Those who express concern about the onset of a dystopian surveillance society in Britain, in which the boundary between public and private is being erased, and in which the state malignly uses new methods of monitoring, usually invoke the spectre of Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘Orwellian’ is the customary adjective denoting the kind of cruel, maladjusted authoritarian state that spies on us, that knows everything about us — one, it is feared, that will soon be upon us.
Such allusions have some credibility, as Britain has in some respects been transformed into that which George Orwell feared it might: we have detention without trial, armed police and the widespread use of CCTV cameras. Similar invocations of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — in which a hopeless populace lives not in fear of the state, but is so drugged up as not to notice, or care, that they live in such dreadful times — have merit, too. Yet developments suggest a third 20th-century author warrants rereading if we want to gauge the manner in which gloomy prognostications made in fiction are assuming an equally sinister presence in reality: Philip K. Dick.
Dick, who died on 1982, has only posthumously received the recognition that his themes warranted. Many of his science fiction novels and short stories have since become successful films, such as Blade Runner and Total Recall, but it is the main theme of Minority Report — a 1956 short story that in 2002 became a Spielberg motion picture — that should really concern us. For this futuristic cautionary tale predicted the notion of pre-crime.
In Minority Report mutants, or ‘pre-cogs’, are able to predict a felony that will be committed in the near future, and the police (or in the original story, a government department) therefore have to find, apprehend and punish the person who is going to perform the crime.
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