Minority Report and other stories
The first I actually heard the name Philip K. Dick, it was from a radio host on WBAI, Jim Freund, a true Dick fanatic. He was a member of a local bulletin board system in New York City called Magpie, created by Steve Manes. A bunch of us were invited over to WBAI to watch him do his show, The Hour of the Wolf, which was unfortunately 5am to 7am. But this was back in the 80’s and I was still young and all-nighters were not a rare occurance for me back then. A few years later Jim Freund actually got us tickets for a theatrical performance of Dick’s Close My Eyes The Policeman Said put on by a theater group from NYU.
I call myself a PKD (Philip K. Dick) fan, but I’m ashamed to say that I really have not read considerable amounts of his prose. The novels I’ve read are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip, and Radio Free Albemuth. Up until reading this collection of short stories, I’d never read any of his short fiction.
For those unfamiliar with Dick, his stories are generally dark and paranoid, and reality is shaky. Dick deals with issues of sanity, alternate realities, drug-distorted realities, religious-distorted realities, and the different perspectives of reality between artificial life (or artificial intelligence as it’s known to us today) and natural life. Dick himself had a somewhat tenuous grasp on reality during some of his life and eventually drank himself to death. Nonetheless, his copious works carry his name forward and this book is an example of how it has influenced film makers.
As a science fiction author I find he was often off the mark when it comes to some of the finer details in his portrayal of future worlds. It’s a common complaint that when imagining the future, authors often underestimate the changes in the farther future (say of 50 or more years), but overestimate the changes in the nearer future (say under 25 years). In addition, the vast majority of what Dick wrote was before the age of the personal computer, and since few authors envisioned such an enormously influential device on society, a great deal of what came before the mid 1970's seems very dated. Nonetheless, Dick does get a few ideas eerily right. Reality may not be as dark and devastated as the ones he painted, but some of the fears he had play themselves out in the more questionable actions that government has taken since his death. Whether or not his books accurately predict our future is not of the utmost relevence, however. Appropriately enough, his work, to me anyway, is more about alternate futures; futures that could have been possible but have turned out not to be - at least mostly - or at least not yet.
As mentioned, many of Dick’s works have been cinematized. The first of these was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (although his story Imposter was apparently dramatized for TV in the 60’s), which was made into the Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and even watching it today, over twenty years after it came out, it still does not seem “dated” to me the way so many older (and even some more recent)Sci-Fi movies do. The book, although containing the same characters and also being about replicants, was turned on it’s head. In the movie, the whole point of it is that the replicants are given expiration dates because it’s found that after a certain point they develop real emotions. Whereas in the book, the reason they are being hunted is because they cannot have real emotions, like compassion, and so have no qualms about killing.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is one of the few of Dick’s full-length novels that's been made into a movie. Most of the other movies based on his work have adapted short stories, and the collection reviewed here contains most of these screen-adapted stories. Unfortunately the cinematic versions of these stories pale in comparison to Blade Runner. Like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, most of these stories have to some degree been turned on their heads.
In Paycheck, the alternate future is more fleshed out in the book and it is one where the government is more oppressive and companies are the only entities that hold significant power outside the government. The individual has few rights. This is a common theme in Dick’s works. The political/military/economic dynamics play into the story in a central way, very different from the somewhat personal story of a lone freelancer pitted against a shady company in the movie.
In Minority Report, Dick’s view of a post WWIII future where world governments battle with military forces and industry for power changes a great deal of how the story works out. Again, much of the plot remains the same. John Anderton is a police commissioner in charge of “Pre-Crime,” a division that predicts murders before they happen, by way of idiots who babble incoherently and then their words are processed by a computer into coherent thoughts. Murder has basically been eliminated until he finds his own name being predicted by the idiots. The movie is more about Anderton clearing his name and finding the true murderer, but the book diverts from this in a very “P.K. Dickian” way, which although certainly interesting is not exactly standard movie fare!
We Can Remember It For You Wholesale was made into the 1990 film Total Recall, with Arnold Schwartzenigger. This might have been the most alterned in some ways as any of his stories. This was a fairly short story about uncovering memories that had supposedly been deleted. It ends in a fairly bizarre and abrupt way that you will never expect. Never do we see the main character, Quail, go to Mars. He simply retells a few scant details about being on the planet as an undercover agent. Whereas the movie only hints at this, in the orginal story you get hit much more up front by the question of how real memory is and what memory is real and what is fantasy.
The final story in the collection that was converted to the screen was Second Variety, which was made into the movie Screamers. This is the one film that I did not see, so I can’t really speak to the difference between it and the original story. I will say that the story is very typical of Dick, about a soldier on an Earth that has been ravaged by nuclear war. Intelligent machines have become a major element of the battle. As with other works by Dick, what we initially assume about the identity of a person starts to come into doubt. I thought this was a good, albeit pretty dark tale.
The one movie that I’ve seen based on a story by Dick which was not included in this collection was Imposter. The movie was quite terrible, so I can’t imagine the story being worse, and assume it must have been a whole lot better, but then I’m sure Dick has some duds in his collection as many prolific writers do.
The last piece in this collection, The Eyes Have It, is a spoof, very short and undoubtedly something that will make you laugh