The Joy of Erudition’s Reviews > Minority Report > Status Update
The Joy of Erudition
is 95% done
"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.
— Oct 25, 2025 10:14PM
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The Joy of Erudition’s Previous Updates
The Joy of Erudition
is finished
"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!"
— Oct 25, 2025 10:19PM
"
… he took her arm.
Not content to wait, he had to start dismantling her on his own!"
The Joy of Erudition
is 67% done
"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.
— Oct 23, 2025 01:40PM
The Joy of Erudition
is 43% done
"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.
— Oct 17, 2025 11:04PM
The Joy of Erudition
is 27% done
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.
— Oct 15, 2025 02:18AM
The Joy of Erudition
is 20% done
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.
— Oct 12, 2025 09:02PM
