Status Updates From Rapporto di minoranza e alt...

Haven't quite finished this yet, been distracted from reading but this collection of short stories shows just how interesting Philip K. Dicks ideas can be.

A highlight of course is the namesake, Minority Report. An idea that has proved interesting (if not horrifying) enough to inspire other works with the same core concept.
I also quite enjoy Second Variety, and War Game.

"The Eyes Have It" is a surprisingly comedic flash fiction about a man who reads a paperback novel and misunderstands a lot of common English phrases as being evidence of a hidden alien conspiracy. This is probably some kind of schizophrenia, seeing meaning and connections where none exist, but it's all phrases like this:

"
… he took her arm.

Not content to wait, he had to start dismantling her on his own!"

"Second Variety" clearly laid the groundwork for the Terminator movies. Somehow, it turns out to have been a bad idea to create human-killing robots who can reproduce and modify themselves, with no human oversight. Unknown to the humans, they start making varieties that look like humans, engineered to gain entry to human bunkers before unleashing mass slaughter. There's also some "The Thing" paranoia. Still rough.

"Paycheck"—A lot to say about this one, but too much for the character limit of these updates. Here I'll just say it's a cool time-travel premise, but it's let down by several unaddressed issues and internal inconsistencies, and an ending that makes the protagonist out to be a lot more ruthless and amoral than he had seemed earlier. This ending requires establishing him as an anti-hero.

"We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" is the famous basis for the movie Total Recall, and more than most of PKD's story-to-movie conversions, many of the recognisable elements are here. The main difference is in scope. The story is set entirely on Earth, with only scattered details of Quail's time on Mars (renamed Quaid in the movie). The final twist is more outlandish than the movie. Both are worth your time.

There's a possible problem in "The Minority Report". There have been no murders in decades because the precogs always inform the police in enough time to stop them. But Fleming tries to strangle Lisa to death and throw her out the aircraft, and there's no mention at all that the precogs saw this. If it's because Anderton stops him, there should have been some acknowledgement of it.

This book contains "The Minority Report" and several other PKD stories. It's been a long time since I saw the Minority Report movie, but I think it played out very differently from this original story, aside from the basic premise: A police official is accused of a future murder by the pre-crime precogs, and he goes on the run to prove his innocence.