What a superb collection of sci fi short stories. Every single one introduces big, mind-bending ideas that really force you to pause and think. I wish they were longer and had better characters, but the concepts are super fun. Most of these have been turned into movies, and had major impacts on other books.
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The Minority Report: The basis for the movie of the same name. Big idea: there are people with “precog” abilities who can foresee crimes in the near future, leading to a police force that arrests people for crimes they haven’t yet committed.
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We Can Remember It For You Wholesale: The basis for the movie Total Recall. Big idea: you can pay for a service to implant memories in your head, so you think you’ve done grand adventures in your life, without having to actually do those (many of which you might never be able to do anyway).
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Paycheck: The basis for the movie of the same name. It also feels like it might have inspired the show Severance. Big idea: you get a 2-year contract for an extremely high paying job, but at the end of the 2 years, you must agree to the company erasing all your memories from those 2 years.
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Second Variety: The basis for the movie Screamers. Big idea: in a war between the US and the USSR, the US creates robots to do the fighting for them, and gives those robots the ability to repair themselves, and even produce more copies of themselves.
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The Eyes Have It: This was a bit of an odd inclusion in this collection of stories, as it’s little more than a play on words.
Rating: 5 stars
Yevgeniy Brikman
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