This is another great book sent to me by my longtime friend Killyn. He must know I love science fiction.
This collection includes 14 short stories written by Philip K. Dick between 1954 and 1964. The most well-known one is Minority Report, which was the inspiration for the movie. And yes, they had it available to watch on the prison tablets—and yes, I did watch it right after reading the story to compare versions. I won’t bore you with all the differences, but let’s just say the movie added a lot of plot.
Out of the 14 stories, I’d say 3 were excellent, 3 were pretty bad, and the rest were decent. I liked that many of the stories seemed to exist in the same universe. Kind of like Marvel movies—sometimes there were subtle references to events in other stories, or the same story was told from a different perspective. A lot of the plots felt familiar to me, especially from shows like Futurama. I’m not sure if the shows were inspired by PKD, or if these are just common sci-fi tropes, but either way, I thoroughly enjoyed them.
Let me give you an example of one of my favorites.
“Autofac” was probably my favorite. It’s about a factory that was built to be fully automated to meet every human need during wartime—food, medicine, clothes, everything. This let people focus on fighting. But when the war ended and half the population was wiped out—including the people who knew how to shut the factory down—the factory just kept going. It kept using up all the Earth’s natural resources to make products for people who no longer existed. Even after they thought they’d destroyed the factory (after it defended itself—yeah, it could do that), they found a secret basement room. It was producing tiny micro-factories in pill form that were being shot all over the world—and space. Once these landed, they would grow into full factories themselves and keep replicating, using up all the universe’s resources. It totally reminded me of a Futurama episode where Bender becomes self-replicating and eats up all of Earth’s resources. Sci-fi at its weirdest and best.
The best part of this book, for me, was getting to see inside the mind of people living in the 1960s—their fears, hopes, and how they saw the future. Most sci-fi is supposed to make you think ahead, but this time, the journey felt more like a trip back into the past. And it was a fascinating ride.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
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