It’s nice to see a big time publisher, actually, the biggest of the big time publishers, taking a little bit of the money they carpet the floor and paint the walls with and toss it behind a piece of speculative fiction, and I mean that in with every possible compliment in mind. ‘The Futurist’ is the fantastic debut novel from the massive talent, James P. Othmer.
There are parts of this story that directly reflect Jonathan Franzen’s masterpiece, ‘The Corrections’. I’d go on about that book, but I’ve made that case enough times already. Franzen would be proud to read Othmer’s views on the future, culturally significant and relevant in their predictions. But ultimately Kurt Andersen and ‘Turn of the Century’ are the models for this book. Andersen took his story of the lonely genius trapped by his own wit and boy wonder powers to incredible heights of glory (everyone missed that book). But to say ‘The Futurist’ sounds and looks like these two books would be doing it a disservice. It’s an incredibly original and highly readable story about the zeitgeist in us all. We meet a cinematically likeable main character, flawed, hampered by his own intelligence and his extreme wit who’s a globe trotting expert in everything that’s about to happen.
Meet the Futurist. His name is Yates.
And it’s safe to say that this book will kick your ass.
Yates predicts the future of society: the cultural trends, the lifestyles, and people pay him to do this. He gets this information not from a computer program he’s created, or from a crystal ball, but from his own cynical and highly immoral mind, albeit an oddly repressed mind. He just looks around and makes snap judgments on what he sees. Simple when you think about it. He’s paid ridiculous sums of money from equally ridiculous but colorful characters that Othmer has peppered along Yates’ path as he bounces carefully from one global hot spot to the other.
Yates is likeable but only in an envious fashion; he’s taking advantage of the banal stupidity that permeates the world. Yates predicts that people will be traveling to space, to live, vacation, etc., and then suddenly the Russians decide that it seems completely plausible to do just that. The spine of this story revolves around a doomed space station that Yates feels directly responsible for, which echoes Yates and his human side.
As the story starts, his girlfriend has just left him for a history teacher, forgetting of course that Yates doesn’t believe in history, he only knows the future. He’s not interested in what’s happened, only what will happen. In Johannesburg, he witnesses a bloody riot at a football match which sets him off on a Jerry McGuire-like tantrum that causes the opposite effect, making him even more popular for telling the king he has no clothes on. He’s in town to be apart of something called Futureworld… it’s a conference of people trying to predict of all things… the future.
From here we dip into one of the more incisively brilliant sections of this book. I need to direct your attention to page 60, the last paragraph of the chapter (too long to reprint here) and what could possibly be the most ‘right-on telling’ of our society, right now. Yates has a Bill Gates-like friend who lives in Greenland and is fantastically rich. So rich that he makes Bill Gates look like, well, like someone who’s making minimum wage by comparison. Campbell is his name and his viewpoints on fantastic wealth – and how it really hampers you, and you’re never given any idea of what to do with yourself once you become wealthy – are used as a mirror for a malady that many people suffer from, and that is anticipation. (Don Draper said it best, “Our greatest fears lie in anticipation.”) You’ve looked forward to something for so long that you forget how good it is when it’s finally arrived because you’re looking forward to something else, so the thing you’re doing now and its emotional value have deserted you. (Jim, you’ve nailed my personality…) Othmer manages to toggle between Campbell, Yates, and the simplistic materialism that has destroyed the society we all live in. Dare I say this isn’t even the finest section of the book. Milan. How the section in Milan soars, and the Fiji chapter: the waves, the surfing, the sacrificing of the virgin… It’s all here, every portion of the human condition: wealth, greed, ego, religion, science and its failures, human or accidental in nature. The Futurist, I mean, Yates… is a man on a mission. Of course it wouldn’t be a mission without a Deep Throat to inspire/threaten him, but I’ll leave that treasure for you to find. I wouldn’t want to spoil the future.
-JR
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