He had the imagination to predict a man on the moon, for example, but not that the moon walks would last little more than three years, from July 20, 1969, to December 14,1972. The SF writer was an optimist about science and a pessimist about humans. His stories were dreams of technological Utopias in which nightmares of personal and political dystopia were played out.

...He also foresaw that “an alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth,” and that in 2010 the Soviet Union ... but who had the prognostic chops to see that the U.S.S.R. would disappear in 1989? The predictions were lighthearted, non-binding, irrelevant to his reputation. Dick knew that his job was not to handicap the future. It was to explain the present.

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