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The End of the Future by Jean Gimpel (Adamantine Press, £14.95, ISBN 0 744 90118 9) might take you aback, always a salutary experience. Gimpel maintains that Western civilisation is almost at the end of its technological tether and due for decline. He has a great time listing all the predictions made by futurologists that turned out to be wrong – nuclear-powered flight, the murder of books by the information network, commercial supersonic airliners, the conquest of diseases by antibiotics. He reckons that technology has reached a plateau, that not much will advance from now on and that eventually the West will be one with Nineveh and Tyre. He forecasts, as many do, that the future belongs to China. Of course, his glimpse of the future is just as liable to be wrong, but he is enjoyably provocative.