Customer Reviews

The Minority Report and Other Stories

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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, intrusive 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.

For those who already know his stuff, this book is a treat. Besides the great title story, you'll see the seeds of some 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"). This is the fourth of five volumes Citadel has published of his complete short stories. This and the fifth volume are most worth owning. Once you become a fanatic, of course, you'll want to have them all. (There was once a single volume, shorter than this, of collected best short stories, but I believe it's out of print.)

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 Asimove. Essential reading for any fan of science fiction, or of off-kilter writing in general.

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."

It's tempting to say that these stories from 1954, 1955, 1958, and 1963 represent great periods of prolific creativity for Dick and the working out of themes and ideas that later found their way into his more famous novels. But Dick was more often than not prolific and frequently recycled motifs and themes and even character names from stories into novels. What the Dick scholar will find here is a growing emphasis, at least in the short story format, on illusion and fakery, the seeds of some of Dick's novels, and, for the first time, stories which convey the frequent despair and desperation of those novels.

But the Dick fan and scholar is going to read this collection as a matter of course. What does it offer for those just discovering Dick or his casual readers?

Of course, there is the famous title story. However, with it, Dick seems more interested in posing a logic puzzle based on the implications of precognition than making a serious political statement even though the story features much more political intrigue than the movie based on it. Indeed, with it and several Dick stories here, one gets the sense that the political struggles between various government agencies owe a lot to a study of the Soviet Union or, more probably, the Third Reich. There are other minor stories: "Stand-By" and a rare sequel, "What'll We Do With Ragland Park?". Their main attraction is Dick's weird speculation on future media -- prophecies which don't seem far from the mark 40 years later. The "news clown" of these stories doesn't seem, apart from his makeup, that different from our late night comedy hosts in America. But then the listings in _TV Guide_ often remind me of Dick. They also show Dick's fondness for theorizing odd mutations of American government. Here the President has been replaced by computer.

In "Novelty Act", the nation is ruled by a permanent First Lady who inflicts her cultural tastes on America via public tv. She's mistress, wife, and mother to the nation, many of whom long to audition their talents at the White House. Later incorporated into the novel _The Simulacra_, it is the first story of Dick's that doesn't just mention the despair and desperation of its hero but induces them in the reader as effectively as many of his novels do.

There's also some political fakery afoot in the story and that theme is echoed in "The Mold of Yancy" (reworked for _The Penultimate Truth_), which features a culture built around a doggedly anodyne Eisenhowerish everyman, and "If There Were No Benny Cemoli". The latter is one of the book's highlights and, against a background of searching for war criminals on a devastated Earth, built around the proposition that reality is what the _New York Times_ says it is. The spirit of a dead businessman haunts the mediasphere and a political convention in "What the Dead Man Say". It reminded me of some of the loas in early William Gibson.

Fakery of a forensic sort is the idea of "The Unreconstructed M". The idea of a robot built to leave clues designed to frame someone for murder was intriguing. However, because the story goes on too long and into unnecessary tangents, this is also minor Dick.

At this point in the short story part of his career, Dick seems to be less interested in mutants and berserk machines than before. Still, we get an automated command and control economy that needs reprogramming in "Autofac", and "Recall Mechanism" explores the link between precognitive mutants and certain psychological tics.

The science fiction story device used most often here is time travel. "Service Call" has some engineers getting a disturbing glimpse at the future of conformity machinery. Or, as the ad says, "Why be half loyal?". "Captive Market" has a miserly shopkeeper who only sees a profit where others see a horrifying future.

Time travel gets mixed with meta-science fiction in a couple of uncharacteristic Dick stories. In "Waterspider", time travelers come back to snatch Dick's friend Poul Anderson because, you see, all science fiction writers are unconscious precognitives, and they need his help on an experimental space project. This story drops plenty of famous names and even mentions Dick's inspiration, A. E. van Vogt. "Orpheus with Clay Feet" works a witty variation on the idea of time travelers meeting famous artists of the past. Here uncreative people like our protagonist can take solace in inspiring great works of art if not creating them. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Here the artist is the greatest science fiction writer of all time, Jack Dowland.

"Explorers We", somewhere in the middle range of quality, strikes one as a _Twilight Zone_ episode about aliens' failure to communicate. "Oh, To Be a Blobel!" is a story probably more famous then it deserves to be. Judging from Dick's notes as to his intentions, it's mostly a failure to illustrate the Nietzsche maxim about becoming a dragon when battling dragons. However, it works on other levels.

Along with "If There Were No Benny Cemoli", the gem of the collection is "The Days of Perky Pat". While children roam a landscape blighted by nuclear war and engage in useful pursuits like hunting and making knives, their parents are underground and expending their energy on making elaborate layouts for their Barbie-like Perky Pat dolls. Their infantile obsession with recreating the minutia of a vanished world is enabled by handy care packages dropped by benovelent Martians. Dick has some weirdly plausible things to say about play and the role of toys in our lives and mental health. This story also inspired Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

In some ways, the variety of themes here dilutes the power of Dick's typical obsessions, especially the metaphor of machine as an anti-life force. There are also fewer really exceptional stories here than in the earlier volumes of this series. However, it is still as good an introduction to Dick as some of the collections he edited himself.

In this fourth volume of the five-book collection of Dick's short stories, it is put forth (in the amusing "Waterspider") that science fiction authors are actually pre-cognitive. In a later story, PKD himself foretells Richard Nixon's election to the Presidency in 1968...four years before the event! Probably a lucky guess, but who knows....

This collection comprises stories written in the late 1950s and early '60s, a period when Dick was also taking off as a novelist. Some of this has had an influence on his short stories, which are generally longer than before, and which, in some cases are early versions of what would eventually become novels such as the Simulacra and the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Generally speaking, these are all good to great stories. The title story - made into a movie last year - is a clever little mystery, and that is just one of the gems within. Although most of the stories are disconnected, many involve precognition and most have a bit of dark humor running them. Some - such as Orpheus with Clay Feet - are strictly humorous, while others are far more serious.

As with the other volumes in this series, this is a great collection with very little in the way of bad stories - quite an accomplishment considering how quickly some of these were cranked out. For fans of science fiction, especially the off-beat sort which was Dick's specialty, this is highly recommended.

With the appearance of the movie I just had to read the story again. 'The Minority Report' is a clever story and it does show tentative grasping at topics that were later to become so seminal in all of Philip Dick's work. What is real? Would an ability to see the future consolidate reality before it even happened? Not so according to this story, because there are ways of seeing and times of seeing.

With 'Blade Runner' a successful movie with a 'cops'n'robbers' theme, I guess this one just had to follow. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I make no comment in advance, but I am encouraged that the title is preserved (unlike 'Blade Runner' or 'Total Recall') and so is the lead character's name. Unfortunately the renaming of the precogs, as I have read in reviews of the film, does seem rather weak.

Of course, in all collections of stories, different readers will have different favourites. In this collection I particularly like 'Autofac' but for sheer humour and unpredictability my favourite is 'If There Were No Benny Cemoli'. Now, what a movie that story could make!

I have often seen hawked about the notion that the work of Philip Dick is a precursor to cyberpunk. Personally I loathe cyberpunk and yet Philip Dick is my favourite author. Have I missed soemthing here?

Hello my friends out there in computerland.

I will try to be brief. I like Philip K Dick. I like his novels and I like his short stories. While his novels are, at their best, philosophical meditations combined with crazy sf ideas, these stories are mostly just the crazy ideas. Plots weave in and out of madness.

Most of the stories collected in this five-volume series represent early work--before most (if not all) of the novels.

But these are good ideas, good stories. From the five volumes there are at least 5 stories I know of that have been produced or are in production now as movies. A two-hour movie might just be able to capture the plot of one of these stories. The complexities are great.

These stories are fun to read. I like them. And I think that you will, too. Sorry I can't tell you that this is the one story collection to buy, if you are only going to buy one of the five. I don't know enough about them to tell you that much. But I enjoy them all, this one more than most--better than the first one, certainly.

Thank you.

It is unfortunate that the movie Minority Report will result in many readers first exposure to Dick being this book. This is nothing like the movie so viewers will be disappointed... plus he has done better as a writer.

This is a collection of short stories. You will recognise these stories as the bare bones from which numerous movie scripts have been developed. The stories show Dick's originality but also expose his weakness in terms of handling plot development and compositional devices to enhance the story line.

As we have witnessed how his stories have been manipulated, enhanced and embellished for the screen, it's obvious to see that what we're getting with this collection is a very basic treatment of each story's potential. I believe they show Dick to have a great imagination but to be only an average writer.

I greatly enjoyed "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" which shows much greater depth as a writer. If you haven't read Dick before I recommend you start there and leave this one to hard core fans.

Philip K Dick is one of the best storytellers of the sci-fi genre. His short works and most of his novels are interesting dives into the nature of humanity and reality. Great reading that will twist your brain or leave you perplexed. I recommend Philip Dick to anyone looking for sci-fi that is out of the norm. [...]

Essential reading for a PDK fan and someone who wants to see where the ideas for some of Hollywood's recent films came from. Some of these have way different endings and only somewhat resemble the films for which they're credited as the genesis.

What I would like to see here is a LIST of what is actually in this collection. Amazon's information has nothing.