It’s well known by now that the super-wealthy are planning for the apocalypse. Whether they’re buying luxury bunkers or island nations, it’s clear that billionaires are preparing for the end of days with lavish and secure spaces where they hope to ride out whatever catastrophe might strike humanity next. Beginning Naomi Alderman’s new book, “The Future,” you’d be forgiven for thinking that its main subjects are exactly such billionaires, as the first three chapters describe mega-wealthy tech giants Lenk Sketlish, Zimri Nommik and Ellen Bywater, each learning that it’s time to run to their refuges of choice. But the novel is not really about them, and thank goodness for that; it would be hard, I suspect, for many readers to sustain interest in the richest people on Earth living easy while the rest of humanity struggled.

The plot of “The Future” really focuses on the events leading up to the billionaires receiving notice that the end is nigh. Alderman’s fifth novel closely follows two very different sorts of survivalists: Martha Einkorn, raised in a cult she escaped from, now a personal assistant to Sketlish; and Lai Zhen, a former refugee and “a Top Fifty Creator on the Name The Day forum and ranked number one for expertise in technological survival” — which is to say, a survivalist influencer (this is already a real thing).

We learn of Martha in the first chapter, but we meet Zhen several months before the billionaires are forewarned. She’s at the Seasons Time Mall in Singapore, the biggest retail experience in the world, where she suddenly needs to go into true survival mode because she’s just been shot at by what she’ll deduce is an Enochite extremist. The Enochites, coincidentally, are the cult from which Martha escaped — in fact, she is the leader Enoch’s daughter.

“The Enochites,” Zhen recalls, “thought the end of days was coming soon. They were gathering evidence, piecing together prophecies with current events, matching one thing with another.” Since Zhen teaches people to survive — rather than wait for God to decide who lives or dies — and since she’s very visible on Name the Day (a survivalist forum the Enochites organize on), it’s not inconceivable that she would become a target. What’s far more mysterious is why her wearable smart device has a program on it called AUGR, which helps her neutralize her would-be-assassin.