With the millennium around the corner, the pundits are beginning to publish like it’s 1999. We are soon to be awash in tomes proclaiming the arrival of the 21st century. W.R. Clement is one of the first to attempt to decipher what this brave new world holds. But to do that, he maintains, we must look at the past.

“This book is about a world in which time has not only been speeded up but continues to accelerate,” he writes in the preface. “It is a world in which the level of abstraction has become so elevated that many can no longer understand the forces at play.”

Clement is no northern Nostradamus and offers few prediction about what the future holds. His thesis is that we are undergoing a transformation as great as that which occurred at the time of the Renaissance. Just as the discovery of perspective by the painters of that era and the adoption of Arabic numerals fundamentally changed the way our ancestors lived, computers and the development of international trading blocks are altering our current manner of living.

Clement’s book is not light summer reading. Although he can display a deft touch at times, tossing off whimsical phrases, all too often Quantum Jump reads like a doctoral thesis.

Clement’s examination of industry is incisive. He show how the grand successes in the computer market came from small entrepreneurs with daring. The larger conglomerates, like IBM and Texas Instruments, were unprepared for the revolution that cyberspace has brought.

That same old-line business thinking, Clement believes, will doom trading blocks like NAFTA and the European Community. The influence of multinational corporations is already affecting the ability of governments to administer their affairs as they once did.

Social scientists will be debating the next millennium until we are well into it. This book gets the discussion started.