The Future and Why We Should Avoid It
Killer Robots, the Apocalypse and Other Topics of Mild Concern
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The future holds many unknowns: advances in medical technology, increased airport security and critical new inventions like sentient, polygraph-enabled, wireless toasters. Luckily, Maclean’s columnist Scott Feschuk has written a survival guide—part how-to manual, part product guide, part apocalypse analysis and part sardonic observation—to help us navigate these troubled times. Or at least make us laugh while we try. The Future and Why We Should Avoid It envisions the daunting, depressing era we have to look forward to with the best of Feschuk’s musings on aging, death, technology, inventions, health and leisure. Combining quizzes, voiceovers and speeches, and employing snark, innuendo, toilet humor and shameless mockery—because how else do you cope with the fact that one day you will die?—Feschuk contemplates the fate of humanity and the planet in the upcoming years, poking fun, provoking thought and dredging up silver linings in even the darkest forecasts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This scattershot stand-up routine in book form runs out of comedy gold well before it finishes. The occasionally funny but repetitive material covers the human and especially capitalist propensity to waste efforts on trivial matters (such as developing "427 different Coke products") and to prioritize all the wrong things. Magazine columnist and author Feschuk (Searching for Michael Jackson's Nose) looks at politics, aging, science, entertainment, and killer robots. He habitually riffs on events from the recent past, to dubious effect in a book purportedly about the future. He devotes jokey pages to parodying classic movies if they had been scripted by George Lucas, men's midlife crises, the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama's 2009 visit to Canada, a Canadian version of Fifty Shades (of Eh), hockey parents, and the nation's winter despair; and he's deeply fond of shopworn cracks about American celebrities like Tiger Woods, Kirstie Alley, and Donald Trump. As a comedian, the author's motto seems to be "Try everything and see what sticks." It's a questionable tactic that leads to clever bits interspersed with stale leftovers.
