The Complete Idiot’s Guide to New Millennium Predictions
by the New Age Collective and Lisa Lenard
Alpha Books, £13.99, ISBN 0028631129
There seems to be a trend in publishing towards insulting one’s readers: after the For Dummies series, the Complete Idiot’s Guides (are they guides for complete idiots or complete guides for idiots?). Formerly confining themselves to computing, they are now found elsewhere.
The cover of this one is not reassuring, promising ways to see the future with astrology, numerology, tarot, palmistry and psychic intuition, while the back says of course you’re no idiot – you’ve had your birth chart done, numbers calculated, cards analysed, palm read… Well, if you’ve done all those things – and paid – you are an idiot! True, it opens with one spot-on prediction: by the time it’s read Y2K may have come and gone without a whimper! But then it’s mainly downhill all the way.
There are small upturns at the beginning: Chapter 2 has some interesting discussion of our fascination with the future as shown by science fiction (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World and 2001: A Space Odyssey), and when the new millennium began, with useful information of the history of the calendar, and Chapter 3 some interesting statistics. At the end it’s good too, with concrete predictions on science and economics – but in between it’s the above-mentioned hooey as listed on the cover. I’d say it’s like the curate’s egg, good in parts, except that joke is always misunderstood – the curate in that famous Punch cartoon who stammered that parts of his egg were excellent was desperate not to cause offence; an egg is either good or bad and obviously cannot be good in parts. This book is, however, good in some small parts and very bad in others.
