Oh well, since I already have it, why shouldn't I post it? Here are a few words from two particularly influential individuals from 1989. I realize that dropping easter eggs is not the same as replicating somebody's style but this was still fun to write. I'm fairly certain that the first of these two is living out his dream without being prevented from freely expounding his ideas by iron curtains and censorship, or feeling slowed down by the need to invent plots for stories which he would use as means of presenting them in OTL. IDK about the second one of the pair but in OTL he processed reality in such an unusual way that this version of him doesn't seem that weird to me.
Two Sermons
"Two Sermons" by Stefan Żechowski (1939)
"...yes, I was quite concerned that after the Costarican fiasco people would simply stop turning up, and seeing the size of the crowd at this year's opening speech at the Lwów High Castle was a huge relief. And I can now reveal that the Tenth World Futurological Congress will be held in San Francisco! A bit more expensive, yes, but fortunately our benefactors agree that we really can't risk having two out of three Congresses in a row interrupted by riots, and have agreed to help pay our guests' travel expenses. This really is wonderful news, you see, because it would be a great shame if what I will immodestly call the most significant global event dedicated to the promotion of the understanding of modern science were to become a local, parochial affair of a continent which has seen better days. Yes, it's time to look this unpleasant fact in the eye. With the vital Channel Entente decisively severed the Trilateral Consensus cannot continue, and the lack of a meaningful reaction to the Vienna Declaration and resuscitation of the Warsaw Pact has shown beyond all doubt that the entire European Understanding itself is history.
Yet all those changes are the result of economic rearrangements which were ultimately driven by the ever-accelerating advancement of technology. They say we are heading for a Second Transformation on the scale of what we had in the sixties; I say we are heading for a Constant Transformation the like of which we have never seen before. Mankind truly cannot afford to not understand it, or we shall lose control over our fate, like a man losing his balance and falling from a high building. We might not notice our world crossing the point of no return, and if someone looking from a window on the tenth floor were to ask him how he feels, he might reply "so far, so good". But the coming crash would already be inevitable. We are a predatory race, and if we lose control over the world we have made, we will succumb to our own worst instincts.
And this is why I hope that one day our Congresses will be announced and printed, transmitted, televised and optonized as widely as today's great sport events. We are still a long way from that, I fear. I will not lose sleep over petty insults of course. But it is vexing to hear that the most viral response to our Congress has come from that crazy American - or should I say Atlantean? - preacher who chose to take issue with my name, of all things! A bold move considering what his own name is.
It is much worse to see how effective those followers of his have been at spreading their faith across Europe as if we were ignorant savages. Could it be that Europe truly has become decadent and incapable of conceiving anything better on its own? My younger self may have felt perplexed that the decline of Catholicism would not be accompanied by progress towards a saner scientific worldview, but that we would keep going around in circles. And he would have scarcely believed that going around in circles might be the preferable option, the other being to be dragged back a thousand years by the Zermatists' demented neo-pagan nonsense. If there was anybody who should have been censored more strongly before the sixties, it was their insane founder - no, he should not have been censored, but simply put in the asylum where he so obviously belonged! Attempting to communicate with such irrationality in any meaningful way may be worse than pointless, it may be quite impossible! But what of the National Technocrats, you may ask? I may sympathize somewhat with the ... way of thinking which gave birth to it, but the emerging movement itself is a great disappointment. With what feels like a fetishization of science, and with their silly abbreviated name and stylized feedback loops the EnTeks seem almost like the Zermats with their fancy axes or the Ubiks with their silly pink crosses. Is it any surprise that I declined their request to officially endorse them? I will not be their Grand Old Man, no matter how much they would like to see me as such, and if they don't grow up, I will have nothing to say to them either..."
- Stanisław Lem, philosopher, futurologist and chairman of the World Futurological Congresses
"...My reports from Europe are sometimes met with the reply that, despite our hugely successful missionary work over there, it is America that really matters. And in America we are - still - a minority. I am also reminded that even in Europe our rationalistic "competition" is still going strong. But those strangely-named little men in their high castles are a dead end. For without a soul, what is Man but a particularly effective calculator? And what value will he have when intellectronics replicates what is, to them, our only notable faculty? Once that Replication happens their worldview will bring about what one of their colleagues has already proclaimed to be a time of contempt for Mankind. And they do not merely justify the coming invalidation of Man. Their fascination with technology in fact threatens to accelerate its arrival.
It is we who are the way forward, in the present and future, in this world and in the better ones. For ours is not the ossified Catholic church, nor the Orthodox which has allowed itself to become a tool of the Russian government, nor one of those ephemeral Protestant movements which die together with their founders. Ours is a vast, active, living, intelligent system, and one day we will activate the American soul as well. On the day when circumstances will awake us from our American dream of prosperity we Ubiks will be waiting, not just to promise eternal life, but to deliver it!"
- Philip K. Dick, head of the Ubiquitous Church