weaving together the personalities Inand plot lines for The Ghost of the Grand Banks, Arthur C. Clarke refers to the plagues of the twentieth century. One plague he poses are the medical effects of smoking tobacco: The twenty-first century society he delineates, despises the addiction. Donald and Edith Craig operate a company that reduces or cuts smoking scenes from twentieth-century films and videos to make them usable in the twenty-first. However, he cites no statistics on deaths attributed to lung cancer, emphysema, or heart disease for the century.

The other plague, AIDS, in the opinion expressed by psychiatrist Jafferjee, is regarded in terms a careful reader could find contradictory: One good thing did come out of the AIDS epidemic—it forced people to be honest: it wiped out the last remnants of the Puritan aberration. My Hindu colleagues—with their temple prostitutes and erotic...