ABSTRACT
Ben Elton caught the notion of a modern climacteric in the reflections of Sam, the character in his novel Gridlock who busily pondered the fate of nations:
Industrial dominance was a hard thing to fathom, Sam thought to himself as he took the chōpper to the Global building. Why, it wasn't thirty years since the US was such an economic power it didn't seem as if it could ever end. How do these things happen? A hundred years before, the British had been the Japanese, so to speak. After them, in the middle of the century, the people of the United States were unquestionably the Japanese. These days, perhaps rather ironically, the Japanese themselves were the Japanese. Who would be the Japanese next thought Sam? Probably the Germans, but you can never tell.
