No heavy spoilers...
I just finished watching Season three of Amazon's adaptation and expansion of Philip K Dick's lone Hugo award-winning novel Man in the High Castle. As a PKD expert, I was watching it slowly and carefully. Really the first season is the only one actually based on the novel, and even though Phil outlined a novel and wrote a few chapters of a sequel the show is not really based on that. Season 2 has a few concepts from Owl in the Daylight (the sequel) it is mostly an expansion of the characters and setting.
I think season three of High Castle is a good slow burn speculative drama but it becomes something very different from the source material. Season 2 had some clumsy sci-fi that is rooted in the choice to change Haawthrone Abensen's stories of the other world from a novel to films. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (novel in the novel) makes internal sense. The films in the show make visual sense but not logical sense. It requires almost a mythical explanation, verses the clearly multi-verse explanation of the novel.
The expansion of the novel on the show becomes a story about resistance to fascism. Of course, I think that is a good theme, but the original point of the novel has been lost. The message PKD most honed in on - was gee whiz look how scary it would be if the bad guys won but the danger of false historical narrative. How much can you really trust the history you are being taught? Does bias itself create false reality?
I think Anti-fascism is a running theme in PKD's fiction, So I don't think this was a bad direction for the show. His anti-nazism took a weird turn in his second novel The World Jones Made. But the novel treated life in the occupied parts of America as a mundane horror. The show expands the horror and cruelty of Nazism to a more realistic level that portrays the horrors of the holocaust. For whatever reason, the Japanese west while authoritarian did reflect the level of horror as the east. I think the survivors of Nanking might have thought the depiction soft.
The natural reaction is to escalate the resistance. Major characters die and some were surprises for me. Rufus Sewell continues to amaze as John Smith, his storyline being the most interesting to me. As the intensity of the drama ramps up so in the science fiction, I suspect season four is going even deeper there.
Overall I like the series and think that it is an important showcase for PKD, my biggest hope for the show is it will continue to spark interest in source material and various works of the author. Ultimately I think the novel is a masterpiece and the show is about as much as we could hope for.
Our Dickheads episode about the novel:
Really cool interview we did with academics about Man in the High Castle:
What is your basis for stating that The Owl In Daylight is the sequel to The Man in the High Castle???????
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ReplyDelete"As a PKD expert..." C'mon, what kind of Junior High crap is this? Let your writing speak for itself. The writer doesn't evaluate and praise himself, the writer evaluates and criticizes other work. Let others decide whether you're an expert or not.
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