History today

The Noughties is already history, or at least archive material. BBC Radio 4’s The Archive Hour features Will Self on JG Ballard, whose dystopian imaginings influenced our perceptions of the 21st century, and whose novel The Drowned World (1962) was very prescient in its depiction of melting ice caps (see Chapter Three); and then, on Saturday, Stephen Fry will be re-examining the Millennium Bug (see the Introduction).