The 1990s was a decade which Baudrillard had already advised us, in the 1980s, we should miss out while we went straight to the end of the century. In some respects Baudrillard's work during the 1990s started to seem more and more millenarian as references to the threshold year of 2000 increased. The first one which appeared in French, translated into English, is the extract here. Looking back on the end of the century it is hard to overestimate how far this ‘end-of-the-millennium’ spirit had percolated into media forms, especially popular culture. Baudrillard's writing chimed perfectly with the times. In 1992 Editions Galilee published L'lllusion de la Fin which in a number of its short essays drew attention to the coming end of the millennium in eight years' time. It evocatively questioned what later became the ‘Y2K’ apocalyptic historical watershed in its title. In 1994 Polity Press published an English translation by Chris Turner under the overall title The Illusion of the End. The suggestion was that many imaginary end-points had come and gone in history and this was merely another ‘illusory’ one. Pataphysics being the ‘science of imaginary solutions’, the title of the essay extracted here seems most appropriate. In another chapter in the book Baudrillard wrote of ‘the reversal of history’, ‘the end of linearity’ and the rewinding of modernity. In the extract here, which in fact begins the book, Baudrillard predicted provocatively that ‘the year 2000 will not take place’ just as he had written previously that ‘the Gulf War will not take place’.