iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

And very seriously, other than getting blocked, what is it that you hope this question will achieve? Are you thinking that I have maybe not understood the climate crisis? or are you saying that I am insufficiently expert in recognising anti-Semitism? Or are you just enjoying trying to start a row?

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

but instead we have this absolute shower about whom the question we need to ask is "wait, so are you *antisemites* or are you *complete fucking morons*? Or is it perhaps both?"

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

this. this is the feeling. the climate is the pressing issue of our era! do you remember when it got to 40C in London this summer?! it's somehow a beautiful summer afternoon out there in early October right now! we do need this to be taken seriously politically!

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

look I know this isn't perhaps the whole story but I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion today that the explanation for most of what they do is "they are a bunch of absolute fucking idiots"?

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

so, essentially, according to party policies and/or the statements of a load of their members, the positions now are: - vote Reform if you're right wing and hate Jews - vote Green if you're left wing and hate Jews - if you don't hate Jews, you're back to Tory, Labour and maybe the LibDems

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

as a Jewish person in the UK who eg belongs to a synagogue I am *quite* angry about a major British political party having declared yesterday that I'm a racist, yes.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

and if we're going to make the UK's official policy "one Palestinian state" (rather than: 'people in Israel and Palestine need to engage in a process to figure out the best way for them')... we could ask France how arming the Hutus against the Tutsis worked out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_...

en.wikipedia.org

France and the Rwandan genocide - Wikipedia

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

but yes I think it is a real fucking shame that a party that I agree with on the environment, on migration and on trans inclusion has decided to redefine itself mostly as a party for people who don't like Jews

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I don't think in the UK it is the one party that wants to take climate change seriously?

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

it is amazing. anyone who votes Green now will have to have a think about how this will come across to any Jewish friends they happen to have. and just having to ask yourself that question about a political party...

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

oh no but everything is specially evil when Jews do it.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

but I mean in a sense I suppose it's good for the stability of the UK that both the extreme right wing party Reform and the extreme left wing party the Greens have looked at their best chance for serious electoral wins ever and both seem so utterly determined to shoot themselves in the feet.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

one million, million percent. the current Israeli government are a disgrace to Judaism around the world, they have taken the most appalling extreme fringe elements of a millennia-old tradition of tolerance, generosity and education and used them to enact their horrific racism. there you go.

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Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This should be enough to sell The Strangers to you, as it has to me.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

And we can only imagine aliens (or etc) behaving just like the worst humans - because War of the Worlds is specifically based on what the British did in Tasmania, and that book is about ordinary powerlessness in the face of the horror of that invasion. But what if they were a bit kinder than us?

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I have a TERRIBLE, almost unforgiveable desire to try to explain my books as I'm writing them which as I get older I am painfully learning to rein back. But nonetheless. Yes. It's a book about how an alien (or etc) invasion would really feel if you really lived through it. You would not be the hero.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

reviewed by the brilliant @abigailnussbaum.bsky.social in Locus Magazine this month and look, it's terribly wrong to say something like "oh *thank goodness*, this very experienced SF reviewer has understood what I was going for on the SF side of the story" but this is 100% what I was going for.

Later, when Naomi shows this data to scientists
and other government figures, they insist that it is
inconclusive. Frinton appears several more times,
in each seemingly possessed of more authority but
also more mentally scattered. As someone who has
experienced a series of miscarriages and who is
slowly coming to terms with the fact that she will
probably never have children, Naomi admits that the
allegation that the mimmoths are causing infertility
seems designed to cut to her core. At the same time,
as a person without access to definitive information
or the ability to assess it, the only possible response
she can have to Frinton’s claims is a blank shrug.
This, The Strangers seems to be saying, is how
most of us would experience an alien invasion. It
is how we currently experience war, climate crisis,
and the breakdown of our institutions. Decisions
are made by people far above us, and we sometimes
only become aware of them when the ripple effects
touch our lives – when our mother’s medical care
isn’t what we’d been raised to expect, or when an
animal no one has seen before shows up on our
wildlife camera.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

It would not be great to rerun this and for it to come out 48:52 in favour of staying out again. I think most rejoiners have literally no idea how to speak to the people who are pleased we're out now and want to stay out. We just think they're morons.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

The problem with democracy. Well, one of the many problems. Is that you are going to have to convince people who are convinced by very different sorts of things to the things that convince you. The argument must be emotional, but it cannot be “we made a terrible mistake.“

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

This is true, I'm afraid. I am obviously a rejoiner, but I struggle to imagine how to persuade someone who isn't already persuaded. All I have is that patronising "Well, just look at the results, just look at them!" Which doesn't make friends or make people feel you understand their concerns

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Jane Hill @janehill.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Naomi Alderman’s new book The Strangers is an absolute knockout. An autofiction about her mother’s death and multiple pregnancy loss, framed by a sci-fi novel about the arrival of mysterious creatures called mimmoths. Aren’t we lucky to have Naomi Alderman?

The cover of The Strangers by Naomi Alderman. A series of neat suburban back gardens, and underneath there’s an eerie root system.

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leupagus @leupagus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Over the past ten years, as the US has slid further and further into chaos and hatred, a story about people in much worse circumstances who still love each other and work to help not just themselves but complete strangers—even enemies—was a welcome relief from reality.

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leupagus @leupagus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

GET ON THIS GUYS. I just checked and a standard one-year subscription in $50 which may be a reach, totally get it; if you want to try a 6-month subscription it's only $30 and you can see if it's a good fit. (Alternatively, hmu and I'll send you a gift sub for 6 months.)

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Also, this epilogue mission literally stars me because I have become that person. 😬😬😬😬

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Very validating that you remember it that way too! Given what I’ve managed to do in tech without having a community of like-minded enthusiasts as a young person, I do sometimes wonder what I might have achieved with.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

my first week at Oxford, I went to the college computer room. Because I had taught myself BASIC when I was 10 years old. I wanted IT friends, ppl who were also excited by tech. The computer room was full of giggling teenage boys sharing photos of boobs. I left and never came back.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

It’s October. Do you have (or think you really should have) a daylight lamp? Start turning it on EVERY MORNING WHEN YOU WAKE UP now. You don’t have to wait until you feel sad and low energy!

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

A new Magpie Murders is on iPlayer! Marble Hill Murders! Klaxon klaxon! it’s SO BLOODY GOOD, Lesley Fantastic Manville, the best best mysteries AND lots of lovely publishing gossip and the teasing sense that it could just about be a roman a cle.

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Joanne Harris @joannechocolat.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Just finished @naomialderman.bsky.social's superb new book, THE STRANGERS. Oh, my, but it packs a *hell* of a punch...

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

when I went there, I realised that I was walking around very very slowly, breathing very heavily... and that everyone else in the shop was doing the same. this was my proper realisation that there is something... intense... about it, and that I wasn't the only one.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I am so picky. I keep getting rid of items that don't *quite* cut the mustard compared to things I now have. I do regard my youthful purchasing of Mont Blanc pens as a regrettable but understandable error.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

this: youtu.be/1pT8JQvu8Uo?... the blank notebook is the skin without a biography, all potential.

youtu.be

John Berger / Ways of Seeing , Episode 4 (1972)

YouTube video by Enlight Studies

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

it's not really normal to like pens & notebooks as much as I like them I've come to the conclusion that really nice paper has something to do with 'the skin dream' John Berger talks about in Ways of Seeing. The smoothness when you run your fingers over it, how smoothly the liquid from the pen flows

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

something that is quite nice for me as I've got older is that I now have no trouble admitting that I am a real stationery pervert

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

also also! POETRY. grownup poetry not children's poetry. children respond to the rhythm and rhyme and assonance even if they don't understand the words.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

so obviously it needs to be your taste not ours, but they had a *lot* of fun reading through eg literally all of the books in the Wizard of Oz series. (there are 14.) it was something my brother was also interested in which helps cement the "this is also a thing grownups do for enjoyment"

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

my Orthodox Jewish brother, fwiw, started reading a load of Victorian science fiction to his kids on Saturday afternoons (when no one is using any electronic devices anyway) from when they were eg 1. Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Journey to the Centre of the Earth. My family's tastes.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

and keeping it short. 6pm-6.15pm everyone reads. if they can read by themselves they do that and so do you. if they need to be read to, you make that a time that you read a book to them *that you're reading* (I mean, appropriate. Probably not a modern novel.) You might only get through a paragraph.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

this is a very interesting question! I wonder whether there is something useful in making a specific time for "now we all read" and accepting that the first month might be relentlessly difficult with whiny kids and you can't actually concentrate on your book, but it's storing up future happiness?

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Stephen Dilley @stephenjdilley.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

199. The Strangers by @naomialderman.bsky.social An utterly extraordinary novel, as strange as its title suggests - exploring motherhood, grief and a bizarre new species that has appeared without explanation. One of my favourite reads of this year.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Hard disagree though. Bereishit is the best one.

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Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The amazing effect of having had so many excellent reviews for The Strangers is that now I feel that my current work in progress cannot possibly live up to it 😂😭

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Kristine Bolander @kristinebolander.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Always difficult to review Naomi Alderman. Her books are never what you expect and never like anything else. This one starts off as science fiction but becomes a memoir of profound grief- I cannot describe it- just read it. Moving and never dull- high recommend. #booksky

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