Download The Futurist AudioBook Free
Yates is a Futurist. Which is to state he makes a good living flying round the world dispensing premonitory wisdom, aka prepackaged bull, to world governments, corporations, and global leadership conferences. He's an optimist by trade and a cynic by choice. He's the type of man who can give a lecture on successive days to a respected pesticide manufacturer and the Organic Farmers of America, and receive standing ovations at both. But just as the American Empire is starting to fray round the edges, so too is Yates's carefully scripted existence. On the path to the Futureworld Conference in Johannesburg, he opens a handwritten note from his girlfriend, saying she's left him for a sixth-grade history teacher. Then he witnesses a soccer riot in which a variety of South Africans are killed, to the chagrin of the South African PR people at Futureworld. Sparked with a heroic devastation of his minibar and inspired by the rookie hooker delivered to his accommodation thanks to his hosts, Yates gives a spectacularly career-ending speech at Futureworld, which contributes to a sound beating, a meeting with some quasi-governmental creeps, and a hazy mission to go around the world answering the question: Why does everyone hate us? Thus starts an absolutely original novel that is fueled by equal parts subversive satire, genuine physical fear, and heartfelt moral anguish. From your hideously ugly Greenlander nymphomaniacal artist to the gay male model spy to the British corporate magnate with a taste for South Pacific virgin sacrifice rituals, The Futurist manages to be wildly entertaining and deadly serious at exactly the same time.
