The just-released sci-fi thriller novel “The Natural Order” features a trillionaire tech genius who’s invented a system that, in theory, lets him live forever. Plenty of people and organizations hate the idea, and they’re looking to take him out before his secret becomes publicly available.
Author Matthew Aldrich is originally a screenwriter who’s trying his hand at novels. He cowrote Pixar’s “Coco,” which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and shares a writing credit on “Lightyear.”
“The Natural Order” is his debut novel, and it generated a fair bit of buzz before the general public could read it. Atria Books published it on Oct. 27, but Universal Pictures bought the project in March 2025 with director Barry Jenkins and actor Glen Powell attached.
Obviously, there are many who think this is a novel of considerable merit. Does it hold up?
Battle of the Ages
Paul Whitmore, said trillionaire at the center of the story, has spent his life trying to eliminate aging after watching his father die of cancer at 61. The result is “The Method,” a regimen of exercise, meditation, and a proprietary cocktail of synthesized nutrients that seems to work. The story is set in 2071, decades after Paul first announced the Method to the world. He’s now 122, with the health and looks of a man less than half his age.
He isn’t an immortal, though. He can still catch diseases, so he avoids sick people and lives in near isolation in a fortified California compound. The house holds few possessions and features sparse decor. There are no photos or anything else to suggest a family or any attachments.
His only close companions are Benji, his security chief and a precise former counterterrorism operative, and Celeste, an almost-human AI bot who runs the house and his schedule.
Paul is nearing the so-called Golden Day, when he’ll pass the previous record of the longest-lived person in recorded history at 122 years and 164 days old.
Ironically, even with his money and his longevity, his life isn’t his own. He’s turned himself into the company’s product, and he has to keep proving that it works by continuing to live. Then, Benji receives a credible threat to Paul from a terrorist group, which demands: “Repent! or his child will die.”
As far as Benji knows, his boss has no children. It seems that Paul has been keeping secrets.
Divisive Tropes
This is an intriguing concept, but it’s hampered by serious pandering to one side of the political spectrum. First, it features yet another flooded world, a trope seen too often in near-future sci-fi. Modern publishing houses seem unable to picture an Earth that hasn’t ended in climate catastrophe. One has to wonder what a constant stream of this nihilistic vision does to the hopes and dreams of younger generations.
Bashing the ultra-rich is another trendy punching bag, along with the ubiquitous righteous female character, who thinks it grotesque “to see the world bend to the wills of men like Whitmore.”
The main antagonist is a terrorist group named—cue sinister music—Natural Order. They’re born of a “white nationalist” movement of the 2010s, “when the perfect storm of economic stagnation, rampant drug addiction, and a Black man in the White House had driven many American whites to wrap themselves in the flag, and Kevlar.”
Its QAnon-esque philosophy is an illogical, farcical hodgepodge of tropes. Members are fervently anti-industrial (think Amish with a heavy cult flavor). Meanwhile, they keep a strong online presence and favor assault weapons, which they fire at scarecrows painted black with tar. How subtle.
They also use meth to train guerrilla fighters, because everybody knows strung-out junkies make notoriously effective militia.
The Logic?
This group is the explicit reason Paul has been forbidden to fly. So why has his head of security never read more than an FBI abstract on it? Natural Order is willing to spend millions in revenue and resources, plus risk its entire community, to get at Paul. Why? Their meager explanation is that he offends God. The group’s slogan is “Death to the man who takes more than his share.”
Most of the book shows that Aldrich is falling prey to the shallow concept that garishness equals edginess (tar-coated scarecrows) and that emotional turmoil beats intelligent exploration.
A premise like biohacking to achieve immortality has a lot of philosophical potential. What’s a life worth when it has no natural end, and what does a man owe the people he’s outlived?
The story does engage with some of these ideas, but Aldrich’s screenwriter instincts ultimately overwhelm the book. Much of the writing wastes time on cliched action sequences. These don’t always obey the laws of physics. Emotional introspection is indulgently cinematic without moving the plot very much.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Universal bought “The Natural Order” months before the Leonardo DiCaprio film “One Battle After Another” reached theaters. That film, which was predicted to be the biggest success story of the year, also paired a bleak vision of America with a fight against white nationalists.
It, however, flopped hard at the box office. Buyer’s regret, anyone?
‘The Natural Order: A Novel’
By Matthew Aldrich
Atria Books: Oct. 27, 2026
Hardcover, 352 pages
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