Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

AS the millennium approaches, more than computer meltdown is exercising
writers’ minds. Nothing less than Armageddon is the order of the day in several
books.

Take Christopher Brookmyre’s Not the End of the World (Little Brown,
£12.99, ISBN 0316640654), the follow-up to his acclaimed first novel,
Quite Ugly One Morning. This is a hyperintelligent, hip and impassioned
apocalyptic romp. It’s a deeply felt book, too—the author’s loathing of
pious intolerance informs his satire and influences every twist and turn of a
plot involving an Armageddon brought about by fanatical celebrities of America’s
religious Right. Indeed, Brookmyre is wont to let his antipathy to his
sanctimonious targets skew his otherwise canny judgment.

His three principal characters—a lanky Scottish photographer of B-list
stars, the porn-star daughter of a Republican senator and a Nietzsche-quoting
black Los Angeles cop—are expertly dovetailed into a narrative that may
owe a little to Terry Southern’s manic fantasies, but remains grounded in a
just-about believable nightmare reality. And it’s no easy task that Brookmyre
has set for himself, with the Dead Sea Scrolls, murdered seismologists and a
biblical tidal wave all stirred into the brew.

Steff Kennedy, with a Glaswegian accent that mystifies the denizens of LA as
much as his ungainly appearance, finds himself examining a Hollywood Festival of
Light. Soon, he’s coping with Daniel, a pro-life terrorist, and Luther St John,
a sinister and plausible demagogue. Aligning himself with Madeleine, who
performs in adult movies as Katie Koxx, Steff finds he’s stumbled onto a
biblical initiative to purify society of the canker of permissiveness, with
nothing less than the TV broadcast of the suicide of a major character as
deus ex machina.

Brookmyre adroitly juggles satire with megathriller elements, and it’s
entertaining to compare his imagined doomsday with Marina Benjamin’s nonfiction
take on similar scenarios in Living at the End of the World (Picador,
£12.99, ISBN 0330342037). Writing in an accessible and just as fiercely
intelligent style, Benjamin is concerned with humanity’s obsession with its own
demise as filtered through everything from cryonics, religion and catastrophe
theory. She’s particularly acute on such examples of the millenarian impulse as
David Koresh’s Waco cult and the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in San Diego.

The obliteration of human memory is another fin de siècle
concern, and Michael Marshall Smith provides as witty and imaginative a riff on
this as one could wish in One Of Us (Harper Collins, £14.99, ISBN
0002256002). His hapless protagonist is a REMtemp, a technological caretaker of
dreams and memories. As always with the fiercely inventive Smith, the rug of
reality is exhilaratingly pulled from under the reader’s feet.

If you choose not to believe that the author of Exegesis (Penguin
Vintage, £6.99/$11, ISBN 0140271937/037570051X) is really called
Astro Teller, that’s entirely up to you. But a mordant reading of possibilities
is the name of the game in this thriller, a 20th-century epistolary novel: the
computer programmer heroine’s heady tale is related in e-mail messages. Edgar,
the object of Alice Lu’s attentions, is an artificial intelligence programme.
With only the occasional faltering, Teller tells his tale with wit and
authority. He holds his own computer science background sufficiently in
check—he’s clearly read some of the grim offerings from other wannabe
novelists in his field.

The pace of Daniel Hecht’s Skull Session (Macmillan, £16.99,
ISBN 0333714326) is maintained with an iron grip. Hecht’s protagonist, despite
his brilliant mind, hasn’t held down a job in years because he has Tourette’s
syndrome, but his experience of the human brain is the key to the identity of a
brutal murderer. Complex and challenging stuff, told with real panache.

Finally, Virtual History (Papermac, £10, ISBN 0333647289),
edited by Niall Ferguson, is a fascinating miscellany in which leading
historians explore the possible consequences of various momentous events taking
very different directions. Philip K. Dick, Len Deighton and Keith Roberts have
all tackled these themes, but the political detail here offers a new twist on
virtual history.