The claim Philip Kindred Dick, California nutcase and sci-fi seer, holds on our imagination is a particular one. Dick's signature as a writer is a sort of pre-epileptic hum or aura, an intimation of fast-approaching crisis. Something dislocates, something accelerates, a wire touches another wire and we know -- quiveringly -- that we have to fit ourselves for a lasting ontological derangement. Quality control was never Dick's problem (capable, in his speed-gobbling prime, of writing up to 30 short stories a year, he barely had time to look over his shoulder at the exhaust cloud of output in his wake). But it is ours, and nearly 50 years after it was written, "The Minority Report," Dick's short story, makes for very shaky reading.

I could have walked out of Enigma. Not in
anger -- not in that
state of congested indignation that sometimes forces cinemagoers to their feet,
huffing and puffing and clawing for their coats in the darkness -- but through
simple
lack of concern. Which surprised me, because almost any film set in England in
1943 has, for me, an automatic power and pull: wartime England, my God, I am
(aren't you?) rank with false nostalgia for it -- with implanted memories of the
brave cities and the murmuring countryside, the voices of leaders on the radio,
the turned-up trousers and the coal smoke, the pluck, the pep, the upper lip!