Extreme Future

Our world is constantly buffeted by new and dramatic changes we can't fully grasp. No one is fully prepared for the challenges, crises, and risks that lie ahead. The Extreme Future is a blueprint for what's next and how to navigate these changes.

The Future—as the richest people on the planet have discovered—is where the money is. The Future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers. The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons. The Future is a handful of friends—the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO and an Internet-famous survivalist—hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization.

REVELATIONS FROM THE Z’S ABOUT WHAT LIES AHEAD Humanity is facing an unprecedented phase of evolution, planetary revolution, and the acceleration of time. More and more people are seeking guidance as they wake up to a connection with something far bigger than what they were taught about human life.

In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.

With Aristine at his side, Eden Chain technology will connect Jack's new people as they get ready to go to war, but Kassos - the city of intrigue and fear - is not what it seems. There's a new threat in the region, known as the Procurators, and they are using the past against Jack and his people - nanobots. War is coming, and Jack is determined to win at all costs.

Subtlety is a game Joe is capable of, but he always preferred a more hands-on approach. Unluckily for him, the Komran are no longer satisfied with a war of attrition, and there’s no choice but to play. After intercepting the Komran battleplans on his last suicide mission, Joe gets the request to take on the most challenging mission to date: diplomacy.

From childhood, Sarah Robb O'Hagan felt destined to become a champion, but her early efforts at sports, in school, and in music made it clear she was no natural superstar. Unwilling to settle for average, she decided to go Extreme. From working with Richard Branson as a thriving Virgin Atlantic executive in her 20s to being fired and nearly deported a matter of months later, she learned through a series of surprising successes and epic fails that the extremes of her experiences were the engine of her success.

Veteran ski journalist and former ski bum Heather Hansman takes listeners on an exhilarating journey into the hidden history of American skiing, offering a glimpse into an underexplored subculture from the perspective of a true insider. Hopping from Vermont to Colorado, Montana to West Virginia, Hansman profiles the people who have built their lives around a cold-weather obsession. Along the way she reckons with skiing's problematic elements and investigates how the sport is evolving in the face of the existential threat of climate change.

A rapid and massively disruptive shift from centralized to distributed organizations has already begun. But current leadership practices were designed for large centralized organizations, making them increasingly obsolete. Bob Johansen, who has been projecting future trends from Silicon Valley since 1968, outlines five literacies leaders need to develop to cope with this brave new world.

In a world with an uncertain future, do you imagine for the best or for the worst case scenario? Twelve writers tackle extreme solarpunk utopias and apocalyptic or political dystopias—and the gray areas in between—in Biketopia, the fourth volume of the Bikes in Space series of feminist science fiction stories about bicycling. Some find love and fierce resistance in the end times; others imagine an ecological future of saving technology, with solarpunk ecotopian visions, at times paired with crushing social control.

In the age of the Web, smartphones, and social networks, every action an organization takes can be exposed and critiqued in real time. If you treat one customer unfairly, produce one shoddy product, or try to gouge one price, the whole world may find out in hours, if not minutes. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers argue that the only sane response to these rising levels of transpar­ency is to protect the interests of customers proac­tively - even if that requires spending extra money in the short run to preserve your reputation and cus­tomer relationships in the long run.