Springcleaning Book 23 – “Minority Report” by Philip K Dick

In my teenage years I read a lot of science fiction and thus I am familiar with the works of Philip K Dick. I was never a great fan of his books because I thought that they were quite soulless and more concerned with ideas than people – this was quite often the case with books written in what is now considered the Golden Age of science fiction writing, in my experience. This collection of short stories (published in 2005) is given the title of Minority Report which is one of the nine stories in the anthology. I was sent it as part of my book subscription and it is in very good condition, although I note that it has now been superseded by other collections of the author’s short fiction.

These nine stories are full of ideas. Each one seems to look at what would happen if something in the future world went wrong, and all of them have as their theme issues of identity. The title story has obviously been made into a film with the same name and the story “We Can Remember it for you Wholesale” is the story on which the film Total Recall was based. The films take the short story and turn it into a more complex film which also deals with the same issues as does the very well-known film Bladerunner which was based on the author’s story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” which is not in this collection but which I have read.

I thought that the ideas in these stories were fascinating and the issues explored were interesting – this author has more ideas in one short story than many others do in a whole trilogy. I sometimes thought that the endings were unresolved or ambiguous but they were all interesting. The characters, however, were often just present to enable the plots and seemed to have little life or reality of their own. After a while I got tired of the ideas and wanted to identify with the people more. This is obviously a personal preference – this author is well regarded and very popular in the science fiction community. This author is one whose books make very good films and I think, unusually, that I liked the films better than the stories. I enjoyed reading this collection but I didn’t really want to read any more and so the book is off to Oxfam to find a new home.