Rating: 
Summary: Miss O's review
Review: Minority Report was a very interesting book. It kept me on the edge of my seat, and it threw many unexpected twists at me. John Anderton, a respectable chief of police,is accused of a murder that hasn't even happened yet, and he will stop at nothing to prove his innocence. Leopold Kaplin (Anderton's victim) will stop at nothing to see that Anderton is detained and that the pre-crime system is proven to be a failure. Anderton suspects his wife, Lisa, and his new "co-worker" Witwar are behind the strange accusation of his murder. This book is full of lies and deceit, and in the end Anderton doesn't know whom to trust. The three pre-cogs hold the secret to Anderton's fate...does Anderton really murder Kaplin??...Or does he get the information he needs just in time? Read Minority Report to find out!
Rating: 
Summary: Minority Report
Review: Philip Dick's short stories read like bad Twilight Zone episodes. Fortunately, they are more than made up for by his prize winning novels, whose longer form truly transport the reader into other(Dick's)universes. There's just not enough length to the short stories to view them as anything but curiosities. This doesn't mean you shouldn't buy this book, however- the stories are valuable in their own right as examples of the pathways which mainstream SF has taken in the last 35 years.
Rating:
Summary: Minority Report
Review: Philip Dick's short stories read like bad Twilight Zone episodes. Fortunately, they are more than made up for by his prize winning novels, whose longer form truly transport the reader into other(Dick's)universes. There's just not enough length to the short stories to view them as anything but curiosities. This doesn't mean you shouldn't buy this book, however- the stories are valuable in their own right as examples of the pathways which mainstream SF has taken in the last 35 years.
Rating:
Summary: Future Noir is Kicking
Review: 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. [...]
Rating: 
Summary: Another necessary volume for the obsessed
Review: While Volume 5 "Eye of the Sibyl" comes close to being the "Best of" (many of those stories were in the out-of-print Ballantine "Best of Phil Dick") every volume is worth having, even if only 50% are really memorable stories. Unfortunately, the film adaptions usually stress action & chase-scenes and ignore his deeper, weirder more interesting concepts. "Minority report" is just another chase-story with a new twist on the usual "predict-the-future" plot at the very end. Not really worth a movie adaption but hopefully it will make some viewers into readers and discover his better writing.
Rating:
Summary: all those posters - I had to read it again
Review: 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?
Rating:
Summary: all those posters - I had to read it again
Review: 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?
Rating:
Summary: minority report
Review: 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.)
Rating:
Summary: Dick the Revelator
Review: 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.)
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