Man in the High Castle - Amazon

Yes! The full season begin 11/20!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00RSI5HHI/ref=dv_dp_ep0

 

Just now digging this up! Excellent news!!
Phil actually wrote this book using the I Ching for guidance.
This book was a bestseller back in the sixties and helped start an I Ching fad in the U.S. back then.
I really enjoyed pretty much all his books, this one is certainly one of the more popular, I always wanted to see either the Zap Gun, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik or Valis directed by David Lynch.
John Lennon apparently owned the rights to Stigmata for a few years.
TMITH Castle had been in the works for quite a while I think, I gave up looking for it's release, I think it originally got going with BBC and some entity in the U.S. with Ridley Scott involved -it's been so long I forget.
There was a show called Rome that was a BBC/HBO production from the nineties (a better than excellent series)
that was what the production scenario reminded me of when I first heard about it.
Great news that this will be a full season!

excerpts from Stigmata:


Barney Mayerson had a problem. He was about to be drafted, which in this future Earth means that he was about to be selected to be resettled on another world. How to avoid this miserable fate? Figure out some way to be declared "4F"; he was determined to develop enough neuroses to be undraftable. All he needed was a good coach...

And there in the next room by the sofa sat a familiar suitcase, that of his psychiatrist Dr. Smile.
Barefoot, he padded into the living room, and seated himself by the suitcase; he opened it, clicked switches, and turned on Dr. Smile. Meters began to register and the mechanism hummed. "Where am I?" Barney asked it. "And how far am I from New York?" That was the main point...

The mechanism which was the portable extension of Dr. Smile, connected by micro-relay to the computer itself in the basement level of Barney's own conapt building in New York, the Renown 33, tinnily declared, "Ah, Mr. Bayerson." "Mayerson," Barney corrected, smoothing his hair with fingers that shook.

From The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by Philip K. Dick.
Published by Doubleday in 1965

 

Episode 2 is now available as a preview.

 

I'd love to see a good UBIK done. I'll certainly be watching the rest of High Castle, but UBIK is my favorite PKD novel.

 

UBIK is definitely in my top 3 PKD novels at any given moment, it could be an epic film but in this day and age it will probably get a high end serial treatment by HBO or whatnot.
Actually come to think of it I was lately thinking along the lines of what a well heeled company like that could do with the idea of turning a good batch of his novels into an anthology/serial type format where say three or four of his novels run parallel in the same time frame. It always seemed like writers for film can't resist changing and amalgamating his ideas whenever they get put to film anyway.
I think Total Recall had minor elements from Dr. Bloodmoney thrown in -I never liked that film, Bladerunner got a whole different twist/focus while leaving key elements out and I like that film a lot though.
So if you take a solid batch of good novels with great ideas and create a world in which their stories play out in parallel then it might be pretty wild with good writing, etc.

 

I think DR BLOODMONEY would provide the best scenario for an ongoing series. Looking forward to MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE series.

 

Clans Of The Alphane Moon might be fun, but I agree Dr. Bloodmoney would be a gas.

 

Any chance there'll be a DVD set of High Castle?

I don't have Internet ...

 

I would guess it will eventually come out but probably not for a least a year, Amazon wants to drive people to use their service so I would expect a much longer than usual release window for physical versions.

 

Clans could just be a straight continuation of the book.

Who'd play Chuck Rittersdorf? I could see Will Arnett playing him.

 

Have you seen Bojack Horseman?

 

The second episode was excellent!

 

Yes, I liked the second episode too. Looking forward to seeing the rest of the series. I'm so glad to see this is being done well.

 

When I started the book I had no idea it was a series. Now I see trailers on TV and there is not one scene that looks like its lifted from the book. In fact, there is not a single sequence in the book that takes place in NYC. Probably one of those loose adaptations.

So is Amazon the only way to watch this?

The question was asked if this was the first alternative history novel, apparently not. There was a novel (I believe in the 30's) where the Confederacy won the Civil War.

 

Well, I would hardly call it a bestseller but it did pretty well in the science fiction community.

I've enjoyed the series "The Man In The High Castle" so far nice expansion and adaption of Dick's themes (Frank Spotnitz from "The X-Files") . Well written, excellent production values. Clearly not shot in the U.S. In a touch of irony.

Folks are finally starting to realize the potential of Dick's paranoid science fiction novels as they fit very much in our paranoid times but the irony being thst they were written for times paranoid for different reasons.


I think Lynch would be eniteely wrong doe Dick's work. I think that Cronenberg would have been a better choice. "Three Stigmata" is one of my favorite books by Dick.

 

Sadly, so many ideas have been lifted for Ubik by lesser writers (and very good ones as well) that I don't think it would work quite as well today. I could be wrong though as "A Scanner a Darkly" was a perfect adaption IMHO.

 

It was one of the earliest and the first to win a major award (at least for Science Fiction) .

It also truly broke Dick as a major genre writer (others would break him with mainstream but, once again, an important artist died without benefiting fully from his own work. At least his family is able to benefit from him.The Hugo award was deserved. As far as the adaption, it takes the concepts from Dick's book an expands on them. I think he would be pleased just as he was eventually pleased by what he saw of "Blade Runner".

Yes, Amazon is the only way to,watch this at this time. It's worth it. You can just subscribe for a month or try a trial and then quit.

I wonder if they had access to Dick's notes for the book and early drafts?

 

The Man in the High Castle won Dick the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
I read a great book about Dick's life called Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick years ago, and came away with the impression it was considered a best seller back then, oh well.
I'm not giving up on this series as it does show promise, but changing the Grasshopper Lies Heavy from a book into a film that is on several film reels seems silly to me as it stands so far in the story.
Like I said this may turn out to be pretty good, but so far is quite different and to what effect is not clear yet.
FWIW torrenting the show for free is also an option to watch (any show for that matter).

With the basic plot element of Ubik being the story twist where all the people you thought were dead were actually alive and the protagonist who thinks he survived to get those people into 'cold pack' (so they could still communicate with the living in their 'half life' death state) is actually dead and in cold pack himself. Although probably picked clean idea wise and placed piece meal into forgettable films, I think this story is still ripe for a proper high impact telling. Cronenberg would suit this material well, but in my eyes he's too messy a director for something like Stigmata, which cries out for the sublime and poignant vision of a master -it is one of Dick's most existentialist and thought provoking stories ever. The things David Lynch tries to say in his most challenging works comes from the same voice as this story to some degree, Kurosawa and Kubrick are gone now, and Lynch is the only one I could see for that story being put to film.

 

I'm on episode 5 now, and I'm liking how they've opened it up to include the East Coast/Reich. I've noticed a few Hollywood clichés here and there, but nothing too terribly distracting. I'm hoping there's more discussion about the genuine relics vs the reproductions and what that means to the themes in the story (a real-vs-fake contrast which is paralleled in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), as well as more direct references to the I Ching, which is also an important part of the machinery at work here.

I think turning The Grasshopper Lies Heavy into a film is a brilliant idea. It plays more obviously cinematically than a book would, and it makes me curious where the adaptation is ultimately leading. The leads are all perfectly cast, with Julianna (Alexa Davalos) a particular standout to me. Of the strong women characters in Dick's books (see also VALIS), Julianna is one of the best. I really hope her climactic scene with Joe is played here as written in the book.

 

I pondered pretty much the same thoughts as my words were leaving the keyboard above. TMITHC is an excellent book that I last read about 20 years ago, admittedly it's not my favorite of his work and yet I do recall the 'wu' aspect that the jewelers story line revolved around and the fake artifacts part of the story. The change of the book to a film is obvious for an adaptation and that is why I distrust it -it might work well.
I'm downloading episodes 3 thru 10 right now and have only seen the first two so far.

 

Unfortunately that win didn't translate to big money. It might have been a bestseller for science fiction novels but that was a much smaller group of people then.

See I'd disagree with you about Cronenberg. I think he has demonstrated time and again that he is the less sloppy of the two directors. Naked launch and The Fly both demonstrated he can tackle challenging material and make it work dramatically.

Both are very talented but Cronenberg can tell a story well, Lynch is more interested in film as an abstraction. Lynch has a hard time with telling a more structured narrative.

 

I watched episode 6 last night. Amazing show! I've never read the book, so I have no idea how it turns out. Pure speculation on my part: The alternate reality aspect of the story involves time travel and a disruption of the timeline. I hope that doesn't come across as incredibly silly, but afterall, Dick was a science fiction writer. Being that the show is based on a single novel, I wonder how long they can keep this series going.

 

I just finished 10. It's got a cool twist. Looking forward to season two. It'll be a long wait though.

 

Yeah, that's the downside of binge watching. It's great when you discover a show years after it's off the air and binge watch the seasons consecutively.

 

I'm a big fan of Phil K. But I have yet to see a really good cinematic adaptation of his work. Bladerunner was ok, but the book had a different texture.