The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick: Detective and Crime Fiction

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Genre Analysis: The Minority Report
Philip K. Dick’s story, “The Minority Report” focuses on fate (external determinism) and freedom and questions whether free will exists. John Anderton, the main character in the story, supports Precrime, a government agency that uses imaging technology to predict the likelihood of violent crime occurring before it happens. The technology is believed to be capable of identifying the victim and the perpetrator. Dick reimagines the conventions of the detective at the center of crime fiction, and the detective happens to be the potential murderer of a crime that hasn’t be committed. Later the detective has to decide between saving his freedom or the authority. This forces the readers to follow the detective’s perspective and bait them to consider the conflict between individual’s will and the government’s authoritarianism, which insinuates the cold war era.       
Dick subverts the idea of traditional crime fiction where there is a focus on thorough investigation detective work to unravel crimes and the perpetrators by setting the futuristic scenes where there is no crime. Crime must be present in a crime fiction, but this is not the case with the story where the government uses predictive tools to determine who is likely to commit crime. In the absence of crime, it is the authoritarian government that makes it possible to achieve this through Precrime. Thus, the author draws attention to a world where crime is prevented based on technology analysis and prediction, which is achieved through authoritarianism. The first chapter introduces readers to a world where Anderton states, “I have quite a few ideas of my own about the way Precrime is run. While the detective story focuses on who committed the crime, the author goes on to highlight that the likely perpetrators can be caught before committing the crime. Typically, traditional crime fiction focuses on the circumstances surrounding the crime and trying to unravel what happened.
In detective fiction, the focus on crime and investigation is often linked to the society where the story is based, and Minority Report is set in an urban scene where there is violence. However, it is the government agencies that use violence to preempt acts of violence. The crime fiction genre often focuses on the criminal act and examining how best to deal with the criminal act to restore peace and the ending connects the events and the whole narrative (Pyrhönen 46). The government controls the society using the pretext of stopping crime to justify using violence, and rather than fight crime, governmental agencies manipulate the people. In the book, the law enforcement officers are crucial to maintaining law and order, and they are entrusted to ensure the Precrime system functions properly to prevent crime in the future and ensure safety and security for all.  
In the crime fiction, there are detectives or investigators who try to solve the crime, but then Anderton is the suspect and he cannot investigate himself. In the story, Dick casts Anderton as a potential criminal, and since he is also the Chief of Precrime and this is a surp...