Book publishers are having a field day putting out books hailing "the end of..." There's more to this than literary license. It reflects the widespread sense we're sailing not only into a new century but into a profoundly different world. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson is a political scientist specializing in issues of global governance and author of the forthcoming "Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be." He can be reached via e-mail at <waltt@well.com>.

If book titles are a reliable indication of what's going on in the world, we're facing tumultuous times -- not only the end of the twentieth century, but the end of damn near everything.

Recently I glanced at the shelf next to my favorite reading chair and noticed two books side by side whose titles both read "the end of ... " One was "The End of History and the Last Man," the book-length version of Francis Fukuyama's much-discussed essay. The other was Jean-Marie Guehenno's "The End of the Nation-State."

Now, if we are indeed facing the end of history and the end of the nation-state, that is a lot of change. But it's nothing compared to what I found with just a little browsing around: The End of Affluence (Paul Ehrlich), The End of Education (Neil Postman), The End of Work (Jeremy Rifkin), The End of Nature (Bill McKibben), The End of Sex (George B. Leonard), yet another The End of the Nation-State (Kenichi Ohmae) and of course The End of Ideology (Daniel Bell), whose great success and influence in the 1960s probably launched the current trend.

There are any number of conclusions you might draw from this similarity of titles -- perhaps the simplest would be that what we're really looking at here is the end of originality.

You might equally well conclude that we have reached the end of accuracy, since there is still plenty of history, lots of nation-states, and enough affluence, education, work, nature, sex, and ideology to last us for a while yet. None of the authors of these literary obituaries actually proves that we have seen the end of anything.

In most cases, of course, the author would say in his defense that the title was merely a literary device, an arresting way of getting the reader's attention for a more difficult and deeper excursion. Fukuyama, for example, isn't announcing the end of the profession of history or the recording of events, but rather the triumph of capitalist liberal democracy. Guehenno and Ohmae aren't saying that nation-states are about to disappear, but rather than the period of their reign as dominant institutions of governance is rapidly drawing to a close. Postman is arguing the time has come for a fundamental rethinking of public education policy, McKibben is fretting about the loss of wild or untouched nature, and so forth.

Yet even after you discount a certain amount of literary license (if not downright hype) in the promiscuous use of "the end of" as part of a title, you are left with a strong suspicion something is going on here. If so many writers of so many different political and philosophical persuasions see such fundamental changes taking place, if so many readers are willing to wrestle with difficult books on such subjects, surely this reveals a widespread sense that we are leaving behind much of life as we knew it, sailing not only into a new century but also into a quite different world.

The book titles that I have cited are only a small fraction of the "the end of" literature. I dialed into the online catalog of the University of California in Berkeley (the end of going to the library and hunting through the card files) and found no less than 918 listings of books whose titles begin with those portentous three little words. Some were fiction, some multiple listings of the same book, some different books with the same title (lots of The End of an Era, The End of the World, etc.), and some were more-or-less straightforward accounts of things that have actually ended, such as the middle ages and the Vietnamese monarchy. But a surprising number of books were true to the "the end of" genre, proclaiming or predicting or advocating a final shutdown of some piece of life as we have known it to be or hoped for it to become.

I mused over The End of the Third World, The End of Reform, The End of Liberalism, The End of Economics, The End of World Order, The End of Culture, The End of Economics, The End of Tradition, The End of Marriage, The End of Government, The End of Physics, The End of Progress, The End of American Politics, The End of Revolution and The End of Evolution, to name a few. There were several books entitled either The End of Modernism or The End of the Modern Age, and even one, getting smartly ahead of the curve, entitled The End of Postmodernism.

A truly mind-boggling bunch of terminations, especially when you view them as a whole. I think this burst of "the end of" literature is telling us something, and needs to be taken seriously. But at the same time I strongly suggest that, as we stumble forward into a new century, we would do well to search for some new way of thinking and writing about change -- and put an end to all "the end of" books from here onward.