Title The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories Series --- Author Philip K. Dick Cover Art Kristine Mills Publisher Citadel Press - 2002 First Printing Citadel Press - 1987 Category Anthology Warnings None Main Characters See below Main Elements Science Fiction

• Autofac (1955)
• Service Call (1955)
• Captive Market (1955)
• The Mold of Yancy (1955)
• The Minority Report (1956)
• Recall Mechanism (1959)
• The Unreconstructed M (1957)
• Explorers We (1959)
• War Game (1959)
• If There Were No Benny Cemoli (1963)
• Novelty Act (1964)
• Waterspider (1964)
• What the Dead Men Say (1964)
• Orpheus with Clay Feet (1987)
• The Days of Perky Pat (1963)
• Stand-By (1963)
• What'll We Do with Ragland Park? (1963)
• Oh, to Be a Blobel! (1964)

"More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds." --Wall Street Journal

Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick to have been the greatest science fiction writer on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount and his reputation has been enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now presented annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.

This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction covering the years 1954-1964, and featuring such fascinating tales as The Minority Report (the inspiration for Steven Spielberg's film), Service Call, Stand-By, The Days of Perky Pat, and many others. Here, readers will find Dick's initial explorations of the themes he so brilliantly brought to life in his later work.

Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for the best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. In the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The classic stories of Philip K. Dick offer an intriguing glimpse into the imagination of one of science fiction's most enduring and respected names.

While I was reading the story Autofac I had what might a very PKD moment. As I read it, something in the back of my head told me I've encountered this story before. As I kept reading I realized I could visualize bits of it quite vividly, at which point it occured to me I didn't read it before, I watched it on TV. But what was the chance that a Bradbury TV series would match so perfectly with a Philip K. Dick story? Till I realized the TV series was Electric Dreams, and was written by Dick, not Bradbury, and Autofac was indeed one of the stories turned into an episode.

Dick always questioned reality, and in particular, memory.

Autofac - What happens when automation goes too far, even when it believes to be working to the benefit of humanity

Service Call - What if a repairman from the future knocks on your door with the intention of fixing a device that does not yet exist?

Captive Market - We all know future has many possibilities. What if there was someone out there who could see them, even visit them. What if she finds a future where humans have lost everything, and need her to provide the basic necessities, at a huge profit? And what if that future no longer needed her anymore? But then, anything is possible.

The Mold of Yancy - The power of the media to control the masses and to influence how they think. After all if that nice man on TV thinks a certain way about a certain topic, probably we all should too?

The Minority Report - The first line said it all - "I'm getting bald. Bald, fat and old". There was no way Tom Cruise was going to play that character (plus the story is really short and would never have filled a 2hr movie), so the only thing in common with the big screen version is the idea of predicting crime. Other than that, even the ending it completely different, with a completely different point being made, but then a mass media movie needs a happy ending and let's just say Dick wasn't exactly into that happy thing...

Recal Mechanism - What if you are a failed precog, the only future you can see is your own death, but you don't really see it per-se, you just start getting urges or phobias around certain things that you can't explain. And what does a psychiatrist tell a patient when a precog's vision is never wrong and cannot be changed?

The Unreconstructed M - in a world of advanced police investigative techniques, it takes some advanced technology to commit the perfect crime.

Explorers We - a very PKD story where what happens if who you think you are, who you truly believe you are, is not actually who you are, and everyone around you knows it except you?

War Game - Some company execs are testing out some new toys, however each proves to be subtly disturbing, in particular one where a group of toy soldiers try over and over again to take over a fortress. What happens when they finally succeed? Is it a bomb? But with their focus on this toy, others appear less overtly frightening...but those might be the worst ones of all.

If there were no Benny Cemoli - if someone comes looking for whoever started a revolution, what would you do to send them in the wrong direction?

Novelty Act - a strange world where people as so closely bound to their apartment buildings they rarely go out, and rivalries between them exist. However to be able to remain in your chose building you need to pass tests, prove you are a good citizen. If you cannot, well, next best thing is to try to come up with a novelty act, like playing classical music on jugs, and be sent to Washington to perform for the president...the same president who has been around for a long, long time...this isn't the only PKD story in this collection where a great inspirational leader isn't what they appear to be.

Waterspider - A future world where people thing the SF writers of the 50's and 60's are actually precogs (e.g. Minority Report) and can tell the future. After all many of the the things they wrote came true. I really enjoyed this one, looking at at SF conventions as if they were precog societies sharing information about the future. And PKD picking out different names like Asimov, Bradbury and Leinster (and Dick...), and even tossing poor Poul Anderson to the future so he really could write an accurate story of the future. I wonder if Poul ever returned the favour? I really enjoyed this one, it got a smile out of me.

What the Dead Men Say - a world where the dead can still speak, at least for a little while, after death. But when an important business man dies, his voice is not heard from this coffin but rather coming from the expanse of space. He takes over TV, radio and telephones, pushing his vision of how his company should be run, and also getting involved in politics. In the meantime there are those trying to counter him, but how do you fight a disembodied voice that can come through any electronic device and appears to be able to see all and know all?

Orpheus with Clay Feet - this one is similar to Waterspider in that someone in the future wants to inspire a modern day SF writer to write SF. However he fails so miserably that the only SF tale that author ends up writing is the very one we're reading! While there were a few famous names dropped here, the one who was to be the greatest Jack Dowland, we've never heard of...all because his muse made such a mess of things.

The Days of Perky Pat - a post-apocalyptic world. People live underground in pits and martian drop food packages. Why? Guess it doesn't really matter. What matters is the adults all obsessively play a game called Perky Pat where they for all intents and purposes, have Pat live the life they once lived. Not sure exactly how the game works, but when they discover another pit is playing with Connie Companion instead, a rivalry is born.

Stand-By & What'll We Do with Ragland Park? - The machine that was running the world breaks down to the temporary president has to take over, but a TV personality thinks he'd do better at the job. These two stories are related to each other, the one continuing where the other left off. To be honest, though I read these only a few days ago, I barely remembered what they were about.

Oh, to Be a Blobel! - In the future we go to war with blobs from Mars, and to infiltrate them we modify some humans to take their form. Unfortunately it wasn't so easy to reverse the process, with those humans spending half the day in their amoeba forms. Turns out the Blobels did the reverse, so there are blobs that are stuck in human form for some hours of the day. When you don't fit in with either society, maybe you need to hook up with the other misfits. I particularly enjoyed this one.