Friday, August 19, 2011

The Future, According to Rob Kutner


Rob Kutner is sort of like Ray Kurtzweil on crack. Kutner is a writer for TBS’ Conan and the author of the satirical end-of-times bestseller Apocalypse How: Turn the End Times into the Best of Times! He has also written for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, won four Emmies writing for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”, and contributed to its bestseller, America (The Book). Other writing includes HBO’s “Dennis Miller Live,” as well as humor and feature pieces for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, and Maxim.

His new book, The Future According to Me, a collection of 35 short comic scenarios of what our future might look like -- touching on everything from nanotechnology to existentially self-aware Smart Toilets to the upcoming Chocolate Famine.

The breezy book is full of great humor and wry comic observations that any sci-fi geek would greatly enjoy geeking out on.

In Rob Kutner’s future, peace will be achieved in the middle east thanks to quantum physics. You can live forever, as long as you can deal with baby boomers who keep hanging on. You will prepare for the invasion of the Xoxians. Learn how to eat artificial lab grown meat, before the meat gets uppity. Watch out as nanotechnology grey goo takes over, in unexpected ways. All in all the future is so bright, you have to read this book.

Get it at Amazon.com for the amazing low price of 99 cents. (You don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle books, just download the Kindle app for your Mac, iPad, iPhone, PC, or other device.)

Read a few excerpts from the book here and here and here.

And check out this review from the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

And in our Sitrep archives, be sure to read my colleague ProgGrrl's Battlestar Galactica discussion with Rob Kutner and John Hodgman from 2009.