By Phillip K. Dick
I got this from the town library and read it in early Feb, 2024.
It’s a short story collection - I didn’t get all the way through it, but some of them were pretty good! All of them had the 19th-century-sci-fi malaise though - idk how to describe it, but it’s there in Neuromancer, in some of Clarke’s human interactions, and definitely here. It’s an attempt at high-concept futurism but painfully through the lens of their times, particularly with regards to social norms and interactions. I’m sure this is just a consequence of the intervening decades, and that our scifi will seem similarly short-sighted and stilted to read, but that doesn’t change my opinion.
Just like the movie, this is about a police division focused on stopping crimes before they happen, using three ‘precogs’. I actually found the movie to be a bit richer, discussing as it does the philosophical implications of innocent criminals, while the book takes the existence of the department as a given, with a bit of a gotcha explaining away the premise. It also doesn’t deal very satisfactorily with the idea that knowledge of one’s future immediately changes that future, since it’s such a huge loophole in the idea. Nevertheless, a really interesting read.
A story about a man who has been replaced by a robot who thinks it is the man. Classic self-doubt with not much additional depth, but entertaining and occasionally insightful.
About a future war between the US and the USSR causing the US to develop self-replicating killer robots disguised as humans, with of course some of the main party being these robots. It seemed a bit like a pastiche of an Into the Night Vale episode, but still good.
This was a really interesting one about how an extra-terrestrial human society might wage long-term psychological war on Earth via games. One game seems far too complex and is detained, but in the process a Monopoly-style game is released which in fact is highly addictive and implants in kids the idea that all their assets should be sold off. The assumption that this would work doesn’t hold up, but well executed story nonetheless.
Bit of a meh, really - the one interesting concept was of humans still being accessible a year after their death, doled out in slices. The rest of it was some odd political machinations interspersed with convoluted plot. Not my favourite.
Another story that was adapted into a movie, this time Total Recall (twice, in fact!). More comedic than the movie, it’s about a guy who goes to get false memories implanted of things he wishes he’s done, like go to Mars, or be a spy, or be secretly responsible for saving Earth, only to find out that he’s actually done all of these things, and the real memories keep being uncovered! High concept and very well executed, and it’s easy to see from the text that this was really a novel concept when the author came up with it.