I’ve read a fair number of ::Philip K. Dick::’s novels, but didn’t manage to get around to Minority Report before the movie version came out – and obviously it took me a couple more years to get around to it. Like most stories translated to film, more than a few liberties were taken with the it.

The basic premise is, as you would expect, the same: a trio of mutated humans can glimpse the future and this ability is use to arrest the perpetrators-to-be of violent crimes. The central question is what happens when one of the potential murderers becomes aware of his future act and incarceration?

Part of the answer to this is that the precogs see at least some of the alternate futures which result. The two that agree, or agree the most at any rate, make up the report given to the Department of Pre-Crime and no one see the dissenting minority report.

Like most of PKD’s work, Minority Report is not high art, it’s about ideas. This aspect of his work is almost certainly a reason that most of the movie adaptions of his it tend to make great use of the ideas, but follow the story loosely at best. (Not that I’m claiming that this is justified in all movie adaptions, just that it seems to work for PKD’s stuff.)

Warning, there are some spoilers below. Normally I studiously avoid these, but that’s not really possible with the points I want to touch on.

The story raises some interesting questions to be sure, ones that are particularly germane in the age of the Patriot Act. The moral conundrum in Report is just what you think it is: is is justified to detain these would-be violent criminals on the basis of their future actions. By the end of the book the question is actually murkier.

Our hero, Anderton, does in fact murder the person the initial report says he will, but his foreknowledge changes the circumstances – which is, more or less, the content of the 3rd precog’s report. It is only the 2nd precog who does not have Anderton commiting murder. He in fact kills him to keep pre-crime from being handed over to the military. Not only does he demonstrate that pre-crime is not exactly reliable (clearly a would-be murderer can opt not to kill and the foreknowledge of the murder can thoroughly screw up the reports to boot) but he essentially perverts the system to save it (in the sense that keeping it in civilian hands is saving it).

I could not help but compare the detention of pre-murderers to the detention of terror suspects in the US.

The whole thing is particularly ironic really. The dystopian PKD was, in retrospect, a bit optimistic in this case. 5 years ago, the idea of indefinitely arresting and holding someone for a crime they might commit was much more morally repugnant than it is today, when we arrest and detain people for possibly knowing someone who might be a terrorist – who in turn might be plotting to blow something up.

Which do you think is worse?

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