I stopped listening after the first three stories. Bad audio recording and disappointing use of female characters.

The audiobook didn’t separate the segments by stories, so it was hard to navigate back to where I left off before I fell asleep. The audio recording between stories sound like they are overlapping at the very last word of each story. And there were a couple of times when the narrator’s diction wasn’t clear in the second story. All in all, these marks of amateur production made it hard to finish this audiobook.

What also didn’t help was the author’s treatment of women in the stories. In “The Minority Report” Lisa is first introduced as the protagonist’s “slim and attractive wife,” which is less important than the fact that she’s also an executive officer at PreCrime. She almost plays a critical role in the story when she tries to convince her husband to take the reputation of the institution before his personal interest. While Anderton understandably refuses to turn himself in at first, he does commit murder to protect PreCrime in the end despite the fact that the whole truth he learned that led to that decision undermined the institution’s raison d’être even more than when he only knew part of it. Even though it was Lisa who posed a very important moral question, after she nearly dies while taking her husband in, the next time we meet her is when she’s packing up with her husband to live in extraterrestrial exile. In other words, removing her character wouldn’t make any difference to the story’s events or to its development of the theme.

This negligibility of female characters is even more apparent in the second story, but I think I’ve made my point. The sci-fi elements were interesting, but the sexism in the writing were grating. Probably should watch the movies instead.