s is obvious by now, nothing really big--and certainly nothing catastrophic--happened when 1999 (in the Western/Christian and computer calendars) rolled over into 2000, just as John Clute suspected.
Clute's central thesis in The Book of End Times: Grappling With the Millennium--written well before the Y2K rollover--is that millennial tension was and is simply "hysteria," a condition he primarily defines as "A disease--often now called 'conversion disorder'--where some scarring but inadmissible stress, which may be physical in origin but is usually psychic, surfaces as a symptom or symptoms seemingly unrelated to that original stress." In other words, people were (are) driving themselves to be freaked out about the arrival of the new millennium--buying into numerous and diverse prophecies, conspiracies and other imagined horrors, throwing up their arms in resignation and placing the blame on anything and everything but themselves--to avoid dealing with the horrifying problems actually facing them in the here and now. Those problems include the destruction of the Earth's environment, the increasingly widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the great disorientation of human society in the 20th century, among others.
Two thousand is just a number, Clute notes. However, that doesn't mean the end of the world as we know it isn't a very real possibility. And whether the world changes for the better or worse all depends on humanity's willingness and ability to deal with such change. Clute argues, both in pictures and in words taken from sources as varied as the Bible, Victorian history and The X-Files, that the idea of the millennium and millennialism is a story, complete with a beginning, a middle and an end, and that it's not a very good one at that. It is how humanity positions itself in relation to that story, and what it does with that story, that will determine how the species will fare in the 21st century.
A potent pastiche
The Book of End Times isn't an easy book to encompass. It is at once both a socio-historical study and a work of literary and visual art, reading at times like an academic argument and at others like prophetic prose or even free verse poetry.
Materially speaking, the glossy pages of the large book read not unlike a series of hypertext Web pages, with different pieces of text set out in various colors, typefaces and sizes over a wide array of images ranging from illuminated manuscripts to movie stills. Clute's words are broken in the text in any and all places by quotes--short and long--from myriad authors whose writings, either directly or indirectly, have to do with the end of the world. These authors include everyone from William Blake to Leonard Cohen. This innovative layout, unfortunately, acts more as a distraction from Clute's largely compelling arguments than as an interesting way to present the material. What Clute himself says, what's being quoted, and what images are shown never really explain or complement one another in the ways they are perhaps intended to.
However, The Book of End Times is filled with a number of profound and focused (however cynical) observations of, and recommendations for, human culture, society and motives. It doesn't pull too many punches, taking serious issue with everyone from religious fundamentalists to the digital architects who set up computers for potential disaster in the first place. One of those observations, incidentally, is that, as far as science fiction movies (which Clute argues are presently the most popular form of science fiction) go, excluding Star Trek, there hasn't been "in the last twenty years one single movie that depicts the near future in positive terms." There's one to think about.
[Editor's note: John Clute writes for Science Fiction Weekly.]
