Abstract

Futures is a novel about Calgary in 2011. Set in the midst of the city’s volatile economic boom, the narrative follows Lyle Oglov’s coming-of-age journey as he navigates uncertainty in his own life and in the world. Drawing on traditions of paranoid fiction in the vein of DeLillo and Pynchon, as well as classic Bildungsroman and picaresque novels such as The Catcher in the Rye and A Confederacy of Dunces, the novel inverts these predecessors, and offers a satirical critique of the contradictions inherent in art-making, activism, and daily life within an extractive economy, exploring the futility of dogmatic adherence to both mainstream narratives and their alternatives.