I had never read any of Philip K. Dick's stories, but I had seen Minority Report & Paycheck and was aware of how much of his work had been the inspiration for so much science fiction TV and movie productions, so I decided this was a good place to start. I enjoyed the Minority Report story (I don't think the movie really did it justice), but the other stories never truly captured my interest. I look for a storyline to pull me in and it just didn't happen for me. "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" left me kind of confused. "Paycheck" was very enjoyable. I loved following the main character work through the miscellaneous objects to piece together his true past. Philip K. Dick is considered one of the great science fiction writers. I think it is worth reading for anyone who, like me, discovered science fiction in recent years. ( )

PKD is amazing, and it's depressing to compare him to modern sci-fi authors. His short stories are probably his best work, as they present the weird, mind-twisting premise without distraction. These four short stories are among his best, and I think all (or at least 3 of them) have been made into movies. ( )

The book contains 5 novellas from PKD, the main ones being "Minority Report" (which formed the basis for the movie) and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" which was the inspiration for Total Recall. Besides this I also read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and "A Scanner Darkly".

I was hoping these novellas would more closely resemble "A Scanner Darkly" in quality but I was highly disappointed in them. It seems after reading them that PKD is a "one-trick-pony" when it comes to plot: guy is put into fantastic situation in a futuristic setting - a hot woman betrays him - he is confused - robots - predictable plot twist - the end.

I would've maybe excused the misogynist undertones that litter the works, but he would've had to write them in the 50's, maybe 60's which was not the case. Also the plot twists being so predictable really didn't hold up scrutiny with so many other movies and books having been released before the time of these being written with genuinely clever red herrings and turns. These were cancelled-season-low-budget-cop-show level bad. Will probably skip other works of his, which saddens me since "A Scanner Darkly" is one of my favorites and I love it regardless of having been so disappointed by his other works. ( )

John Anderton pioneered the police Precrime Division which has a military counter-part. Precrime uses three precogs to identify criminals before they can strike. As a result, most crime, including murder, is increasingly rare. On the day his assistant cum replacement shows up, Anderton receives a report that he himself will murder a man he has never met, Leopold Kaplan. Kaplan is a retired military general who learns of the precogs report through his friends and tracks Anderton down before he can escape off planet. Kaplan hopes to abolish the police Precrime Division in favour of the military arm. After studying each of the three precog reports in detail, Anderton makes a startling discovery.

SPOILERS:
Anderton surrenders to Kaplan at a rally where Kaplan hopes to demonstrate that Precrime is punishing innocent people. However, Anderton shots Kaplan at the rally. Anderton realized that the first precog predicted he would kill Kaplan. The second precog predicted that knowing he would kill Kaplan would prevent Anderton from killing Kaplan but instead make the two of them talk (a minority report). The third precog predicted that after they talked, Anderton would learn of Kaplan's plan for Precrime, and kill him. While two of the reports predicted Anderton killing Kaplan, all the reports were actually Minority Reports. After explaining how such "minority reports" based upon timing can only occur to someone with access to the precog reports, Anderton and his wife are exiled from Earth.

Minority Report.doc ( )

The title story, "Minority Report", was probably the one I was most familiar with going in, thanks to the movie. The basic premise - that there exists a police bureau of "pre-crime" where mutants who are able to see the future report on what crimes are going to take place, thus allowing the police to arrest the would-be criminals before the crime is actually reported - and the basic plot - a report comes through that the chief of police (who is also the founder of the pre-crime unit) is going to murder somebody - are the same as in the movie, but a variety of other elements are different. While it's in some ways simpler than the movie, the story's still very layered, and certainly very thought-provoking.

"We Can Remember it for You Wholesale" is the short story on which the movie Total Recall was based. (While I've seen the movie - it was my first R-rated movie, in fact - it was half a lifetime ago, so I can't do much by way of comparison). In the story, a guy who works a boring, dead-end job wants a little more excitement in his life, so he goes to a company that's essentially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in reverse, to have false memories of a trip to Mars as a secret agent implanted. Once there, however, neither he nor the company get quite what they bargained for. This one wasn't quite as thought-provoking as the first story, but it was still interesting and fun to listen to.

"Paycheck" is the story of a young man who has just had his memory wiped as the fulfilling clause of his two-year contract with a construction company. In lieu of the huge sum of money he was expecting, though, he is handed a bag of seemingly worthless trinkets. However, when the trinkets start proving useful in seemingly unforseeable ways, he starts to question what he had actually being doing during the past two years.

This story is an interesting counterpoint to "Minority Report" on the theme of "what would you do if you could see into the future?" It's good and suspenseful, with enough mystery and intrigue to keep things ticking along nicely. However, the whole thing was a little bit soured by a discordantly sexist tone to the ending one of the story threads.

In"Second Variety", the Cold War has escalated into widespread, world-shattering, and interminable war. In order to gain an edge over the Russians, UN troops have developed mechanized heat-seeking killing machines, or "claws". However, the claws are just as dangerous as the enemy soldiers ever were... and now they're evolving.

While this might have been scary and suspenseful and fascinating when it was originally published in the early 1950s, in a post-Battlestar Galactica world, the revelation that "The Cylons look like us now" was not particularly novel, or even particularly suspenseful. The fact that the protagonist took so very long to twig to the truth of the situation long after I was going "Ye gods, you moron, that's a machine!" made him seem intensely dumb.

....but still not so dumb as the protagonist of the last story. In "The Eyes Have It", the protagonist becomes convinced that certain phrases in a novel (i.e. "His eyes followed her around the room.") are indicators of invasion by a race of alien beings who can disassociate their body parts at will. While this was obviously written with tongue very firmly in cheek, to me it didn't read as"funny" so much as "irretrievably dumb." The protagonist is obviously literate, if he's reading a novel... but apparently he's never seen figurative language before? Even satire needs a plausible premise.

Overall Review and Recommendation: Every time I read more sci-fi, I'm better able to define what kinds of sci-fi I like and dislike. Dislikes: a lot of tech talk or space-ship battles. Likes: any sci-fi that is driven by the story, the characters, or the premise. (Also: long walks on the beach.) I'm not anti-technology per se, but the technology needs to be in service of something else in the story (i.e. answering "does being able to see the future change it?"), and not a point in and of itself. The stories here were almost all premise-driven, and as such, were very enjoyable. Their trappings haven't aged particularly well, but if you can mentally edit out the "data tapes" and replace them with "futuristic data storage technology of the Future!", the stories themselves work pretty much as well as they ever did. Which, I guess, is why they're considered classics of the genre. 4 out of 5 stars. ( )