Minority Report and Other Stories

I read that the family of Phillip K. Dick have been very carefully granting rights to use his work in film. Many of these have been very good, others probably had lofty ideals but perhaps fell into a all-to-common hollywood pitfall. Something about his writing keeps them coming back, though. Some might say each of his stories is carried by a very clever idea, one that can be summed up in a sentence. Hollywood loves that shit: "murder is eliminated by police who use mutants to predict the future." or "The US military creates war machines that have the ability to evolve." The studios have proved that these ideas alone are enough to build a movie around. Thats apparently just clever enough for the average moviegoer to wrap their head around. Dick's writing always takes it farther. In its essence, once you understand the idea, he moves on to the twist about that idea. Got that, ok, on to the next twist. This is cyberpunk style before it had a name. The "try and keep up" writing that always assumes you understand the ramifications of what was just discussed. Spielberg took what was practically exposition from "Minority Report" and made it into the major plot element. I'm not even sure why. The story could have worked near-verbatim. Verhoven sent "Total Recall", based on "We Can Remember it for you Wholesale", off on a wild, although interesting, tangent. I didn't see the film of Paycheck, but I'm curious about what hollywood did to this one. Now I hear that my least favorite actor (yeah, Neo) is leading the cast of another PKD work, "A Scanner Darkly." Pardon me while I chortle in disgust. I was thinking of starting a petition to ban Reeves from science fiction films, or at least PKD films, but then I heard that it was Reeves who actually brought the book to the attention of director Richard Linklater. I have no doubt that, this time, the story will be true to the book, and that the ideas won't be dumbed-down, but I still will cringe everytime Reeves opens his mouth. Oh, and I'll read the book first.

So I haven't said much about this book yet. What can you say, its not that long, they picked the best of a much larger collection of stories. His novels I've read were a little too long, plodding and sometimes exploding into Hawthorne-like detail, but the short story format seemed to keep him sharply focused, engaging the reader and never letting up. For this reason, I'm motivated to seek more shorts. Keir "open the pod bay doors" Dullea does a very good reading, short of the accents and female voices, but otherwise very entertaining. I guess this has been the most interesting book I've written about so far, since its the shortest book and I've written the most words.

Minority Report and Other Stories
Making links to audible content is a real pain.

Revenge of Visual

So there are a bunch of new blogger.com templates. These look much better without major revising and have normal size text. Guestbook is gone now that comments are enabled. Comcast's guestbook was so 1997.

I found out that the blogger.com overhaul was partly due to being engulfed by google. I haven't decided if I like that or not. On one hand, its the "do no evil" company, on the other is, well I guess I just don't like google all that much. Is the combination of gmail, blogger, and your google cookie TOO much data for a single company to have? Anyway, I like the way blogger.com works so I will just retain a bit of my privacy by eschewing gmail and deleting my google cookie every day.

Surely You're Joking, dthree!

When you read a physical book, or even a text book on a Palm or something, you have an idea of how much you have read and how much is left. You can see how thick the page stack before and after your current position are. Or you can see what page number you are reading in a PDF or text file (page 17 of 56) and have an idea of how much is left. With an audiobook, you loose that. If the reader says the chapter numbers before each chapter, AND you have found out AND memorized the number of chapters, you can have some idea. With most fiction, you can tell more generally where you are in the story, but that sense is a bit more hazy. With biographies, you can tell based on how old the subject is in the current chapter, if they stick to a chronological format. What all this blathering is about is that at any given time I had no idea how much I had left in this book The book is biographical, but only the first 20 years of his life are in chronological order. Everything else is almost totally random. If I stopped the book in the middle of an anectode, the next time I started listening, I would forget where he was. Not "where he was in the story" but where he was in LIFE for that story. Was he working for the government, or was it later, when he was a professor in california, or was it when he was in brazil; I'm not even sure I know where he was working in the US when he went to brazil. Anyway, the book jumped around a lot and I had no idea I was near the end until there was about 30 seconds left and it seemed like he was "summing up".

Thats not to say it was a bad book. It was just a random collection of stories, and there we gems of wisdom here and there, as well as humor and fascination. The guy was certainly unique, a scientist who hated getting the nobel prize, got more tail than sinatra, played drums and did drawings for fun. I can put the randomness problem aside because many of the stories are genuinely interesting. A couple of stories I read left me waiting for the "clever" part which then never came, but most of them didnt have that problem. I'll mention things other reviews have, just for competeness. You won't learn much about physics, but you will hear a lot ABOUT being a physicist, you won't learn much about drumming, but you will hear a lot ABOUT drumming, you won't learn a lot about science, but you will hear how important it was to him and how he belives that if we aren't careful, we will lose it.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character © 2002. Blackstone Audiobooks. 0786122188.