Minority Report: Philip K. Dick

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So, he goes, investigates, some shit goes down, and the long story short version is that, yes, there was a majority report about him killing his victim, but technically not really because they were all minority reports. There's also a rather large plothole in who is helping Anderton and who isn't. There are several factions hunting and helping Anderton.

Commissioner John Anderton is the creator and head of the Precog unit that is responsible for nearly eradicating serious crime. He's nearing retirement (think "bald and fat and old," not sexy guy) and is showing his new assistant, Ed Witwer, around the office. They visit the area where the three precogs - described as gibbering idiots, deformed and retarded monkeys (yes, you can certainly tell this was written in the 50s) - are kept who visualize every future crime. The dreams are captured by machines and printed on punchcards. :D If your name shows up on a card as a future murderer, you're arrested and held in a detention camp indefinitely. 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. All the characters feel like pawns used to move the plot forward, but none more so than Anderton's wife. (Probably why her part was entirely changed for the movie version). 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.But not the shadows of today. The three gibbering, fumbling creatures, with their enlarged heads and wasted bodies, were contemplating the future. The analytical machinery was recording prophecies, and as the three precog idiots talked, the machine carefully listened. The 2002 film Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg and with Tom Cruise as main actor, was based on the story. John Allison Anderton’s day begins with the arrival of a snot nosed kid by the name of Ed Witwer. He has been assigned to Precrime to eventually replace Anderton whenever he decides to retire. The system is based on three Precogs who can foresee the future. They are able to see a crime before it is committed. When two or more agree, it is called a majority report, but if one disagrees with the other two, that is a minority report. Anderton designed the system, but even he has some qualms about the validity of what they do. What if we can detect crimes before they happen? What if we can arrest criminals before they commit crimes? 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.

And the easiest way to prevent a murder from happening is to not go to the building where the guy lives at the date and time you're supposed to kill him. There was no examination of the morality or ethics of imprisoning people for things they haven't done. If the system can survive only by imprisoning innocent people, then it deserves to be destroyed. My personal safety is important because I’m a human being.’” The short story ends with Anderton and Lisa exiled to a space colony after Kaplan's murder. The movie finishes with John and Lara reunited after the conspiracy's resolution, expecting a second child. [5] [6] [7] Precrime is a predictive policing system dedicated to apprehending and detaining people before they have the opportunity to commit a given crime. At the time of the story, it has been operating for thirty years. This method has replaced the traditional system of discovering a crime and its perpetrator after the crime has already been committed, then issuing punishment after the fact. As Witwer says early on in the story, "punishment was never much of a deterrent and could scarcely have afforded comfort to a victim already dead". Unlike the film adaptation, the story version of Precrime does not deal solely with cases of murder, but all crimes. As Commissioner John A. Anderton (the founder of Precrime) states, "Precrime has cut down felonies by 99.8%."For other uses, see Minority Report (disambiguation). "The Minority Report" was originally published in Fantastic Universe in 1956. This is only my second PKD story (the first being The Man in the High Castle, which I liked, despite still being pretty sure that I don't know what any of it actually meant), and I think, maybe, that I liked this one, too... But I'm not sure yet, because, well, I had some pretty big issues with it. We shall see how I feel after I blark out all of my thoughts in this review. But not the shadows of today. The three gibbering, fumbling creatures, with their enlarged heads and wasted bodies, were contemplating the future. The analytical machinery was recording prophecies, and as the three precog idiots talked, the machinery carefully listened. In our society we have no major crimes, Anderton went on, ‘but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.’”

Deformed and retarded," Anderton instantly agreed. "Especially the girl, there. Donna is forty-five years old. But she looks about ten. The talent absorbs everything; the esp-lobe shrivels the balance of the frontal area. But what do we care? We get their prophecies. They pass on what we need. They don't understand any of it, but we do." I'm not sure if I read the same novel as the ones who rated this 4-5 stars. I honestly don't get how to like this novel, aside from the premise. Happily, they don’t — because we get to them first, before they can commit an act of violence. So the commission of the crime itself is absolute metaphysics. We can claim they are culpable. They, on the other hand, can eternally claim they’re innocent. And, in a sense, they are innocent.” And your "boss" was totally cool with your plan to take out some of his own employees for no reason, other than making a chapter end with a cliffhanger?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] When Anderton pulls the latest cards from the Precogs and finds his name among them, stipulating that he is going to kill someone next week he doesn’t even know, he knows that he is being framed. He has no choice but to go on the run and hide until the week has passed and, in the process, prove the error of the forecasting, but if he does that, he also proves the system is flawed. There are people who most definitely don’t want that to happen. He soon finds he can’t trust anyone, and maybe the very person he trusts the least is his only hope at discovering and exposing the truth. However, as Anderton finds out, sometimes all three reports differ quite significantly, and there may be no majority report, even though two reports may have had enough in common for the computer to link them as such. In the storyline, all of the reports about Anderton differ because they predict events occurring sequentially, and thus each is a minority report. Anderton's situation is explained as unique, because he, as Police Commissioner, received notice of the precogs' predictions, allowing him to change his mind and invalidate earlier precog predictions.