The Futurist
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- ¥1,000
発行者による作品情報
Yates is a Futurist.Which is a fancy way of saying he flies around the world, lecturing various conferences, confabs, and conglomerates, dispensing prepackaged bullshit in an attempt to stay just ahead of the latest trend and claim he saw it first. But now Yates has lost faith in the very future that he’s paid to sell and gives what should be a career-ending rant. Instead, a mysterious governmental group hires him to travel the globe and discover why the world seems to hate America. From Middle Eastern war zones to Polynesian superluxe corporate retreats, James Othmer takes us on a mordantly hilarious journey through corporate double-speak and global unrest to find the truth beneath the buzz.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As Young & Rubicam ad exec Othmer's satirical first novel opens, famed pop pundit J.P. Yates, having emptied his hotel minibar, experiences an epiphany: he's a fake. After years of peddling insights to any group willing to pay him well one week he assures a Bible college's graduates that God has a future, the next he assures adult video distributors that porn has a future he stuns attendees at a Futureworld conference in South Africa by declaring himself "founding father of the Coalition of the Clueless." Ironically, his career takes off: he's more in demand than ever and is even recruited to travel the world asking why everyone hates the U.S. Othmer takes amusing swipes at the likes of (real-life) futurist Faith Popcorn, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and billionaires Ted Turner and Bill Gates, but the real target of this blistering tale is the American government's post-9/11 arrogance, come home to roost in the fictional Middle East nation of Bas'ar, where press release cant substitutes for untenable reality. A short story excerpted from the novel was a National Magazine Award finalist; this spirited dissection of the contemporary cultural and political zeitgeist is a stylish winner in its own intelligently weird right.
