Minority Report
By Philip K Dick
Minority Report was published in 1956, in a magazine called Fantastic Universe. Fantastic Universe ran for about 7 years from 1953 to 1960, publishing 69 issues. The main editors of the magazine were Leo Margulies who edited from 1953 to 1956 and Hans Stefan Santesson who edited from 1956 to the last issue in march 1960. The story became the basis for the movie starring Tom Cruise (patrons will get an audio cast of a friend and me discussing and comparing that). As well as a television show that ran for a single season (Dear God, I didn’t know about this, and now I cannot un-know it. {There’s gonna be a review of the pilot later!} Excuse me, I’m just gonna go Full Denethor). Now there are going to be spoilers below but the story is old enough to qualify for social security so, I'm past the limit (on caring) I feel folks.
The protagonist of our story is John Anderton, the aging creator and commissioner of the Pre-Crime police division. Which under his leadership has grown to be the most powerful and effective national police force in the Federal West-Bloc (It’s very easy to be highly effective when you can violate causality, I guess.). I should note that pre-crime in the story can see all sorts of crime but they focus on the big nasty ones, like murder, rape, kidnapping, and assault. Because of this, no one has gotten away with a crime in nearly five years in the entire nation. (In addition to the causality issues, there are also some spectral evidence issues, but I’ll get to that later.)
The story opens with Anderton meeting his Senate-appointed assistant and eventual successor Ed Witwer and he’s resentful about the idea of being replaced. I'm honestly not that sympathetic to him here because frankly, there's a damn point where you just hang up the hat and go home, man. There are too many people in the world who grimly try to hang to every shred of power well past their due date and that's one of the reasons for a lot of the issues facing people of my generation and the Zoomers (I really enjoy being ruled by people old enough to fondly remember the original runs of US government anti-homosexual propaganda films.). You've done your work Anderton, go home, enjoy your wife (We have medication that can help.), and get a hobby while you're able to. Let the new blood have their time in the sun!
Sorry, sore point, there. Well, the resentment explodes into full-blown suspicion when Anderton intercepts a prediction that he'll murder a man in a week. Now the predictions are given by mutants, who are strapped to metal chairs. They are pretty much vegetables. The story explains that the pre-cogs ability to see the future destroys their brain's ability to do anything else. So they have no personalities, or ability to function in any way. Instead, they mutter their predictions constantly with them being translated by vast and powerful computers (that run on punch cards, this tickles me). The predictions are printed in Pre-Crime headquarters and the Army headquarters to prevent anyone from mucking with them. I honestly find this ominous, why is the army involved in a law enforcement matter? Why not the FBI? (And this is where we get into spectral evidence. Like, there hasn’t been a crime. The only evidence is the unverified say-so of a precognitive. Put them under surveillance, sure…but arresting them? Really? {Yeah, you think instead you would issue them some sort of precrime warning, there was an episode of Sliders built around that})
At first, he assumes it's Witwer as the victim and he's being set up so the Senate can replace him (weird how there's no mention of a President anywhere in the story). However, when his much younger wife corners him... He finds out that he's actually predicted to murder a man he's never met. Leopold Kaplan was a retired general who fought in the Anglo-Sino War leading the now-abolished Federal West-Bloc Army. These little tidbits raise all sorts of questions and I could spend days just chewing on them honestly (Someone really didn’t want to give Hong Kong back?). Kaplan actually has moles in the Army General HQ (You’d think the precogs would see the moles… You’d think moles would rate, at the very least.{What if the mole was the guy who got to the predictions first though? These things are being printed directly from a computer run on punch cards after all…} Which is the other problem. You shouldn’t ever have these going to just one person.) who send him a warning and he has men kidnap Anderton as Anderton makes his escape from Pre-Crime. Kaplan decides to turn Anderton in however rather than risk his own life (And you’d also think that they’d peg to the kidnapping…{Well when you got a mole directly editing the reports…}).
Anderton escapes with help, leading to a game of cat and mouse as he realizes he needs to break back into Pre-Crime HQ to find out if one of the pre-cogs gave a different prediction of the future. A minority report as it's called. Anderton finds one and realizes the implication of this if the pre-cogs can see different futures than everyone they've arrested for having a prediction of doing a crime now as an argument for innocence (Shocking!). It could undermine the entire system. We also have another wrinkle in that we find out that Kaplin has created a veteran's society with officers from both sides of the war and a following within the active duty service. Additionally, Kaplan carried a grudge over having his old position having been abolished and has political ambitions (Happy birthday to you, have a militant coup…)
In fact, when Anderton arrives to meet Kaplin again, we're treated to a full-blown military rally. Kaplin is aware of the minority report, intends to announce it and prove Pre-Crime doesn't work, and overthrow the Senate. Faced with these options, Anderton goes along with Kaplin until the cameras are rolling and murders Kaplin live on international television, and turns himself in. Since Kaplin was about to lead a fascist coup, the Senate decides to grant Anderton exile to a frontier planet as long as the secret of the minority report is buried. Anderton explains to Witwer, his assistant, that the flaw in the system is that anyone who sees the report may change their mind leading to a new prediction. Since the commissioner is the most likely person to see the report, that now makes Witwer the most vulnerable man on the planet.
The story is very much focused on the balance between the needs of individual freedom and security provided by a system (Is it really secure, though? I mean, with causality being violated…{Anderton argues that this would only work for someone who can see the report and change their mind, so only the police commissioner, it says something that no one suggests, what if we just showed people that there was a prediction of them doing a crime?} Of course not! It wouldn’t be a police state if they gave someone meaningful due process.). It's also powered by Mr. Dick wrestling with what free will is and what it means. Mixed into this is Mr. Dick's anxiety towards authority in general but it's a lot lower-key than in later works like a scanner darkly. We also don't see him wrestle with the idea of identity which he'll start to do in later works. It is a good example of his early work though, willing to confront the idea of different timelines and possible futures and how knowledge of your own fate alters it. That said, it feels rough and due to the length (only 20 pages), there's lot left unexplored here. So I'm giving a C+.
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