The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories

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How do you know you’re reading Philip K. Dick?

I think, first and pervasively, it was the strangeness. Strange, Dick was and is. I think it was that which kept me combing the SF catalogs for more by him, waiting for each new book to come out. One hears it said, “X just doesn’t think like other people.” About Dick, it was true. In the stories, you can’t tell what’s going to happen next.

And yet his characters are seemingly designed to be ordinary people—except for the occasional screaming psychotic female who is one of Dick’s specialties, and is always treated with love. They are ordinary people caught up in wildly bizarre situations, running a police force with the help of the mumblings of precognitive idiots, facing a self-replicating factory that has taken over the earth. Indeed, one of the factors in the strangeness is the care Dick takes to set his characters in the world of reality, an aspect most other writers ignore.

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