Amazon Studios to Produce Pilot of Philip K Dick's The Man In The High Castle

The big news from last week (since I don't have the time to write up a complete Weekly Update) was that Amazon Studios was creating a pilot for a series based on Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle.

For those who don't know, The Man in the High Castle is set in a 1962 where the Axis Powers were victorious in World War II. The United States is occupied between a Nazi East Coast, a Japanese West Coast (known as the Pacific States of America) and a neutral "Rocky Mountain States" lumped in a middle as a buffer between the two power blocs.

The novel is considered by some to be the precursor to the modern alternate history genre as it brought the what if game out of the pulpy tales of time travel, magic and parallel universes and allowed for a serious tale of alternate history without any ASBs (although the genre certainly has plenty of that still).

According to Deadline, The Man In the High Castle is a joint project of Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files) and Ridley Scott's (who also adapted Dick's Blade Runner) Scott Free Productions. The pilot will be written by Spotnitz and be directed by David Semel (Legends). The project originally was set up as a four-hour miniseries Syfy last year, but it looks like the cable channel passed.

While I am sort of happy Syfy won't get the chance to ruin one of the classic works of alternate history, I am still worried about how long this project is taking to get made. The longer a project languishes in development, the worse it is likely to be. That being said, getting rid of cable like I did a couple of months ago is looking like an even better idea.

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update and a blogger on Amazing Stories. Check out his short fiction. When not writing he works as an attorney, enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.