Man in the High Castle - Amazon

If I saw a film of you shooting me in an "alternate reality", I would be far more concerned with the notion that there IS an alternate reality, and that there's another me running around doing stuff there, then be mad at the you in THIS reality (which is how the characters reacted) for your alternate version shooting me. I'll stick by my feeling that the sequence has no logic to it, science fiction or not.

 

If presented with something like that which is so outside of your conception of reality, you (or most people) may not think so logically. I think the brain would have trouble assimilating such a thing and would revert to a more emotional reaction, at least in the short term.

 

Some problematic news regarding season 2. Frank Spotnitz has departed as the showrunner. The series was a passion project for Spotnitz, who had long been attached to it.

The official reason given for the change was that the production moved to the west coast: "Frank Spotnitz will remain as an executive producer and step back from showrunner. His responsibilities will be managed by our deep and talented bench of producers".

Hmmm, I know something else that had a "deep and talented bench"...

A source disputes reports that Spotnitz’s exit was due to the producer being hands-off, instead pointing to creative differences with the studio. If he was retired due to creative differences, then season 2 may be very different.

 

No news yet on when season 2 will be released, however a season 2 teaser has surfaced:

 

Just found this (because I rarely browse videos on Amazon Prime). I hit the Amazon button on my TV remote and gave it a try. So far so good, I have watched the first 2 episodes and I like it.

 

I have watched the first 2 episodes

Of Season One....

 

Season 2 is being released on the 16th of December 2016.

 

Too long between seasons....not good news that the creator of the series (from Dick's novel) has left.

 

Wow, you're right, almost two years. I think the second season needs to be the last. They were stretching it going past one season, so I'll approach this one with expectations lowered.

 

gee that's a bit far away

 

But Dec. 16th is when my free subscription from Time-Warner Cable, to Showtime ends...

Really..

 

But it's an amazon show. . .

 

I'm 15 minutes into the first episode. So American won the war but fascist powers in our government are staging a fake takeover by Germany? That's my guess anyway

 

This is a story about Germany and Japan occupying the US after winning world war 2 -that's the premise of the whole story, you should know that much before even starting the show.

 

Sorry, I haven't read all the posts in this thread, but I literally just subscribed to Amazon Prime last week to get this show, and watched the first two, truly chilling episodes, which hit on a lot of personal notes for me.

I'm a huge PKD fan, having read nearly all of his work. It's been a long time since I read this book, but it's one of his best, after The Simulacra, and his masterpiece, UBIK. I've got a hardcover first edition of that one, as well as Dick's own published screenplay, which, despite the film rights having been bandied around for years, no one in Hollywood has had the nerve to pull off.

Besides being a Jew, my dad fought the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge, and nearly got his head blown off ( his commanding officer did). I still have the S/S and SA daggers my dad took off of dead Germans, and brought back home as souvenirs, along with his Bronze Star for bravery.
One of my dad's first cousins was on Schindler's List (the real one, not the movie).
Growing up, I also had a close friend of German extraction whose family was nearly all exterminated. Obviously, and luckily, his parents got out in time.

On top of all that, I'm a big fan of Ridley Scott and Rufus Sewell, so I can't wait to keep watching this show.

 

It's based on one of the earliest alt history novels by Phillip K. Dick of the same name.

The U.S. Lost the war, Germany succeeded and invaded the UK and U.S. And Japan the west coast with the two powers splitting the nation in two with a buffer zone.

In the novel the I Ching plays a part but there's a subversive element that is making both the Japanese and the Nazi's nervous.

 

I'll give it a chance but I agree that developments were glacial during the first season but felt that it was rewarding by the end. I would have cut three or four episodes and dropped a couple of characters.

I'm also concerned that it will take another two years before further episodes are produced.

 

Nice! The only hard bound 1st edition I have is The Black Haired Girl which is a collection of his letters and speeches, though a great read.
UBIK is a natural for adaption into a film or quality series, but it would require serious artistic finesse to do it right.
In the right hands it would be a stunning film. I have all of his stuff in paperback, coincidentally my pb copy of TMITHC is a 1st edition.
I always liked The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, the whole Perky Pat thing is so surreal yet poignant, Flow My Tears sticks out for me as well.
I read somewhere years ago that John Lennon owned the screen rights to Stigmata for awhile, talk about alternate universes! I always wondered if he had not died so soon if he would have ever helped a film project to come out of that.

 

How many episodes are there?

 

I have literally all of his books - but I still think Martian Time Slip would have been the best one to adapt for a series. Ubik would be a great movie (the ending of the screenplay he wrote was better than the book's ending.) Stigmata would be a good mini series.

 

@tomhayes great collection! I'm missing a few, but I've got about a dozen hard covers (some first editions) and all but one of the Ace Double first editions, which have some great covers. I was lucky enough to pick up the collected stories in hardcover about ten years ago for $150, which was a steal even then. I just looked at the prices on ebay and they're nuts now.

Anyway, I'd love to see a good adaptation of UBIK and Stigmata, the latter of which would make a good 6 or 8 part mini series. I just love that book.

 

Love Phil but man was he wacky at the end. I suspect he had a series of mini strokes that caused his delusions.

He was about thirty years ahead of his time and all those who read his works and became writers have reaped the benefit of his unusual plotting and storytelling.

 

That is nice! I used to have all those Exegesis volumes, excellent! Now of course I regret selling a lot of nicer books I used to own a few years ago, but since then I re collected most of his published work in either vintage or newer paper back, because I still want to read them again...

 

That one I did forget to mention as a fave, The Zap Gun just blew me away when I first read it...There are quite a few that do that, actually.

 

Great SciFi (and fantasy in general like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber) has always been my reading of choice I suppose. I have read most of the classics but once bitten by the PKD bug it was kind of like finding a solar system to settle down in and orbit around, some others like John Sladek and Thomas Disch have hit that nerve but Dick was a master for sure.

This quote reminded me of some book that I read years ago where the premise was that matter transmitting and instant travel were recently developed and available, in the story the protagonist uses the device only to find out he has become a ghost doppelganger of himself and he finds that he cannot communicate with any real people from his original plane of existence anymore (including his original self). He runs into other copies of people wandering around and it is as though they are swimming through the matter of our reality, like ghosts. So every time this technology is used it spits out a ghost duplicate... kind of creepy.
Anyone ever recall reading that book? I have no clue who wrote it.