Book Review: The Minority Report by Philip K Dick

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Venganza Media, Inc.

Tv & Film, Film History, Tv & Film:film Reviews, Film Reviews, Film Interviews

4.5 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2011

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The precogs have determined you must read this story Books & Nachos is now part of Now Playing Podcast. Before our book reviews were branded as Now Playing Podcast Book Reviews, they were released under a separate show called Books & Nachos. That podcast focused on book discussions, most of which tied directly into films we were covering on Now Playing. We’ve now merged those episodes into the main Now Playing Podcast feed for easier access and a complete archive. But these older episodes still have the original Books & Nachos intro and credits on those older recordings. This week, Stuart turns to The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella that laid the groundwork for the later big-screen adaptation starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg. Long before glossy holograms and futuristic car chases, Dick’s original story presented a lean, unsettling premise: a justice system that arrests people for crimes they have not yet committed, based on the predictions of three precognitive mutants. But what happens when those predictions don’t agree? Is the original short story sharper and more subversive than its cinematic counterpart, or does the expansion to feature length enhance what Dick only sketched? Read along with Stuart to find out! {Philip K. Dick Series} {Book Reviews}

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Books and Notchos, a podcast for those of us who find excitement in the pages of a good book.
0:12.5	Fiction and nonfiction, graphic novels, and more.
0:15.4	We are here to help you find something great to read.
0:24.3	Hello. something great to read. Hello and welcome to Books and Nachos, the Then Guns Media Podcasts about all things in print.
0:29.6	I am your host, Stuart in L.A., and if you're a precog, you already know that this is the minority report,
0:36.3	the 1956 short story that would become the basis for the
0:40.6	Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise extravaganza, that 2002 film Minority Report.
0:47.3	Two different works with the same basic bullet points, but very different intents.
0:52.9	I'm going to try to not focus on the movie, at least until the end.
0:56.6	Let's just get into the story.
0:58.5	It's a short one.
0:59.4	103 pages, if you have the special standalone edition designed by Chip Kidd, a very clever graphic designer who's made the book actually look like an old-fashioned beat cops
1:12.2	notepad. I thought it was a very funny design. If you can find it, it'll give you some amusement.
1:17.3	But if you're thinking of Tom Cruise, that's not who John Anderson is in this story,
1:22.9	unless you're thinking of Les Grossman, the character he played in Tropic Thunder.
1:27.8	John Anderson is a fat, bald, insecure, middle-aged guy, not heroic at all.
1:33.2	He's kind of upset that his 30-year-old pre-crime program may be taken away from him.
1:39.7	That's where we find him in the beginning of the story.
1:42.5	He is the one that found three psychic,
1:47.3	deformed people and saw their potential for fighting crime. While he mentions that while other
1:52.8	people were trying to get rich and exploit them and use their future seeing powers for their
1:58.3	financial gain, he really thought about what he could do in society to help.
	...

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