Drew Payne’s Website

Minority Report

(Volume Four of The Collected Stories)

By Philip K Dick

Before reading this collection of stories put out of your mind any memory of the Tom Cruise/Stephen Spielberg film of the same name. The Cruise/Spielberg film was very loosely based on the Philip K Dick’s story, taking only a few elements out of the story. The original story is far superior to the bubble-gum, adventure film that bares the same name.

 

In his best fiction, and this collection certainly contains some of that, Philip K Dick was a visionary – a dark visionary with a down-beat but all too real take on the future.

 

The title story, Minority Report, is set in the Bureau of Pre-Crime were three pre-cogs (people so brain damaged that they live in permanent comas and constantly mutter their predictions) predict murders not yet committed, but this is where similarities with the Cruise/Spielberg film ends. This is a post nuclear war world, were vast swathes of the country is burnt waist. The central character is a middle-aged, over-weight man with a much younger wife, who finds himself at the centre of a political assassination plot. This is a twisting political thriller; set in a world mutated by radiation, were every piece of new information causes another change of direction. Within this story Philip K Dick asks the question, if we know what the future holds does that automatically change the future to an unknown one?

 

A lot of these stories are set in post nuclear war worlds, a theme very popular in Philip K Dick’s fiction, but they are not the same world re-hashed for different stories. Whatever worlds he sets his stories in they are dark and unforgiving worlds. His future is not bright, white and hopeful.

 

In this collection there are stories about robots used for assignation; automatic factories that rule the world and don’t want to give that up; the search for a war criminal who is more or less then he seems; a government sanctioned machine that controls your thoughts; an America were the First Lady is the most important person even if the Presidents come and go she remains the same; a future were they look to 1960’s sci-fi to solve their technological problems; a time-travelling business woman; and much, much more.

 

A problem that can be sometimes levelled at Phillip K Dick’s novels is that, though often an excellent and original plot premise; he did not know how to end it. This does not apply to these stories, even the longer ones. With these stories Philip K Dick ends them perfectly, whether it is an ending to a story or a question left up in the air. Most of these stories were previously published in American sci-fi magazines of the 1950’s and 1960’s, whether this is the reason for their solid structures I don’t know, but these are very satisfying stories to read and have not aged the way a lot of sci-fi from that period has.

 

Forgot the bright, white and upbeat sci-fi of Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas and Star Trek; try the dark and all too real sci-fi of Philip K Dick. Some of the peripheral details of his stories may have aged but their central themes are still fresh and relevant today.