Funny how I can be so familiar with the movies his work inspired and not actually have read his work. I loved this. I will need a copy of this for my collection.

The audio was well done. Accents were good and the variations with the characters made it easy to follow.

But the stories... Even in the one story that I knew what was going to happen, I was engaged, scared, amused (Version 2). The last story had me thinking about my oldest who has autism and what it must be like in his head at times.

All of the stories worked for me. Loved it.

Oh PKD, you were so good at ideas and so terrible at writing. It was cool to read some of the source material for so many adaptations though.

Minority Report was the best of the bunch by a long shot. Possibly my favourite PKD story to date. The premise here is so great, but the execution was still mediocre. I liked the movie more, including their choices to vary from the original.

It was much more interesting to see Tom Cruise try to clear his name, but instead wind up solving a mystery and condemning himself as predicted in the process, whereas in the book, the MC is always clearly the wronged person.

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale was another intriguing idea, but not very exciting or satisfying to actually read. And it gets weirder as it goes, but not in a good way. It did make me want to watch Total Recall though.

Paycheck, I don't have much to say about. Again, I liked the idea of having someone arrange to give themselves clues and objects to navigate known future events, knowing that they themselves are soon going to have their mind wiped. It's an idea that's been done many times since, and done better. This short story gets the prize for worst ending sentence ever. I'm too lazy to look it up, but basically the MC was having an awkward conversation where he was blackmailing the owner of a company and his daughter, and the MC ends the conversation, and the story, with a very cringe-y hint that he was now part of the family and soon there would be "even more" members of the family. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Gross.

Second Variety was a hot mess. What was even happening here. The premise was a super familiar humans build robots, robots infiltrate and kill all the humans...Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, etc. Watch those, avoid reading this.

The Eyes Have It...I don't know. Honestly pretty checked out by this point. It was really short, there was something about a species that could take apart there own body maybe? Were they invading? Who knows.

Would love to see a little more variety in characters, or at least less stereotypical characters, especially the women.

I thoroughly enjoyed all of these short stories. Having watched parts of Total Recall with my dad as it came on cable and sitting down with my whole family to watch the Minority Report took me back to some fun family memories. Plus, these sci-fi stories always surprise with a dark twist at the end.

I listened to these stories on audiobook and it’s been such a delightful way to do chores, being taken to totally different worlds while I complete mundane tasks here on Earth.

The book contains 5 novellas from PKD, the main ones being "Minority Report" (which formed the basis for the movie) and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" which was the inspiration for Total Recall. Besides this I also read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and "A Scanner Darkly".

I was hoping these novellas would more closely resemble "A Scanner Darkly" in quality but I was highly disappointed in them. It seems after reading them that PKD is a "one-trick-pony" when it comes to plot: guy is put into fantastic situation in a futuristic setting - a hot woman betrays him - he is confused - robots - predictable plot twist - the end.

I would've maybe excused the misogynist undertones that litter the works, but he would've had to write them in the 50's, maybe 60's which was not the case. Also the plot twists being so predictable really didn't hold up scrutiny with so many other movies and books having been released before the time of these being written with genuinely clever red herrings and turns. These were cancelled-season-low-budget-cop-show level bad. Will probably skip other works of his, which saddens me since "A Scanner Darkly" is one of my favorites and I love it regardless of having been so disappointed by his other works.