|
|
Introduction
by Steven R. Solomon
WHAT, IF ANYTHING, DID YOU EXPECT the turn of the Millennium to bring?
Anyone who has been observing popular culture over the last year or so knows
that we projected a broad spectrum of hopes, fears, and expectations onto
the advent of the year 2000.
Many people anticipated disaster. The dreaded Y2K bug would cause all
our computers to crash and plunge the civilized world into chaos: public
utilities and telecommunications would be lost, aircraft blinded, stock exchanges
crippled, and all record of personal financial accounts wiped out. Ecological
or biological catastrophes would do us in: global warming, increasingly violent
storms, floods, earthquakes, asteroid impacts, or perhaps a mutated microbe--a
new, unstoppable virus or bacterium--would decimate or even destroy the human
race. Many Christian fundamentalists expected the end of the world in a literal
and cataclysmic fulfillment of Biblical end-time prophecies, and they deftly
wove new anxieties into the old doomsday tapestry--the Y2K bug became a tool
of the Antichrist.
Others expected an event worthy of celebration or commemoration. Merchants
and advertisers encouraged us to both celebrate and commemorate by buying
their many products: an international food conglomerate wooed us with animated
Millennial "spokescandies," a wisecracking TV pitchman turned "Y2K" into
an acronym for a line of automobiles, and stores everywhere were filled with
Millennial merchandise ranging from time capsules and countdown clocks to
party supplies. And speaking of parties, not a few of us saw the transition
from 1999 to 2000 as simply the reason for the biggest New Year's Eve bash
ever.
Some undoubtedly hoped that the turn of the Millennium would end the
topic of the Millennium. Social critics and media pundits expressed how sick
and tired many of us were of hearing about this supposedly momentous yet
nebulous event--an event which, as mathematical purists repeatedly pointed
out, won't actually occur until January 1, 2001. That being the case, it
would appear that we can look forward to a second new Millennium of equally
vague significance a year from now.
So we observed, or did not observe, the turn of the Millennium as we
saw fit, and as we did so, Planet Earth made the transition into the year
2000 largely intact. Most computers did not crash, airplanes did not plunge
from the sky, and the world was emphatically not destroyed.
Nothing out of the ordinary seems to have happened--in fact, so far 2000
is a lot like non-Millennial and unremarkable 1999. The parties have long
since ended and have already begun to fade from our memories. So what were
we celebrating and expecting? What was all the fuss about? Does the overhyped,
much-ballyhooed new Millennium mean anything at all?
If the Millennium is otherwise of murky significance at best, there
is nonetheless one aspect of modern life on which it has had a tremendous
and obvious effect: publishing. The approach of the year 2000 has been an
absolute goldmine for the entire industry. The most obvious and perhaps greatest
beneficiaries are the purveyors of fundamentalist Christian apocalyptic
scenarios, who no doubt are even now revising their predictions yet again
to accommodate the year 2001. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that
theirs were the only genre to cash in on our collective Millennial Madness.
Computer scientists wrote about Y2K preparedness for government, business,
and personal computer systems; historians sought the meaning of the year
2000 in the events of the year 1000; novelists spun tales of science fiction,
fantasy, and horror.
This outpouring of publications has prompted me to make my own contribution
to society's ongoing Millennial discourse. Over the next year, between the
two advents of our new Millenium, I will be writing and posting reviews of
books from a variety of Millennium-related genres. I hope that you will visit
this site often and share your reactions with me as we move together into
the 2000s.
Edited January 22, 2000
Copyright ©2000 by Steven R. Solomon. All rights reserved.
Please send comments to
srsgm@pacbell.net.