The Minority Report and other stories

Philip K. Dick had a wonderful talent for taking a great philosophical idea and turning it into a fun story. Most of his stories that I've read deal with a single protagonist struggling against a powerful force. Nearly all have the protagonist making a discovery that makes him question the nature of reality. Along with this is a healthy dose of paranoia.

In "The Minority Report" the main character is Anderton, the creator and manager of the Precrime unit, a police unit that catches murderers before they commit their crime. He is stuck in a quandary when the system reveal his name as the next murderer. He first suspects his new assistant, then his wife. His whole worldview comes into question, since his career is founded on the accuracy of the Precrime unit, which has eradicated murder in the society. One way he can make sense of the situation is to actually kill the victim, who is the alternate manager of the Army side of Precrime. He comes to realize that the three versions of the report include three different realities, each one responding to his awareness of the previous.

"We Can Remember it for You Wholesale" has a protagonist who decides to have memories of a trip to Mars implanted instead of an actual trip. When the facility starts the process, they find that Quail already has memories of a trip to Mars. Though they try to send him away, he returns and demands his money back. Quail struggles to make sense of the two sets of memories in his mind. Is he an office clerk who fantasizes about Mars, or a secret agent who has been a spy there? The end is different from the movie, but with an interesting twist.

"Paycheck" concerns an engineer named Jennings who finishes a contract with a secretive company and has his memory of his last eighteen months erased. Unlike Quail, Jennings has no memory of his work, but when he is detained by the state's secret police, he discovers that the seven trinkets he decided to receive in lieu of his pay help him to escape and find out more about the secretive company. In "Second Variety", a long war between North America and Russia is left to the killer robots that the Americans have created. Major Hendricks discovers that the robots have evolved to a point where they can mimic humans, and are not only targeting the Russians. These two stories have interesting premises but lack the philosophical punch of the first two. The concepts drive interesting and action-filled plots. Jennings in "Paycheck" is fighting against a secretive company and a powerful state; Quail is battling for his memory and identity as part of his fight against the powerful spy agency. Dick excels and making fun stories that make the reader think. One finds oneself questioning reality along with the characters. A-

Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is one of the most dense and difficult works I've ever managed to read. The narrative is convoluted and digressive. The characters are unhinged, paranoid, and solipsistic. There is a decent overview of the plot on Wikipedia, but I will try to give my own synopsis.

The story takes place at the end of World War II. London is being bombarded by Germany's V-2 rocket. Ned Pointsman is a doctor at the "White Visitation", a sort of asylum where war intelligence work is done. Studies are done following Pavlov's work on mental conditioning and psychology. They discover that the sexual escapades of Lt. Tyrone Slothrop match precisely with the location of the rocket attacks and predate them by a few days. Thus we learn that the rocket is entwined with sex, specifically Slothrop's. And Slothrop's sex life is warped by Pavlovian experiments done on him when he was young boy. There is a steady theme of paranoia, mixed with the reality that many of Slothrop's and other's actions are controlled or directed by a mysterious Them. There's an affair between Jessica Swanlake and Roger Mexico. There's a dark S&M game played by Katje and Gottfried in Denmark under the direction of their master Weissman, also known as Blicero.

In part 2, peace is breaking out and Slothrop is sent to the Casino Hermann Goering where he rescues Katje from an apparent octopus attack. They sleep together and then she disappears, and he sneaks away from his watchers to go on a secret mission. In Zurich he meets a member of an Argentinean freedom group that has commandeered a German sub and takes a message for him.

Part 3 is titled "In the Zone". This is the zone inside occupied Germany where there is much activity around the rocket. A group of Africans have been brought to form a Swartzcommando. They are trying to reconstruct a copy of the V-2 rocket, the 00000. Meanwhile a Russian named Tchitcherine is looking for their leader Enzian, who is his half-brother. Slothrop gets involved with a drug dealer, gets chased by American soldiers, gets captured and released by Tchitcherine, and meets a horror movie actress named Greta. Greta leads him to the Anubis, a sort of pleasure ship traveling on a German river. There he witnesses and takes part in an orgy. After getting washed overboard he wanders around a lot and enjoys his alter ego as the Rocketman.

In Part 4 Slothrop's narrative dissolves as the 00000 is reconstructed by Blicero and Enzian. The story is filled with various digressions such as Japanese kamikazes and sentient lightbulds. In the end the rocket is assembled with Blicero's sex slave Gottfried inside and fired towards England.

The exposition above can barely scratch the surface of the happenings in this book. There are many flashbacks and sub-plots. The themes revolve around paranoia, free will versus fate, and sex as power. The travels of Slothrop are told not in a traditional narrative but as a very imaginative, wandering stream-of-consciousness flow. At times we are not sure what is real and what is imaginary. Though the characters seem paranoid, eventually true conspiracies are revealed.

A few things stick in my memory: that the V-2 rocket strikes without warning since it travels faster than sound, and that has an affect on the psychology of those in London. That Slothrop's fate is tied to the rocket through Jamf's experiments on him, the man who created the rocket's plastic component Imipolex G. Slothrop loses his focus in Germany and doesn't really understand why he's there. The Swartzcommando in Germany is a kind of dark force of power that Tchitcherine is drawn to but that he wants to destroy. Slothrop's sexual escapades culminate on the Anubis with the orgy and Greta's daughter Bianca, who later dies. That Greta and Bianca are somehow linked to a rocket scientist named Pokler who gets visitations from a girl who may be his daughter or a series of impostors. That the sexual depravity in the White Visitation is mirrored by Blicero's at the cottage in Denmark, and it is Blicero who sends his "son" to be sacrificed on the rocket.

It is difficult to judge this book. At times it was enjoyable and occasionally funny. A lot of the time it was confusing. The novel's title refers to the trajectory of the rocket as it flies through the atmosphere and finally lands on its target. Certainly the rocket and its fate influence the story's arc, and engineering and mathematics are throughout the book. I think a good work of literature should be enjoyable with or without extra explanation, but this book is so complex that it is difficult to really appreciate it without extended footnotes. At the same time, I know there is good stuff there. I will give a B. I am glad to have gotten through it. Some long books are exciting and you don't want them to end, or you have mixed feelings about the end because you will enjoy it but it will all be over. This is not one of those books. It was a marathon read. I was exhausted after reading it.