Reading Like There's No Tomorrow
The Sunday Age
Sunday August 22, 1999
ON 1 JANUARY 2000, there shall be a mighty crashing of computers, and fire and brimstone, yea, and a wailing and gnashing of teeth. And the veil of the temple shall be rent in twain. And there shall be a great thunder as millions of millennium books hit the remainder tables in bookshops throughout the cities of the earth.
I can't guarantee any of these prophecies, but I expect the last one will come true. Millennium books have their own built-in use-by date, after all. So buy now, while they're still selling like hot cakes. In just over four months' time, most of them will be stale cakes.
In true Star Wars style, there is even a book that was commissioned to help flog millennium merchandise (have you seen all those baseball caps?). Five years ago, Ken Walker, an American retail designer, was thinking about the potential Y2K problem and doodled the date ``01-01-00". He liked the look of it so much that he secured international trademarks for the sequence of numbers. Then he commissioned R.J.Pineiro, a computer expert and thriller writer, to write the book of the logo.
The result is 01-01-00: A Novel of the Millennium, which draws voraciously on all the apocalyptic mumbo-jumbo, from hi-tech jinks on the world's computers to ancient Mayan civilisation to possible aliens (as Pineiro says, it's ``a sort of Indiana Jones meets Contact and The Net"). There are, of course, heroes and villains racing against time to solve a mystery as the world approaches a dire moment of either revelation or Armageddon. And lines such as ``Susan filled her lungs, conscious of her nipples pressing against the white cotton T-shirt". Well, you can't save the world without a nipple or two.
The depressing thing about 01-01-00 is not so much the book itself as the way it is absolutely typical of the millennium thriller genre. I haven't read all these books and I don't want to: the synopses make them sound as if they were all written to order by computers. Still, many of them are bestsellers, a lot of people have enjoyed them, and if you want to chase them up you might try The Magic Circle, by Katherine Neville; Night of the Broken Souls, by Thomas F.Monteleone; or The Last Day, by Glenn Kleier.
In a different class altogether, I'm glad to say, is an Australian version of the millennium novel, The Book of Revelation, which I'm sure will go on selling well into 2000. It's the fourth collaboration between two writers, Rory Barnes and Damien Broderick, and unlike most millennium novels, it's distinguished by intelligence and a tongue-in-cheek wit. Jesus, we are told, was the result of little grey alien doctors carrying out gynaecological experiments that are still going on. ``Two thousand years? I'd have thought their funding would be exhausted by now," says the bureaucrat.
What about millennial non-fiction? If you're not already sick to death of lists, there's still time to rush out and buy Life Millennium: The 100 Most Important Events and People of the Past 1,000 Years, brought to you by the editors of Life magazine. Pooh, that's nothing, say the editors of 1000 Years, 1000 People: Ranking the Men and Women who Shaped the Millennium. They ranked their 1000 people according to five criteria: lasting influence, contribution to the world's beauty, effect on contemporaries, singularity and charisma: ``By our reckoning, Napoleon was more important than Rembrandt, Charlie Chaplin more influential than Dr Seuss and the man who invented the safety razor was a cut above Richard Nixon."
If you want to argue with that, you will make the editors very happy. ``We also wrote about 10 famous people who didn't make the list," they say. ``They include John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. If that doesn't stir up folks, nothing will." God, they probably left out Plugger too.
After all the hype and horror, it might be a relief to turn to a slim volume from the bestselling science writer Stephen Jay Gould, Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown. As the Atlantic Monthly reviewer noted, Gould implies that for much of the world's population AD 2000 has neither religious nor historical significance: ``He presents a sound defence against dateline hysteria."
But what's the impact of a still small voice of reason, when hysteria is so much more marketable? The most mind-boggling millennium books are all of the Prepare To Meet Thy Doom variety. The Internet is full of references to dozens of non-fiction books that either sensationalise legitimate concerns about whether our computers will let us down, or seem to take the more wildly eccentric apocalyptic prophecies quite seriously.
To be fair, there are some relatively sensible and well-meaning books on the computer breakdown theme, where you don't have to believe the more ghastly scenarios but can at least get advice about practical precautions.
But what can you make of such titles as Panic Now! The Y2K Millennium Bug Will Affect You!, or the exhaustive Millennium Book of Prophecy (777 ``visions and predictions"), or the ominous Millennium: Peace, Promises and The Day They Take our Money Away? I don't see how scaring the gullible is going to get us safely into the next 1000 years.
Cheer up, there's always Y2K Kitchen: The Joy of Cooking in a Crisis. And I was comforted to discover that the doomsayers are not always spot-on; according to the 1993 Survival Guide for the New Millennium, California should have fallen into the sea by now.
email: jsullivan@theage.fairfax.com.au.
© 1999 The Sunday Age