Here’s another post that deals in the dubious doings of failed prophecy…

In 1981, Philip K. Dick seemed to cast himself as one of the Precogs from Minority Report when he offered a list of his own prognostications to be published in the collection Book of Predictions. Here’s what PKD saw when he stared into the crystal ball courtesy of the PKD Otaku fan zine, issue number 11, 2003…

1983
The Soviet Union will develop an operational particle-beam accelerator, making missile attack against
that country impossible. At the same time the U.S.S.R. will deploy this weapon as a satellite killer. The
U.S. will turn, then, to nerve gas.
1984
The U.S. will perfect a system by which hydrogen, stored in metal hydrides, will serve as a fuel
source, eliminating a need for oil.
1985
By or before this date there will be a titanic nuclear accident either in the U.S.S.R. or in the U.S.,
resulting in shutting down all nuclear power plants.
1986
Such satellites as HEAO-2 will uncover vast, unsuspected high energy phenomenon in the universe,
indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe back when it has reached its expansion
limit.
1989
The U.S. and the Soviet Union will agree to set up one vast metacomputer as a central source for
information available to the entire world; this will be essential due to the huge amount of information
coming into existence.
1993
An artificial life form will be created in a lab, probably in the U.S.S.R., thus reducing our interest in
locating life forms on other planets.
1995
Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive
viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts.
1997
The first closed-dome colonies will be successfully established on Luna and Mars. Through DNA
modification, quasi-mutant humans will be created who can survive under non-Terran conditions, i.e.,
alien environments.
1998
The Soviet Union will test a propulsion drive that moves a starship at the velocity of light; a pilot ship
will set out for Proxima Centaurus, soon to be followed by an American ship.
2000
An alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth, but leave
the colonies on Luna and Mars intact.
2010
Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to
alter the past with scientific information.

I’ve always admired the accuracy Dick fashioned into his literary futures, but I’m pleased to see that this list was mostly off target. Or was it? If the Russian tachyons made it to the past how would I even know the present had been changed?

As a bonus, here’s an interview with author Erik Davies who was part of the editorial team that presided over the construction of the published version of Dick’s mystical meditation, the Exegesis…

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Austin Osman Spare was many people including both an enfant terrible in the London art world at the beginning of the 20th century, and one of the pioneering forerunners of contemporary occultism. Wiki has the basics…

Visionary artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare, who was briefly a member of Aleister Crowley’s A∴A∴ but later broke with them to work independently,[5] is largely the source of chaos magical theory and practice. Specifically, Spare developed the use of sigils and the use of gnosis to empower these. Most basic sigil work recapitulates Spare’s technique, including the construction of a phrase detailing the magical intent, the elimination of duplicate letters, and the artistic recombination of the remaining letters to form the sigil. Although Spare died before chaos magic emerged, many consider him to be the father of chaos magic because of his repudiation of traditional magical systems in favor of a technique based on gnosis.

Following Spare’s death, magicians continued to experiment outside of traditional magical orders. In addition to Spare’s work, this experimentation was the result of many factors, including the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, the wide publication of information on magic by magicians such as Aleister Crowley and Israel Regardie, the influence of Discordianism and Robert Anton Wilson, and the popularizing of magic by Wicca.

This article from Leader Magazine appears at the AOS site:

Austin Osman Spare, a policeman’s son, once looked like being a fashionable painter. But Mr. Spare decided to paint in London’s Elephant and Castle, choosing as models the ordinary people of Lambeth. He rarely charged more than £5 each for them, but they became collectors’ pieces.

Leader Magazine, January 3, 1948

Spare was destitute, but also a cat lover. One can barely utter the words “starving artist” without stumbling into a long discourse on Spare, and the phalanx of felines that shared his misery and his company attests to the fact that even the most solitary sorcerer needs a cat — or a dozen.

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