Future shock

Philip K Dick's writing was the basis for 'Blade Runner' and now 'Minority Report', starring Tom Cruise. But, asks Charles Arthur, is the world he predicted closer than we think?

Imagine a world where crime doesn't happen, because it gets predicted ahead of time, and stopped first. That's the world depicted in the new film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise as the justifiably rather smug chief of police in that world, where crimes are foreseen by a trio of "precogs" – mutants able to see the future.

It's also this world. Researchers at the universities of Reading and Leeds have been collaborating for three years to develop software that will monitor CCTV images, and predict whether someone is about to break into a car by their movements, which tend to be slow and cautious. Security guards need not even watch the cameras; the computer will warn them. Being a pre-criminal isn't only for the films these days.

Or take another film-depicted world, where most of the native species of the Earth are dying off, and where people find empathy with robotic or computerised pets. That was the infrequently glimpsed background in Blade Runner; yet it's also our world today, where surveys show again and again that we are wiping out animal and plant species on a grand scale: the polar bear, for instance, could vanish from the wild within 60 years through global warming. Yet at the same time, in Japan (which would, given the chance, hunt the largest animal species, whales, to extinction for a meal), one of the most celebrated and sought-after pets is cybernetic – the Sony AIBO.

All these worlds would be wearily familiar to the US science-fiction writer Philip K Dick. He imagined them: Minority Report and Blade Runner are both based on stories he wrote (the latter with the deliciously titled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). He had already noticed this collision of the predicted future and reality when he did his last interview with the journalist John Boonstra in 1982, just before Blade Runner came out. "It's as if the world caught up with science fiction," Dick said. "In 1955, when I'd write a science-fiction novel, I'd set it in the year 2000. I realised around 1977 that, 'My God, it's getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the 1950s!'. Everything's just turning out to be real."

Hollywood has loved Dick's work, at least as a springboard, for 20 years: after Blade Runner, there was Total Recall, based on a more subtle short story called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. The idea of a man who wanted to have memories of going to Mars, only to find out he had been there, was Dick's; the rather more Sturm und Drang of shoot-outs and Mars colonisation and ancient civilisations that follows in the film was Hollywood's, though.

In 1995, Screamers, based on the short story Second Variety, appeared, telling the story of two human oppositions in a war that has become mired in a technological stalemate – with deadly machines that kill any human from the other side – trying to make contact, and peace, despite the machines they've created. And soon, Minority Report.

"I believe there are some fairly simple reasons why several of his books or stories have been adopted by Hollywood," says Charles Platt, a science-fiction author and writer for publications such as Wired, Omni and the Los Angeles Times. "He was so creative, and wrote so much, there is a large body of ideas to choose from. And most of his ideas were simple enough to be understood even by Hollywood producers.

"Phil's ideas were rooted in society rather than science. And since the ideas are relatively simple, they can be dumbed-down in the style that Hollywood loves." (Dick was very depressed by some of the early screenplays for Blade Runner: he said that he imagined himself going on to the movie lot, seeing Harrison Ford yell, "Lower that blast-pistol or you're a dead android!", and trying to throttle him. But he was happier with the later versions: when he saw early cuts of the opening scenes of a dark, dismal Los Angeles, he said, "I recognised it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly".)

Philip K Dick (the K stands for Kendred, but it's only used as a quiz answer) was one of the more prolific writers in the genre, producing hundreds of short stories and dozens of novels from the 1950s to the 1980s, until his early death at the age of 54, in 1982, from complications following a series of strokes. It would be easy to dismiss Dick as just another science-fiction writer; easy, but wrong. While other sci-fi writers of similar output wrote simple schlock in which the technology was the hero, Dick produced work with characters who were unsure, where technology took second place to topics that underlie our modern existence: "what is reality?" and "what does it mean to be human?" He was also fascinated by the human capacity for empathy, and for deception. Late in his life, he wrote an essay, "How to Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart in Two Days", in which he commented: "Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power."

You might not wonder much about what reality is, but every year, thousands of Americans have to, on discovering themselves the victims of "identity theft" – where someone steals the facts (such as credit- card details and social-security number) required to create a virtual you, and then starts living high on the hog. And take government news-management. The fighting in Afghanistan is seen through cameras controlled by US forces, because it's "too dangerous" to allow reporters access to front lines – the phenomenon that the news anchor Dan Rather calls "militainment". And government press departments strive to find favourable ways of altering your perception of how their bosses are doing. It's always a good day to bury bad news.

But the manipulations that Dick worried about went far wider. At a time when Tony Blair was still in nappies, Dick had already seen that "the basic tool for manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you control the meaning of a word, you control the persons who have to use it..." But, he added, "another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception."

In Platt's eyes, Dick "feared a modern American version of fascism, and this, more than any other concept, recurs in much of his work". It is certainly the thread that binds Minority Report. For, what sort of world is it where you can be imprisoned for a crime you haven't committed? Not this world – not quite yet. But this is a world where a parent can be imprisoned for the truancy of the child. It is a world where seeking asylum can land you in prison. Enjoy the film – but listen to the voice of Philip K Dick behind it, telling you that someone is deceiving you. After all, films are made by big corporations, too.

'Minority Report' is out on 5 July