The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories

Keir Dullea does a great job narrating this collection of stories by Philip K Dick. Not only does it have five very good stories, FOUR of them are the basis of Dick movies. First off is "The Minority Report." The idea was the same as the movie, but the story was totally different. I definitely didn't see the end coming... it would have made an interesting movie. Second was "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," which became the movie "Total Recall." The story was pretty short, shorter than I would have liked, but it was good. The movie was similar, but a lot was changed. Third was "Paycheck," later made into the movie with Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman. This was actually the most faithful adaptaton. A man wakes up with no memory, finds a bag of clues, and uses them to trace his way back to a secret project. Only the end was different, and of course the movie expanded and added characters, but I liked the story better. Fourth was "Second Variety" made into the movie "Screamers" starring Peter Weller. Again, the two were much alike. A very good SF story set on a bleak planet where clone robots have wiped out much of civilization and have found a way to manufacture themselves. The fifth and shortest is "The Eyes Have It," which is a brief, humorous piece where the main character takes the wording from a romance novel literally... A strong collection and a good recommendation for anyone who wants to compare the stories and movies and wants to get almost all of them in one shot. If only it had contained the story for "Imposter."

The Minority Report is volume four of the collected shorts of the late, and very great, Phillip K. Dick. This collection spans his writing period between 1954 and 1964, but you may be surprised at how up to date the feel of Dick's fiction is. In spite of their age, these stories have maintained a freshness that can only be found with excellent human characterizations nestled inside technical sci-fi. Along with the short, The Minority Report, which the 2002 Spielberg movie starring Tom Cruise was based upon, there are many other strange treats in store for your science fiction palate. Here are a few of my favorites: Autofac, where a post-war network insists on running the world for the good of the citizens. The Mold Of Yancy, a lovely yarn about a seemingly harmless autocrat on an outer colony. The Unreconstructed M, where murder comes in small, shifty boxes. Explorers We, a never-ending cycle of hopes dashed. War Game, the harmless, or not so harmless, tactics of market domination. What The Dead Men Say, exploring a world where half-life after death is expected. Oh, To Be A Blobel digests the aftereffects of infiltrating the enemy's forces by changing appearances. And my favorite, The Days Of Perky Pat, where survivors of the last great war fight their battles with dollhouses. I believe that this is one of Dick's better collections, so if you are hankering for some good, old-fashioned sci-fi that will let you kick back into the future, pick up The Minority report, and Enjoy! TOC: AutoFac Service Call Captive Market The Mold Of Yancy The Minority Report Recall Mechanism The Unreconstructed M Explorers We War Game If There Were No Benny Cemoli Novelty Act WaterSpider What The Dead Men Say Orpheus With Clay Feet The Days Of Perky Pat Stand-By What'll We Do With Ragland Park? Oh, To Be A Blobel Enjoy the book!

A decade ago, Philip K. Dick's complete short stories were published as a five volume series. Prospective buyers should note that this is simply a reissue of the fourth of those five volumes. It isn't a "best of" short story collection; you get the brilliant along with stories tossed off to keep bread on the table. It's still worth four stars. (The fifth volume is also particularly worth owning, and all five are still in print on backorder.)You can't compare Philip K. Dick to any other science fiction writer. About the only other author he can be fairly compared to at all is Franz Kafka - but a workingman's Kafka, shorn of all pretension or artiness. All his heros are the same besieged everyman as K., wrestling with elusive metaphysics, impossible transformations, a cosmic bureaucracy, and a dysfunctional society - but also with overdue rent bills, insistent advertising, and messy divorces.Precogs show up in many of Philip K. Dick's works, but Dick himself was not particularly in the prediction business. Nearly every world he created, large (in his novels) or small (in stories like these) was a future dystopia. But whereas the dystopias of other sf writers make you shudder and think, "Yes, it could be like that... If Things Go On," Dick's have a different flavor, a different kind of immediacy.And the reason for that is, that Philip K. Dick was not so much a science fiction writer as a prophet. He showed us a future that mirrored the present so faithfully that he could convince us of what he always felt - that dystopia is already here; apocalypse is already here. All you have to do (the original meaning of apocalypse) is tear away the veils.Many people are going to take a fresh interest in Mr. Dick's writings because of the movie Minority Report. For them, I give this advice: go first to his novels (some of the best ones are "Ubik", "A Scanner Darkly", "Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"). You have to immerse yourself in his world to grasp where he's coming from, and short stories don't give you room to do that. The novels do.For those who already know his stuff, this book is a treat. Besides the great title story, you'll see the seeds of several of his novels here ("Palmer Eldritch" prefigured in "Days of Perky Pat", "Simulacrum" in "The Mold of Yancy", and "Ubik" in "What the Dead Men Say").

Although these are not necessarily Philip K. Dick's best short works, they are necessary reading for every fan. As the writer in the introduction says, the reason I read PKD is because he has that oddest and most unique of all virtues in a writer - strangeness. You'll be hard-pressed to find stories stranger than this anywhere. As PKD himself says in the notes section at the end of the book, he often sold his stories to the flexible SF magazine Galaxy, as the more famous Astounding and its editor, John W. Campbell, considered his stories "nuts." Also, this notes section is very interesting for other reasons: it becomes apparent in reading them that these stories have much deeper meanings than they at first appear to have. It is quite entertaining enough to read them for their sure strangeness - you will laugh out loud often reading PKD - mostly at the dialogue, which you'll be hard-pressed to determine whether it is entirely unreal, or more real than most. However, deeper and more profound themes were always resonating at the bottom of the well of Philip K. Dick's stories. Although he was quite consistent and extremely prolific with his writings, some of his stories were definitely better than others. Still, everything the man ever wrote is worth reading. This particular collection contains some of his best - and most interesting - shorter works. Covering the period from 1954-1964, we get such classic stories as The Minority Report, an all-time classic SF story; The Unreconstructed M, a dramatic story of spine-tingling SF suspense; and many others - classic stories, profound stories, and just plain weird stories. This is some of the best science fiction published since the Golden Age of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. Essential reading for any fan of science fiction, or of off-kilter writing in general.

I have to say this book was great. I loved the twist and turns of the plot in the book. Some of the ideas are way out there, like the concept of "Pre-Murder". Only one auther would dare touch these ideas and make it into a great story. PKD's short stories are great. WHich seem to be popular in the movie business. This short story Minority Report is soon to be a Steven Spielburg movie. Just Great.