The Minority Report

Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable collection
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Clever, but not great literature
Review: Clever is a good word to sum up Philip K Dick's short stories. His plots and visions of dystopian futures are imaginative, occasionally thought provoking, and satisfying. However, his writing... isn't. He has an unfortunate tendancy to tell instead of show - to lead the reader by the hand through each twist and turn in his characters' heads, put in a lot of clumsy, not-quite-believeable dialog, and then beat you over the head with the punch line at the end. It's as if he's in such a hurry to get you to understand his point that he can't be bothered with such irrelvancies as believable characters and situations.
This is not to say that the stories aren't good: they are! I enjoyed "The Minority Report" and "We Remember it for You Wholesale" (much more of a commedy in Dick's incarnation than the movie) in particular. But what we have here is one of the few authors who is improved by being turned into a screenplay. Even "Ahnold" - never accused of over-subtlety - leant a sense of mystery and believable confusion to Total Recall almost entirely lacking in the short story that inspired it.

Rating:
Summary: Clever, but not great literature
Review: Clever is a good word to sum up Philip K Dick's short stories. His plots and visions of dystopian futures are imaginative, occasionally thought provoking, and satisfying. However, his writing... isn't. He has an unfortunate tendancy to tell instead of show - to lead the reader by the hand through each twist and turn in his characters' heads, put in a lot of clumsy, not-quite-believeable dialog, and then beat you over the head with the punch line at the end. It's as if he's in such a hurry to get you to understand his point that he can't be bothered with such irrelvancies as believable characters and situations.
This is not to say that the stories aren't good: they are! I enjoyed "The Minority Report" and "We Remember it for You Wholesale" (much more of a commedy in Dick's incarnation than the movie) in particular. But what we have here is one of the few authors who is improved by being turned into a screenplay. Even "Ahnold" - never accused of over-subtlety - leant a sense of mystery and believable confusion to Total Recall almost entirely lacking in the short story that inspired it.

Rating:
Summary: minority report
Review: compare with the movie, the real short novel is less visiualised.

Rating:
Summary: short stories
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Pre-Murder........GREAT
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Philip K. Dick: Pre-cog?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Philip K. Dick: Pre-cog?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Start Here
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A Must for the Dick Fan. Good Intro for Dick Neophyte
Review: 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.