domain of just the 'serious' novelist either. Comedy has always been a great filter for truth and the insane worlds of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett often contain as much wisdom as any weighty 'literary' volume (it's just that this wisdom occurs in the context of three-headed politicians and planets held up in space by animals). In the end, it doesn't matter whether the war is cold or hot, whether the government liberal or totalitarian, whether we have self-aware computers or just continually crashing laptops. People have remained stubbornly similar beings over the centuries. This is why Shelley, Wells, Huxley, Orwell, (and who knows, perhaps even Clarke) along with a handful of current contemporary writers, will still be being read even in 2084 without derision. At this stage, no one really wants to put money on which of today's tomes will endure, but I suspect it will not be those that John Ruskin might have described as 'books of the hour'.

And don't weep too long for all those Cold War thriller manuscripts conceived in the mid 1980s and stuck in the bottom draw. Soon enough they will reappear as historical fiction. Indeed, now we are living in the future (well, the twenty-first century) and people aren't dressed in all-in-on jumpsuits and holidaying on Venus, the past has once again become very fashionable. Just a quick glance at the bestsellers list over the past few years reveals a few plums: Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Enigma, Snow Falling on Cedars, Charlotte Gray, The Regeneration Trilogy - and those are just a random selection from World Wars One and Two, never mind the rest of the seven or so thousand years of recorded history. And of the Booker Prize nominated books in 2000, all of them had the past firmly in mind.

All this is commendable enough in a world increasingly confused about where it stands in the historical perspective. However, perhaps because of this very fact, there is always a danger of reshaping the past as we see it through Twenty-first Century eyes. All the research in the world cannot compensate for experience, and the historical novel forever teeters on the brink of nostalgia for a world that never really existed in the first place. Just as so much of future-fiction is actually a case of present day concerns wrapped up in the glamorous robes of science and technology, the themes which most interest us in history are the ones that seem to press hardest on us today.

Nostalgia doesn't stop at the end of the last calendar year: there is a danger also in presenting a version of the present that has more to do with memory than experience - perhaps realising that the novelist cannot keep pace with the changing world. Luckily, novelists can excuse themselves of this sin by citing Charles Dickens, who quite regularly painted a world that had more in common with that of his childhood than his adult years. And even Dickens tried his hand at the historical novel: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." begins his tale of the French Revolution (A Tale of Two Cities), neatly summarising the temptations and traps of history as a novelist's canvas.

No doubt, though, publishers will soon enough decide that the past is old hat - or at least old hats - and some other rung on the temporal ladder will become the most fashionable place to be. Maybe authors too will shift their era and we can look forward to a Pat Barker tale of love amid the rings of Saturn, or a Brian Aldiss novel set in Ancient Rome. As 2001 rolls underneath us, we can at least be fairly certain that no-one is again likely to attempt to entitle a book with just a year, (though, having said that, someone is probably planning that very thing). For the moment I will leave the last word on all this to the man who is now seventeen years out of date - George Orwell. As the Party slogan runs in Nineteen Eighty- Four: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past".