your past, where at school, every morning, everybody said, "thank you, god, for not making me a slave." and then the boys said, "thank you, god, for not making me a woman." yes, and the girls say, "thank you, god, for making me according to your will." yes, it's, in some ways, quite a misogynist religion. i think that is a very misogynist type of prayer. i think i became increasingly... well, i certainly increasingly had the feeling that it was not the right place for me. it was emotionally difficult to figure that out. my family didn't make it difficult, i must say. there wasn't real and deep conflict in the home? in the home, no. certainly, i did lose friends when i decided that i wasn't going to be orthodox any more and i had to really rethink what my place in the world was, who i was, what i believed in. i mean, that was the big work of my 30s, really, was of unknitting that, but also the process

of writing my first novel, disobedience, which is set in the orthodoxjewish community and is about a relationship between two women in that community. the process of writing that book, i think, helped me to think through where i was, where i wanted to be with it. i started writing the book religious, and at the end, i finished the book, i published the book, and i thought, "oh, i don't think i'm going to be orthodox any more." yeah, the book, it became a very successful film as well, also called disobedience. many people probably will have seen it or read about it. and ijust wonder the degree to which one of the two central characters, because it involves two young women who actually were brought up together in, as it happens, a north london jewish community. in hendon, where i grew up. yeah, as it happens — and they clearly, as teenagers, had a love affair. indeed, it was a physical, a sexual love affair. but then one of them, ronit, made a life far away from that community. she was a creative, she went to new york city, she was a photographer. the other, her former lover/friend,

esti, stayed at home. ronit comes back because her father has died, a rabbi. and the question is, will they rekindle that love affair? was there a lot of you in ronit? there's a lot of me in both of them. if you're going to say to me, "well, did you ever "have an affair with a rabbi's daughter?" no, i never did have an affair with a rabbi's daughter when i was living in hendon. i wasn't going to be quite that literal. but, certainly, yes, there's a lot of me in ronit and there's a lot of me in esti. when i was writing the book, i was still religious, so in a sense, it was... and very observant, is what i mean. i was observing the sabbath, i was keeping all the kosherfood laws. you use this word frum, which is the word... i guess, it's originally, what, a yiddish word... a yiddish word, yes. ..which describes the classic observant look and behaviour. and for the women who are frum, many of them choose to wear a wig in public. right, yes, you do that if you're married. you wouldn't do that if you were single. but, yes, i think it was a conversation with myself

in many ways, that book, was to think, "what will that life be like if i cease to be orthodox? what will i miss? what will be the freedoms?" i was trying to imagine it. i got it quite right, actually. ronit was my fantasy. she was as if i had hurled a version of myself into the future and then went racing after it. at that time, i was esti. it just strikes me that there's a great deal of honesty in all of your work. we're going to get to your later work in just a moment. but throughout your work, there is this sort of searing determination to tell the truth about yourself and the world around you. and i just wonder whether, you know, as you reflect on all of the stuff you've done, whether you feel that has sometimes got you into trouble and caused you a lot of pain. oh, it's never as much pain to tell the truth as it is to keep on lying. the greatest freedom in the world is to be able to say exactly who you are and exactly what you think. you know, some of my later work has dealt with feminist themes and...

i have in the past had, for example, people saying to me, "oh, how can you write these things about saudi arabia?" where i criticise the saudi arabian government's treatment of women in my novel the power. and i think, well, if you are living in a country where you don't have to have a male guardian whose permission you need to go travelling, then, actually, as a woman you have a sort of duty to talk about the women who are living less free lives than that — not to rose—tint it, not to go along with the sort of, "oh, well, you know, what can you expect?", but to say, "this is the truth, this is what's happening." the power's a fascinating book because, it seems to me, it introduces your love of science fiction and melds that with another thing that runs through your creative life, which is a deep knowledge of classical stories, of the bible, of history.

and you kind of meld this sort of futurology with this deep knowledge of the past. and in the power, you apply it to a sort of fantasy story which posits the notion that girls, young women, acquire this special power to conduct electricity, and suddenly the entire world is flipped. well, we all have the power to conduct electricity — that's what will kill you if you get struck by lightning. they have the power to generate electricity. very good point. a technical point, but a very important one. and the point then, when girls and women develop this power, is that they can completely shift the power dynamic in society. what is generally a patriarchal, man—led world suddenly becomes open to the imposition of powerfrom women. right, yes — it was, in some ways, inspired by a conversation with a male friend, who said to me, "oh, no, women arejust nicer." and i kept saying, "no, it'sjust that women are less physically strong." and he said, "well, what's the difference?

if you're less physically strong and that means you're less aggressive, thatjust means you're nicer." and i was like, "let me show you what the difference is." so in the novel the power, women essentially become on average more capable of doing physical violence than men. that's really the distinction. notjust capable, but they do it. oh, they certainly do. well, so, we have to ask ourselves, do we think that women get into fewer fights because women are "just nicer"? or do we potentially think that it's because women are making a judgment call and going, "ah, i'm not going to do well if there is a physical fight here?" see, what's fascinating is that the book came out actually just a year or two before the world was swept by the #metoo movement when the revelations about harvey weinstein and others and their behaviour in hollywood caused revulsion, certainly in the western world, all of these men acting with such abusive, entitled power toward women. yes, i don't think it was news

to a lot of women that men were doing that. i think people talk about these whisper networks. i think that there had been, for a long time, women saying to one another, "watch out for him. don't be in a taxi alone with him, don't go up to his hotel room," etc, etc, so... based on what you've just said to me, i'm thinking maybe you, naomi alderman, believe that if the power dynamic were different, the physical power dynamic were different, women would bejust as capable of that level of systemic, abusive behaviour as men. do you believe that? of course i do. i don't think that there exists such a thing as a group of people who are immune from doing wrong things. most men are very nice and most women are very nice. but within both of those groups, all groups, there are always a few people who will mess it up for everybody else. so you can't go around saying... you know, to me, it is not feminism to say all women are lovely and all men are terrible.

that's just... i mean, also, it's a fantasy. you know, in other countries, particularly in america, people say, "oh, wouldn't a woman presidentjust be kinder and more loving?", and so on. and then i say, "well, i grew up in the uk under margaret thatcher. do me a favour." you know, in this country, she certainly had the reputation of... you know, she was a hard talker, actually, and somebody who made, yeah, made a reputation as a tough person. a few years back, we had margaret atwood on this programme, the canadian novelist who has had enormous success, most particularly — for many people — with the handmaid's tale and her creation of this dystopian world, gilead, where men are totally in control, women are subjugated and are, frankly, little more than vessels for reproduction. i know you've worked with margaret. i have. and i just wonder whether she and you took enormous pleasure from creating your world, where everything is reversed

and women are capable of that level of subjugation of men. right, so i had the great fortune to be paired with margaret for a year's mentorship programme by rolex, the watch people. and, you know, those things don't always work, but in our case, we're still friends more than a decade later. and we have great conversations. and one of the conversations that we had very early on was that thought, "are women nicer than men?" and i think we both have encountered in our lives really nice women and also really horrible women. and i suspect that anybody watching this programme, if they say to themselves, "can you think of any horrible women who you would not like to have the ability to electrocute people?", because you think they would not use that well, i think we can all probably bring somebody to mind. so, yes. there is also this cultural conditioning, all that sort of thing, but, fundamentally, yeah... ok, i want to carry that thought, then, through to the latest book you've written, the latest novel, the future, which addresses the power

that the tech titans have in our world today. now, yours are fictional tech titans. two of the most prominent are men. and if one looks at the real world — and, of course, the real world does matter to you because it's your source material — pretty much all of the biggest tech titans who play such an influential role in the world are men. do you think that is relevant to the way they behave? do i think it's...? i mean, it depends what you're asking me. if you're saying to me, do i think testosterone causes that? no — do i think that the world as it exists thinks that people who are taller... this is true — people who are taller earn more, whether you're a man or a woman. so that's just because of what we value. so, do i think that men are more likely to be able to get their tech start—ups funded? yes, i do. do i think that they are more likely to be left in charge of their companies? yes, i do. i mean, you don't use

the names zuckerberg, musk... i don't want them to sue me! you don't want them to — but clearly, loosely, the characters you create are based on some of the things that they have done and possibly may do in the future. i mean, you know, i did have a good time writing this book, and i hope the readers have a good time reading it. in many ways, you can't come up with anything better than the truth, which is... i never thought to put in that mark zuckerberg and elon musk would challenge each other to a cage fight, but that has really happened. so, i wish i had thought of that. but, yes. i mean, in a sort of example of fact and fiction eliding, mark zuckerberg reported by wired magazine to be spending many, many tens of millions of dollars building a sort of apocalypse—proof bunker in an island in hawaii. yes, in hawaii, i believe, yes. now, this entire story of yours is premised on the notion that these most powerful global tech billionaires get information that the end of the world is coming. and they all make their plans to build a safe space for themselves, to survive

while everybody else dies. mm—hm. yeah, they're all planning that, yeah. what, actually, is going on here, do you think? is it some sort of determination that the richest, most powerful men in the world want to sort of find a way to cheat death? i mean, that certainly... i do think that science fiction writers have to hold their hands up here and say that, "look, technology billionaires have become arguably some of, if not the most, powerful people in the world very, very quickly." do you see them as dangerous? yes, i do, yes — at least, i would say, anybody in this position would be dangerous. this is the point and this is also the point about my novel the power, which is once people have power, there is a syndrome of power toxicity. you become less and less able to even hearfrom people who disagree with you, much less to be able to understand in the round that you might not be the right person to deal with all of the problems

confronting you. you become more and more able to shape the world around you, such that you're not having to listen to that, and you start making worse and worse decisions. so there's a brilliant book which i'm sure you know, robert caro�*s book the power broker, about robert moses, the great architect of new york city. and this is his trajectory. he starts out in the 1930s as an idealistic young man who wants to put baby changing shelters into central park. and by the end, he's demolishing communities of black and hispanic people whilst rooting his road around the house of his friends. so that's how that works, you just... the more power you get, the more people are attracted to you who want to use that power. so, i don't think i would be better if i had the power that mark zuckerberg or elon musk has. i don't think you would be better, or anybody watching the programme. i think that we need to think about how we're going to introduce term limits, checks and balances,

breaking up the companies through competition laws in order to be able for them to not have that concentration of power. there is, then, an ambiguity to your message about technology, because on one level, you clearly love technology. i do. you've made plenty of money out of computer games in your past... in my present. and your present. and you're a bit of a geek, if i may say so. i am, i love a bit of doctor who — wrote a doctor who novel. did you? yeah. and so...come clean with me. do you think technology, in the end, is a huge net positive for humanity or not? all right. let's take an example of technology — for example, a knife. you can use a knife to cut up a salad, to carve a lovely wooden carving or to stab somebody in the chest. so, is a knife a net positive or a net negative? and you would say the same of ai, would you? imean, yeah. it's just a tool and, really, all that matters is us humans and the motivations we have when we use that tool? the difficulty with al is that we're starting to relate to it or it encourages us to relate to it as if it's a person. it's not a person.

it's a large language model is what we've got right now. it's a very sophisticated form of autocorrect, which we've all been using for years, or autotype... well, hang on, it can be much more than that in the future, can't it? i mean, as soon as you apply the word "generative" to it, it is getting a degree of autonomy that it's never had before. and autonomy is surely the key to a potentially dystopian future where machines are doing stuff that we certainly didn't tell them to do. i mean, only if we decide we want that future. i think there's a lot of science fiction in there. i mean, you're not going to tell me that you think that these machines are conscious, that they're sitting around thinking thoughts about us when we're not there. somebody said to me, "oh, but i relate to my phone as if it's a person." i'm like, "yes, but your phone doesn't relate to you in that way." the phone isjust a... it's a tool, it's a very sophisticated tool. it's like the sat nav that... you know, that's marvellous if you can't find your way somewhere — incredible, so useful. and don't follow it if it tells you to drive into a lake.

so, as long as we don't put them in charge of our lives, we're going to be fine, we can use them, they'll be lovely. at the point that we start to think, "oh, they can reason better than we can," which they cannot, let me tell you... so, this is a sort of end—of—days novel, but you don't think the end of days are upon us? i mean, the end of days in some level are always upon us. i don't mean completely literally. i'm not expecting you to tell me, "yeah, armageddon is coming in three weeks�* time." but there are many people who have a very bleak perspective on where humanity is going. all right, yes. i'm just trying to tease out whether you do or not. we're never doomed. you know, there are always things we can do. we should definitely not be putting ai in charge of whether or not we launch nuclear missiles. i would say that very clearly. we can use... you know, it's brilliant to use your software for accounting, but we must not put it in charge of life—and—death, or even livelihood, situations. unfortunately, we do seem to feel that we would like to do that. so, is the future

going to be terrible? this is what the book is about. it is, and it's about, if i may say so, i mean, having read it, it's about whether human beings are going to step up to the plate and find their better selves and do the work to actually improve the situation on our fragile planet. yes, it's a book about the things we would have to do to improve it, which is all possible. so the technologies exist for us to, for example, regrow the coral reefs. the possibilities exist for us to now take extremely seriously climate change and to really mitigate that as much as we can. the question is whether we're going to. i want to ask you before we end about something in the real world which is more pressing and more dominant in the news headlines day by day, which i know is something you think about. you've described your devastation at the violence we've seen over the last three months in israel and in gaza. now, you, of course, are from a jewish community in north london, but i know you have family who serve in the idf in israel.

and i'm just wondering, as a novelist, with a novelist�*s eye which you bring to futurology, you bring to technology, you bring to religion, you bring to a discussion of all sorts of things in the real world, with a novelist�*s eye, do you see this room for hope, for the better human self coming forward in the middle east? all right, there's always room for hope. i think, if you wanted my deep analysis of this, we would need not just 25 minutes, but at least 25 hours to talk about it. i think the situation is awful, it'sjust... there is no moral position to take up other than to just grieve that this is what's happening. do you think the people you see are able to grieve for the loss and the pain on both sides? well, certainly, i grieve for the loss and pain on both sides every day. i think if you're in a position

where your children are being killed or kidnapped, i think it is very, very difficult to even physically downregulate to the point that you can think coherently. and, you know, i don'tjudge anybody who is speaking from pain or not able to necessarily think as they might otherwise think about these things. i said at the very beginning that sometimes talented writers of fiction can reveal a truth, find a clarity, that those of us who deal in sort of news, information, facts, evidence can't always find. do you sometimes look at a human conflict like that and think, you know, "i'd like to bring my novelist�*s sensibility to it, i could do something with that, maybe find a pathway to a truth there?" i do sometimes think about that, and certainly it's in my mind to write something... you know, i always try and find

a different way into a subject. ithink... god knows that the situation in the middle east is... you know, there is no other place in the world which has so many sacred sites in such a tiny area. i think that is always going to be extraordinarily difficult. but, yeah, it's something that i would like to think about and maybe write about. in terms of hope, i mean... look, this is a terrible kind of hope, but it is nice, which is my lockdown project was that i studied arabic, and i'm already quite a fluent hebrew speaker, and it is devastating how similar arabic and hebrew are — to the point that as a hebrew speaker, the grammatical structures are the same, people who know either arabic or hebrew, if i say that the verbs take a pa'alform, or in arabic, fa'al, and the way that the tenses

are conjugated is the same. there's a commonality there. about a third of the vocabulary is the same. so that is heartbreaking and devastating, and yet somehow must remain hopeful. it's a very powerful metaphor. ijust want to end this conversation taking you back to the beginning — we talked about how you had to leave your own community to find your true voice. i just wonder whether that... you know, now thinking about change and whether people and communities can change, has your community changed sufficiently that you are now able to go back and be at ease in that community which you left? right, well, iwill tell you a lovely story from the community that i come from, which is a friend recently showed me photos from an engagement party that she had been to in the modern orthodox, but in the orthodox community, which was an engagement party between two young women. and this would not have been possible when i was growing up. absolutely not. and to the extent that my work is part of a movement that has made that happen, i cannot but be hopeful. naomi alderman, it's been a pleasure

having you on hardtalk. thank you very much. thank you. hello there. sunshine was a scarce commodity across the uk on wednesday — but we had most of it in eastern scotland, with just over four hours of sunshine in edinburgh. however, the rest of us, rather cloudy, gray and at times wet — but it was mild with it. however, as the rain continues to push south and east, the wind direction is changing. we'll see a return to some colder air across our shores. so thursday will start off mild but wet across southeast england and east anglia. quite a lot of cloud generally

across england and wales, with the best of any brighter skies into northern ireland, scotland — northwest scotland seeing a real rash of showers, accompanied by gale—force gusts of winds through the day. it will start to turn colder generally across scotland, 6—9 celsius, maybe double digits for a time before that front clears through in the southeast. but, as we move out of thursday into friday, we see this next frontal system moving in — and, as temperatures fall away through the night, bumping into that colder air which is sitting in place across the country, yes, we could see a return to some wintriness. it'll going to be across higher ground — generally temperatures will be sitting around freezing first thing on friday morning, perhaps below in eastern scotland. but there'll be a risk of some snow above 200 metres in northern ireland, scottish borders, across the pennines, and into north wales. we could see a few centimetres accumulating, so that might cause some minor disruption, but it will be rain elsewhere. so you can see, circulating around that low pressure, is that frontal system — and it will bring some sunny spells and scattered showers,

a mixture of rain, sleet and snow at times across wales and southwest england, perhaps drier into the far north of scotland. but temperatures a little bit down — 6—9 celsius. don't forget, friday is the first day of march, so these values just below par for this time of year. then, as we move into the start of the weekend, we maintain the sunny spells and scattered showers — and the wind direction still coming from the north, so it will feel quite cold, and we could still have a wintry flavour with any elevation. so again, 6—7 celsius the expected high. but as we move out of saturday into sunday, we see another frontal system bringing a spell of more organised rain for a time — again, on the leading edge, there could be some wintry showers — but it will be rain eventually as that front moves through. so the weekend will stay pretty unsettled for most of us. take care.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm mariko oi. the headlines. the us supreme court will decide whether donald trump has immunity over election subversion claims. the widow of alexei navalny tells the european parliament that vladimir putin is a �*mobster�*

whose �*gangsters�* killed her husband. the red bull formula one team boss christian horner, has been cleared, after an allegation of "inappropriate behaviour" by a female colleague. thousands of residents have been forced to leave their homes in texas, where wildfires have been burning out of control. hello and thank you for being with us. we begin in the united states with some breaking news. the supreme court has agreed to decide if donald trump has immunity from prosecution on election interference charges. the charges involve mr trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

but the supreme court's decision to take up