From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

"We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there," said the inventor Charles Kettering. In our time, no symbol of the future has sparked more anticipation and mystery than the year 2000. And now the epic moment is close at hand. Lucky us: few people who ever walk the earth have had the opportunity to ring in, all at once, a new year, a new decade, a new century and a new millennium. The imminence of this extraordinary occasion inspired us to devote an entire special issue to the tantalizing future before us and the great events that have set the stage for it. We are happy that our plans for this project appealed so much to IBM that it offered to become the sole advertiser for this issue.

A subject so monumental calls for some unusual approaches. In one such departure, we commissioned science-fiction master Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to write a new story, set in the third millennium. His tale, The Hammer of God, about an asteroid that imperils the earth, is only the second piece of fiction ever to be published in TIME. (The first was a story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1969.) The 74-year-old British futurist, who has written more than 50 books, is often as prescient as he is prolific. Clarke has long warned about humankind's vulnerability to asteroid impacts, a subject that is just now capturing the attention of the scientific mainstream. "I'm not a predictor," says Clarke. "I'm an extrapolator. Sometimes I hear of a scientific discovery or invention, and then I say, 'What if? What would it imply?' "

- The future may be fantastic, but it will also be funny, according to contributor Merrill Markoe's portrayal of dating and marriage in the 21st century. Markoe, an Emmy-winning TV writer, is most recently the author of the essay collection What the Dogs Have Taught Me. We also resolved to challenge some assumptions about society's direction, a mission that historian Christopher Lasch handles skillfully in an essay on the shortcomings of progress, which was the subject of his 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven.

All told, TIME journalists consulted more than 200 futuristic thinkers to help shape this guide to the next millennium. We hope you agree that the result is an exciting preview of the world in which we will soon live.