Bernhard von Mutius Die Verwandlung der Welt. Ein Dialog mit der Zukunft (The Age of Transformation: A Dialogue with the Future) Klett-Cotta, September 2000, 350 pp. ISBN 3-608-94271-8 International management consultant Bernhard von Mutius has written an ambitious book. It combines a history of the recent past with 'futurology' - the prediction of what might soon come into being. In addition, it pulses with a manifesto-like aspiration to shape that future. To achieve these aims, the author decided to talk to the people who are centrally involved in shaping the practices and ideas of the twenty-first century, interviewing in the process scientists, business leaders and media and communications researchers in North America and Europe. In addition he has tackled much of the growing body of 'cyber-literature', a field of speculation about the digital age, digesting many of its obtuse theses and relaying them in lucid form. In particular the book maps the 'Information Society' and projects the lines of its future development. It is no surprise that new languages circulate in the worlds of business, academia, journalism and politics, or that new words slip almost imperceptibly into everyday use. Von Mutius argues that these terms are products of (and productive for) new modes of 'thinking the world'. He takes metaphor seriously, showing how even the new rhetoric of hi-tech progress is permeated by industrial images that belong to a former age - for example, the information 'superhighway'. Breaking with such images, he embraces multi-layered thinking and, most importantly, the metaphor of the mountain path - which is crooked, has diverse routes, sometimes doubles back on itself and can be hard going. In a world of 'surfing', he comments wryly, much foam and froth is produced. In consequence, we need a guidebook. Each chapter is organised into parts, so that each can be read independently and in any order and readers can skip and move backwards and forwards at will. The book itself is international in orientation, lively and accessible in style, and will bridge many markets from the student to the popular. An exceptional achievement.