With the advent of a new millennium, there exists a strong cultural presumption that the search for terrestrial answers will grow bolder, veering as it did in the 1980s toward radical visions of an imminent apocalypse or else the start of an extraordinary reign on earth of the divine spirit. Yet instead, in the 1990s there exists a pervasive sense of complacency, a turning toward immediate satisfactions, and an imaginative fatigue that is seemingly content with muddling through, barely taking more than ritualistic notice of the millennial shift that awaits us. William Gibson, already in 1984, captured the distinctive mood of our era in the revelatory opening sentence of his classic Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.” Perhaps this dullness of outlook is highly provisional and will soon be superseded by a more dramatic and visionary set of expectations; but there are currently few indications that this might happen, by some sort of retuning process in the next several years, a last-hour recovery of imaginative vividness before crossing the threshold of a new millennium.