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Minority Report: Philip K. Dick

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Without going to go into any detail about what happens next (for the benefit of readers who have not read/watched this yet), I'm now going to explain what makes this a very special story for me. In the future, there exists a world in which there's no violence as all violent acts are foreseen and stopped before they occur. But what if you are accused of killing a person you've never met for reasons you don't even know? None of this has happened yet, so there's still time to change the course of the future. How would you fight a system you thought was infallible? The concept of the minority report. Anderton brings up being the Police Commissioner for thirty-something years at every turn, but how in hell is it possible that he doesn't know what a minority report is?! sigh* You're probably right. I'm often a terrible person who dislikes books. But you see, I feel like good SF should have more than a sci-fi-y setting or situation. I feel like it should be a little more than that, and have meaning. But HE knows himself and he knows that HE would never kill anyone, so he must be being framed! (Because HE'S not a criminal like those... those... CRIMINALS. Or well, like they would be if they weren't in jail for thinking about being criminals!)

Anderton knows two precogs confirm a precrime before it is pursued, but there is often a dissenting minority report from the third precog. However, the prediction of Anderton’s murder is supposed to change when Anderton discovers the news, changing the significance of the minority report. Kaplan has manipulated events so that Precrime will fall to a restrengthened Army headed by Kaplan. Discovering this, Anderton decides to actually murder Kaplan, thus saving Precrime; with Lisa, he accepts his punishment and goes into exile. The Minority Report” tells the story of John Anderton, the creator and head of Precrime, a police agency that uses three mutants called “ precogs” to foresee and stop future crimes before they are committed. Anderton’s own system predicts that he will murder a man within the coming week, but he thinks that he is being framed. Anderton seeks to evade capture while investigating what has happened. He then sees THAT report and realizes that if word gets out that the precogs are false-predicting, it would shut down the Precrime division - because that would mean that they are totally imprisoning innocent people (not to be confused with 'people who just haven't committed a crime... yet') - and everything he had worked for would be gone...Andreeva, Nellie (September 8, 2014). "Fox Nabs 'Minority Report' Series From Steven Spielberg's Amblin TV With Big Put Pilot Commitment". Deadline Hollywood. Penske Business Media, LLC . Retrieved August 17, 2015. The precogs were originally named Mike, Donna, and Jerry, and were deformed and intellectually disabled. In the adaptation, they are called Agatha, Dashiell, and Arthur—after crime writers Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Arthur Conan Doyle—children of drug addicts whose mutations led them to dream of future murders, which are captured by machines. They are "deified" by the Precrime officers, and are implied to be intelligent (Agatha guides Anderton successfully through a crowded mall while being pursued by Precrime, and the trio are seen reading large piles of books at the end of the film). In the end of the movie they retire to a rural cottage where they continue their lives in freedom and peace. Wow, this was surprisingly bad. The movie was pretty terrible, so I assumed that the short story had to at least be somewhat better... I was horribly wrong. In the film, a major plot point was that there was no minority report. The story ends with Anderton describing how the minority report was based on his knowledge of the other two reports. For some reason, every time Anderton's wife, Lisa, shows up, her slimness always has to be brought up. It was weird and annoying.

So, at this point, you're probably asking yourself just what my problem is. Sounds like a good book, full of paradoxes and intriguing questions about the nature of inevitability and free will... I must be a terrible person for not loving it!The blurb/synopsis is very ambiguous, yet that's not my problem with this one. Ambiguity doesn't necessarily mean that the novel's going to turn out awful, but rather ambiguity, in most cases, leads to the enjoyment of the reader. In this case, everything didn't work out the way I wanted things to. The existence of three apparent minority reports suggests the possibility of three future time paths, all existing simultaneously, any of which an individual could choose to follow or be sent along following an enticement (as in Anderton's being told he was going to murder an unknown man). In this way, the time-paths overlap, and the future of one is able to affect the past of another. It is in this way that the story weaves a complicated web of crossing time paths and makes a linear journey for Anderton harder to identify. This idea of multiple futures lets the precogs of Precrime be of benefit—because if only one time-path existed, the predictions of the precogs would be worthless since the future would be unalterable. Precrime is based on the notion that once one unpleasant future pathway is identified, an alternative, better one can be created with the arrest of the potential perpetrator. In September 2023, it was announced that David Haig was adapting the story for the stage, to premiere at the Lyric Hammersmith the following spring. [4]

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