The warnings are there from the spacesuit-silver hand-grenade cover on in; this book so wants to be hip to 2000. It promulgates the fancy that everything’ll be different, when we just know it’ll be exactly the same. Maybe Mandy’s Millennium Experience will be fleecing the paying customer, but there’ll still be Dead Di supplements in the Sundays (SHE DIED FOR YOUR SINS!), we will still laugh like drains at Richard Branson, and is there still Are You Being Served? for Saturday tea? The hangover’s your own.

And the back cover hoop-la’s no better. Glaring cock-ups aside (‘and in every city the parties are going of control’), it promises ‘cult fiction set in the final hours of 1999’. You can’t knowingly publish cult fiction any more than you can knowingly make a cult movie. But then Sarah Champion also edited what Bill Drummond calls that ‘cash-in-on-Irvine-Welsh book’ Disco Biscuits, and has commissioned the undertalented Nicholas Blincoe twice, so smarts are off the menu.

Drummond is the big surprise, I suppose; that co-penned scatology-fest Bad Wisdom aside, he’s not known as an author. But ‘Let’s Grind’ is a gem: a diary of grandiose KLF/K Foundation/K2 Plant Hire gestures for the big three-zero. Funny, self-deprecating, and probably not even fiction.

And nice too to see him alongside his sometime guru and narrator to the Illuminati, the irascible Robert Anton Wilson. His wonderful ‘Dali’s Clocks’ is part Burroughs homage (‘walking about the Berlin streets naked, their skin the colour of penis-flesh, sipping cunt juices from laboratory jars’), part heavily footnoted anti-Church, anti-reality rant. And anyone bored by the impending arbitrary Christian celebration might like to take comfort from Wilson’s Joyce-ian calendar: ‘We date things psU. That means post scriptum Ulysses.’ Only 920 years to erect that next Dome.

Elsewhere, inevitably, we’re partying like it’s 1999 already, and two authors - Charlie Hall and Paul Di Filippo - both invite us to ones that never end. The results, though, could hardly be more contrasting. Hall’s lazy Ballard rip-off is a pointless rave-centric ‘Groundhog Day,’ where Di Filippo’s Time Bandits-ish ‘Mama Told Me Not To Come’ is lightweight fluff to be sure, but lightweight fluff of the highest order. Corking.

Of the rest, there’s far too much chemically-fuelled sub-Gibson techno-wank for comfort. We’re in for a dystopic couple of years, folks. Steve Beard’s ‘Retoxicity’ is particularly bad, but by no means the only unreadable drek on offer. Tania Glyde, Grant Morrison, Poppy Z Brite, and the sledgehammer symbolism of Steve Aylett are all best avoided. The drearily with-it-daddy-o Douglas Coupland reads like DeLillo-Lite. And Blincoe’s ‘English Astronaut’ is just shit.

Much better you try Neal Stephenson’s pithy ‘Crunch,’ wherein he distils our essential year-of-an-era ennui into a Nicholson Bakerish rumination on the form and nature of breakfast cereals. Here’s a man with his head screwed on.

Disco 2000 then: too few pearls, too many swine. Mind, I suppose we should’ve spotted the book’s muted threats earlier. That oh-so-provocative grenade on the cover? Still got the pin in.