"The time is 2025. The place is California, where small walled communities must protect themselves from hordes of desperate scavengers and roaming bands of people addicted to a drug that activates an orgasmic desire to burn, rape, and murder. When one small community is overrun, Lauren Olamina, an 18 year old black woman with the hereditary train of 'hyperempathy' -- which causes her to feel others' pain as her own -- sets off on foot along the dangerous...

The founder of one of the world's leading private intelligence companies offers an analysis of current trends and events, as well as historical and geopolitical patterns, to speculate about the changes that will unfold over the course of the next century.