The Futurist ****
By James P. Othmer
Protagonist Yates is a futurist, once full of the youthful optimism that earned him a rep as a motivational speaker with profitable companies. As maturity tempered his optimism, the rah-rah messages became more cautious, thought-provoking. And nothing kills a motivational gig like navel gazing.
Yates’ engagements dwindle. Money dwindles. So as the book opens, Yates is back to the rah-rah, now a pastiche of stolen ideas and embroidered anecdotes that make the companies happy and himself miserable.
In an alcohol-fueled moment of truth, Yates reveals himself as the charlatan he is at a big futuristic do in South Africa.
"The Futurist" is a novel of ideas-or at least an exploration of what we know, or what we invent, and to what ends we manipulate the present to create the future we want. We want, goes the book's main theme, to know what, when and where, but we really don't care about why. Which, of course, is the most important question of all. The book is also full of wonderful shady characters, like the Johnson brothers, whose affiliations are murky and who are part of a vast conspiratorial web of indeterminate shape and texture in which Yates is trapped.
**SPOILER** The irony of the book's ending is as frustrating as it is ironic; Othmer forces the reader to speculate about Yates' future, to become a futurist, even as Yates himself has made speculating about the future his career.
It seems none of us, not even the omniscient narrator and author, really knows what will happen next.
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