“The Minority Report” was first published in Fantastic Universe Science Fiction, January 1956. You can read it on Archive.org or listen to it on YouTube. (Or even listen and read at the same time.) It is story #2 of 22 for The Best SF Stories of 1956 group read. Wikipedia has a rather informative entry for “The Minority Report” that I highly recommend reading.

“The Minority Report” did not meet any of the criteria I used for selecting the best SF short stories of 1956, but I included it because it’s a famous Philip K. Dick story, and because it inspired a movie and television miniseries. It’s interesting that neither Judith Merril, T. E. Dikty, nor the team of Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg picked the story for their best of the year anthologies. Obviously, they were not precogs to the story’s big success in the future, but ultimately, I think they made the right choice.

The premise of “The Minority Report” is built on the idea that the future can be predicted, and murders can be prevented by arresting murderers before they kill. The plot arises when the head of Precrime, John A. Anderton, sees his own name on a computer card stating that he will kill Leopold Kaplan. Anderton immediately figures it’s a frame-up by Ed Witwer to take over his job.

The story is weird because the future is predicted by three mentally and physically damaged people kept in a kind of permanent dream state. They are called precogs. Because the future is always in flux, each precog is monitored by a computer. To convict a person of a precrime requires two of the three computers analyzing the dreams of their precogs predicting the same future, and that’s called the majority report. A single computer produces a minority report.

Most of the story involves Anderton going on the run hoping to prove himself innocent and maintain the validity of precrime as a principle of law enforcement. The story is quite dramatic. I can see why they chose to produce it as a movie. “The Minority Report” is full of action and ideas. Along the way, the story produces quite a bit of PKD weirdness, paranoia, offbeat philosophical questions, and a disloyal wife. Unfortunately, there are so many plot twists that the story breaks down in confusion.

Information about the sale and publication of “The Minority Report” can be found at philipdick.com. It was reprinted in Dick’s 1957 collection The Variable Man and Other Stories, but it was never anthologized in a major anthology. According to the way stories are remembered in the science fiction publishing world, “The Minority Report” was never a respected story. Fantastic Universe was not a top tier publication. This was PKD’s 91st story, and 85th short story. (See philipdick.com for numbering his worksl) Dick cranked them out, and it shows. “The Minority Report” could have been a much better story if Dick had thought about the plot carefully and rewritten it several times. But he had to eat and sold it for little money. Philipdick.com suggests it earned only a little more than $12.95, but don’t say exactly.

Here is the review my friend Mike emailed me.

I think "The Minority Report" is one of Dick's weaker efforts. 


I've never been a fan of hocus-pocus stories, and the idea of Precrime has so much hand-waving magic about it that Penn and Teller would be proud. We never get a plausible explanation why or how precogs manage to predict the future. Good science fiction gets you to believe the unbelievable, but Precrime feels like a story gimmick.


I've also never been a fan of mysteries, because the author typically drops critical details into the narrative at the last minute. We're supposed to marvel at the perspicacity of the protagonist, but I just feel manipulated. Dick drops this important bit of information on us:


"Jerry's vision was misphased. Because of the erratic nature of precognition, he was examining a time-area slightly different from that of his companions."


We discover that precognition, which is the foundation of Precrime, has an "erratic nature" and precogs can examine different time-areas. Doesn't that collapse the entire Precrime house of cards?


You know a story is flawed when the author has to stop and explain for pages why Anderton's name was generated by the Precrime system. PKD finally throws in the towel when he has Anderton announce "Each report was different...Each was unique. But two of them agreed on one point. If left free, I would kill Kaplan. That created the illusion of a majority report. Actually, that's all it was--an illusion."


The whole story feels like an illusion, a magic trick. The characters are subservient to an arcane plot, stock performers in a magic show.

I agree with Mike. I dislike thrillers and mysteries where the author jerks us around contriving plot twists by whatever whim hits them at the moment. They never feel believable or real. Like I said in my previous review. I want to believe what I’m reading, and I have too much distaste for precognition.

Now, if PKD had come up with another system for identifying potential murderers I might have bought the idea of precrime. I don’t think this is possible, but if they had a brain implant that measured various kinds of emotional states and they could identify one that people experience before committing a murder, then that would have been acceptable to me. Dick’s precogs are mutants with ESP. I have problems with psi stories in SF. Too often they feel like comic book plots.

There are a few psychic power stories in science fiction that succeed with some readers. There’s telepathy in The Demolished Man and teleportation in The Stars My Destination, two much admired novels by Alfred Bester. But they are not my favorites. PKD played with ESP in some of his stories, and I’m a big fan of his work, and I can sometimes buy such weirdness as part of his stories because Dick was so weird himself. I’m afraid the precog stuff in “The Minority Report” didn’t work for me this time.

Alfred Bester came up through comics, and I’ve always felt he felt superior to both comics and science fiction. As much as I admire Bester’s writing ability, I’ve always thought he was sneering at science fiction. Writing stories about psionics was his way of saying SF fans would believe anything. But I think Dick was different. He was into thinking about the supernatural and any possible explanation for reality. He played with weirdness.

I need to think about the use of ESP in SF. Let’s see if any more of the 1956 stories deal with psychic powers. I’m not sure it’s a legitimate theme for science fiction.

James Wallace Harris, 11/29/23