Book excerpt: Founded in 1909 by the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism was a radical art and social movement that glorified modernistic concepts of speed, destruction, noise, machines, cities and war. Marinetti's obsession with the future even extended to the abolition of libraries and museums, which he demanded be burned to the ground in a vortex of incendiary violence. Over 100 years later, Futurism stands as a key conceptual movement of the 20th century, one whose ideas are still ominously relevant in the age of rampant technological progress, suicide bombers and unmanned drone strikes. This special ebook volume in the Radical Manifesto series collects nine of the most challenging manifestos of the early Futurist Movement, from Marinetti's founding charter and subsequent calls to war to the seminal noise theories and machine music blueprints of Luigi Russolo and Balilla Pratella. It also contains as a bonus the first manifesto of Russian Futurism, written by Vladimir Mayakovsky and others.