This books was the basis for the movie Minority Report (with Tom Cruise). In reality, whatever that means for Dick, a few ideas a couple of terms were taken from the incredibly textured world the author created here and were slapped into an action movie. A good one that I liked but nothing to do with the book.

I thought this story was the fulfillment of the promise I saw in the previous PKD book I read (Divine Invasion). A wonderful milieu of concepts and imagery were employed to create a universe I truly had never been to before. Hard to do in sci-fi now a days but PKD did it and did it with style. I understand why no movie has really been based on this book: it would be far too depressing and too hard to film.

It was a bleak world we enter, one where the Earth seems to be dying and people are drafted into colonial service to the other planets and moons where they find release for their constant depression only in the use of a drug that simulates Earth if only for a few minutes. It appears the dominance of that drug is being challenged but, perhaps with something even worse, or perhaps with something infinity better.

It's a dark world and the characters seem to be uniformly powerless and slightly depressed. Even the perky and ambitious ones seem to have a dullness with them. Yet the people aren't flat or undeveloped, they seem to be fascinating people and ones with whom moral thought still defines their characters.

An absorbing read, one that follows several interesting people in a gripping story. It is hard to discern reality from the drug-induced experiences they are having, and even time plays no constant role. Yet this is not a draw back of the book nor some avant-grade technique of alienation; rather the alienation emanates from the character's own doubts and fears, and the lack of clarity representative of the real store Dick seems to be trying to tell. I feel a better person for having read this.