Customer Reviews

The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories

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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").

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!

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.

The minority report is a great book if you like short science fiction. Phillip Dick is one of the masters of the genre. Dick also wrote the stories for Blade Runner and Total Recall in case you didn't know. The title story [made into the Tom Cruise movie] is only a small part of this collection. Frankly, the story has a slightly different ending, and in my opinion, more conceptually pleasing. What I enjoyed about this book is that there are lots of stories. Some are hits, and some are misses, but all of them illustrate Dick's ability to create worlds and characters that are flawed and believable. There are no clear-cut heroes in the stories - they often have ulterior motives. The one common thread running through all of his works is that they are strange. It is almost as if his mind worked differently than the rest of the human races. He sees things, and has ideas that are so complex and innovative that it baffles the mind that people like Dan Brown gain fame for the Da Vinci Code, and Phillip Dick died Poor, and largely unrecognized outside a small group of science fiction fans. If you want the challenge yourself, and expand your mind, buy this book and give his writings a chance.

Relic113

This was my first introduction to PKD, and although all the stories aren't the best they do entertain. My biggest complaint is many of the stories overlap in odd ways, and in turn make them feel a tad repetative. An example is the pre-cog (used for full effect in 'Minority Report') is brought up in numerous other stories although these stories take place in alternate futures. Dick seems almost obsessed with a nuclear fallout future, and although some of these stories are interesting, many are just dull.

I enjoyed the stories as a whole, and recommend them to anyone who enjoys looking into the art of the short story and the mind of PKD.

In The Minority Report And Other Classic Stories, Philip K. Dick continues his brilliance of the sci-fi genre. I'm sure you all know of the story which is its title(film by Steven Spielberg), but there is plenty more action,intrigue,drama and laughs in this collection as well. Notable worthy stories(my favorites)from this are 'Captive Market', in which an old woman who is a antique collector and the only one who knows of the secret portal to an apocalyptic future. In 'The Mold Of Yancy' a group of computer analysts create the perfect digital man with perfect morals of life in said culture to teach citizens how to cope with life. In 'Waterspider' a group of scientists go back in the past to capture a 'pre-cog, (or phycic) and bring him to the future to create a formula to change the present. These stories are all so good and all have a different feel and aura to them. I recommend this collection or any of Dick's work if you like intricate and thought provoking stories as well as adventure and suspense, this collection will not bore.

I have been a lover of Science Fiction all my life, and many of the stories in this collection are ones I read as a child. In fact, I was surprised to find that many of the fondly remembered stories and situations came from the master's typewriter. It is easy to see why so many movies have been adapted from his short stories, and I am certain that many more will grace our screens in the coming years.

I was particularly interested by the Minority Report story (having seen the movie first). It's rare to find unique plots. The stories are pretty hit or miss, but there are a few gems.

PKD just doesn't think like everybody else, at least not the way we think when we're awake. That these stories were written 40 to 50 years ago under the cloak of the cold war gives his thinking some context but the direction his stories often take is completely unique. The underlying sub-text was, for me, that in spite of mankinds tendency towards chaos, there lives in the heart of men hope. In spite of some of the nightmare background scenarios in which his characters live, there is a realisation that if man has made it this far, advanced this much, then why not a little more?

I've been a HUGE fan of PKD for many years now. (And not just because I weigh close to 300 pounds!) I own nearly every book/story that he's ever written and this collection is just as good and not one bit worse than any of his other collected series of short stories on the market. As a professional sci-fi writer myself it is with great pleasure and enthusiasm that I recommend any PKD body of work to the literary neophyte as well as the old hand. If you're a sci-fi enthusiast you can't go wrong with PKD. Intelligent Sci-Fi? You bet!