SOURCE: Desowitz, Bill. “Casting a Timeless Shadow: Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is Only the Latest Film Based on the Work of Sci-Fi Author Philip K. Dick.” Los Angeles Times (19 June 2002): F1.

In the following essay, Desowitz examines multiple film adaptations of Dick's work, including Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.

It has been 20 years since the seminal sci-fi film Blade Runner first burst on the scene with its cyberpunk prophecy of a dehumanized 21st century. The dark and dank depiction of L.A. as a technological wonder and existential wasteland—part noir and part sci-fi—may owe its aesthetic to director Ridley Scott, but its vision is that of the late author Philip K. Dick.

It was Dick who was responsible for the thrust of this much imitated paranoid parable: What is reality? And what does it mean to be human? It's no wonder, then, that Dick's fingerprints are all...