The Minority Report

Whenever I revisit PKD's writing, I'm always surprised by how much reading such stories as a young teenager ended up informing my approach to fiction.

A very entertaining concept, I read this because it was said to be like Psycho-Pass, an anime I love. I need to read more sci-fi.

First published in Fantastic Universe, Philip K. Dick's short-story "The Minority Report" reveals Cold War anxieties by questioning the relationship between authoritarianism and individual autonomy while also addressing issues of free will. The plot to this slim story, that became one of my favorite Spielberg films (although I dislike Tom Cruise), is as follows: Police Commissioner John Anderton finds himself at the mercy of his own crime-prevention system when the prescient precogs (mutants with precognitive abilities they can use to see up to two weeks into the future) he's hired to stop crime before it starts peg him as a soon-to-be murderer (murdering a man named Leopold Kaplan, a man he has never met). At first he goes on the run, but later turns to the offensive to figure out why the precogs identified him as a killer. He finds out that Kaplan is pushing to abolish the crime-prevention system, claiming that it is not accurate. What makes this short story (and film) fascinating is how Anderton is eventually torn between a terrible decision: Should he protect the system he helped create and willingly kill Kaplan to validate the Precrime system? Or should he allow the system to crumble under Kaplan's plan? Dick is a master at toying with questions of free will and in The Minority Report we are given the existence of three apparent minority reports which suggests the possibility of three future time paths, all existing simultaneously, any of which an individual could choose to follow or be sent along following an enticement (as in Anderton's being told he was going to murder an unknown man). This creates for Anderton, an existential crisis of sorts that the rest of the story races to resolve. The main tension, throughout the story, is the fact that Anderton struggles to find an appropriate balance between Precrime authority and individual liberty. And this makes for a fascinating, thought provoking read indeed. Highly recommended.