Predictions and Precognition

william kent

william kent

Well-known member
Anyone stumbled across any interesting examples? That Dean Koontz thing from the 80s featuring a bioweapon called 'Wuhan-400' is a fun one. Also this Norman Spinrad thing from the 60s.

First published in the 1960s, Spinrad was one of the first writers to perceive the totalitarian implications of the cradle-to-grave welfare state. But at the same time he was too organically a radical ever to be confused with a conservative. Result: Agent of Chaos! Boris Johnson thinks he wants democracy. But in the course of his adventures he discovers that democracy to him means freedom. It's a banned concept from the Millennium of Religion. Like God. He finds himself dealing with a byzantine political situation worthy of anything from the banned past. The dictatorship is the Hegemony. Opposition is provided by the aptly named agents of C.H.A.O.S. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood of Assassins plays a game that no one can fathom. Whose side are they on? Whose fool are you? Spinrad explores his philosophical theme in a manner all too rare in contemporary science fiction. The problem is that Order will always try to eliminate any random factors. By its very nature, it encourages opposition and that feeds the forces of chaos. But chaos has built in problems as well. Its victories cannot help but feed the forces of reaction, of order. The heroes in this novel ultimately opt for personal freedom. The villains try to establish a dictatorship over the very nature of reality itself. And then Spinrad throws in the discovery of aliens. A starship sets forth to meet them, the Prometheus. The Hegemony doesn't like that.
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william kent

william kent

Well-known member
I found that Spinrad one in the Gibson piece I posted elsewhere.

Science fiction writers are made to seem prescient by confirmation bias: with time, almost any imagined future can be said to have come true. Take the pulp space opera Agent of Chaos by Norman Spinrad, in which an inept, “babbling” protagonist called Boris Johnson goes to war against a technocratic transnational government. It sounds like a satire of the present but it was written, in earnest, in 1967.
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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Ha, I remember stumbling across Agent of Chaos back when he was 'merely' mayor of London.
 
T

Trillhouse

Well-known member
Doesn't Charlie Brooker have a bunch of these now?

PM fucks a pig. ✅
Digitising your eternal presence. ✅
Racist meme / Tv Character gets elected becomes dictator. ✅

And now, Dead Set, the show about contestants in a Big Brother house dealing with a global pandemic / zombie apocalypse going on outside the house.
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
William Burroughs and Virus B23 manifesting as HIV ring a bit too close to call definitively.

Causation and correlation are tricky. Eg certain clients (non-schizoid but acutely traumatised) repeatedly raise questions about synchronicity. One kept a dream journal for 3 decades and dreamt in 1996 that his sibling would become HIV+. During his initial intro-induction this sibling got an actual positive diagnosis. Now, i can't prove he faked the journal and i know the diagnosis was accurate from liaising with their family, but it nearly shattered the specific individual concerned - it was too uncanny. The fact it came in a dream is illuminating (the subconscious expressing something), rather than a dissociative 'vision' (PKD's Satan face in the clouds might be an example here), or a random cultural association 'ping' on the tv or radio. Probably the most difficult life map i've dealt with.

There's a slice on this subject here



Controlled dissociation is the end game of certain military intelligence programs. Maybe pain is holy in some form, even though traumatic abuse is abhorrent.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
There's loads of it. The Simpsons have done it a million times. The shadow of 9/11 fell on the past pretty heavily too and there's loads of premonitions of it in popular culture. Iain Sinclair talks about the way writing preempt the future in Suicide Bridge, I quoted it in the paranoia thread I think. Essentially writing takes place outside of time and The Writer is positioned outside of time so all this stuff is commonplace.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
If you want to experience firsthand than start writing seriously and often. Your experience and understanding of time will be radically altered as a result or your money back.
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
luka said:
It's really bad. I can't remember seeing it so ugly and stupid, thoughtless and trivial.
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sort it out then - you're staff - there's more to the job than the ability to post without waiting 30 seconds
 
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