Couldn’t be a better time for The Man in the High Castle to show up on Netflix — here’s the 90-minute conversation I had with Rufus Sewell about his deeply thought-out performance in the lead role, in July 2021, shortly after the conclusion of the pathbreaking series on Amazon.
And ... if you're a fan of alternate history, you might enjoy It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles.
more about the novel here
Welcome to Light On Light Through episode 418, in which I interview Dan Abella about The Philip K. Dick Film Festival to take place in New York City, March 13-14, 2026.
Relevant links:
My wife and I saw Paul Anka: His Way, a 2024 documentary, last night on HBO. Why did we wait so long to see it? I don't know. Probably because we weren't paying enough attention.
I've been a fan of Anka since 1957, when I was in 5th grade in PS 96 in The Bronx, and Anka had a great hit, "Diana". Joel Iskowitz, Jordan Axelrod, Steven Auerbach, and Paul Gorman were in my class. I started an acapella group, Little Levi and the Emeralds. I don't think we sang much of "Diana" -- we were more into The Five Satins, The Harptones, and The Del Vikings -- but we sure loved it.
Anka explains and demonstrates at the beginning of the documentary that the ease of playing those 4-chord songs -- C, Am, F, G -- when he sat down at the piano was what drew him into singing and then writing. And he progressed in extraordinary ways, writing "My Way" for Sinatra, the Johnny Carson theme song, and even some songs with Michael Jackson. He also wrote "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" for Buddy Holly and "She's a Lady" for Tom Jones, and those are just a fraction of the more than 900 songs Anka has written!
Of course, no documentary can play even small parts of most of that number of songs, but the question always arises (for me, at least) of what songs would I have liked to hear and see Paul Anka perform in His Way? And, yes, there is one, in particular. It's a song that played a crucial role in Amazon's adaptation (by Frank Spotnitz) of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, which ran for four seasons (2015-2019) and helped establish streaming as the titan it is today, The first episode of the second season in 2016 opens with an extended mise-en-scène of protagonist John Smith's (Rufus Sewell brilliantly portrays Smith) young teenage son Thomas getting off the school bus and walking into class. Everything seems so normally, happily, suburban American, as Thomas Smith (good job Quinn Lord) looks at the girls and walks into school. We begin to get a disquieting taste of this alternate history in which the Nazis beat America in the Second World War when we see the Nazi insignia on Thomas's arm and then a kid in the class asks Thomas how many slaves George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had. Thomas Smith then looks at a girl in the class in that certain way, she looks back at him when he isn't looking, but the joy of that budding teenage romance is shattered to pieces for the TV viewer when Thomas is called up to the front of the class to give a Nazi pledge of allegiance that he does with pride.
Now, this is one of Spotnitz's best conceived and realized scenes, and he hammers it home playing Paul Anka's 1960 hit song, "My Home Town," loudly and softly in the background until Thomas begins the pledge. This is an upbeat, zestful song, brimming with the enthusiasm and pleasures of living that is a hallmark of Anka's music, especially his early recordings -- the perfect background for the unnerving perversion of American life that the Nazi conquest has wrought.
So, yeah, I missed "My Home Town" in Paul Anka: His Way -- especially given the steps to fascism our country is currently taking -- but the documentary is titled "His Way", that is, Paul's way, and/or the movie's director and writer John Maggio's way, not my way, and as I've been known to say to someone who tells me that they would have had a character in one of my novels do or say something different than what I had them do or say: hey, go write your own novel. :) And all in all, there's not much I would change in this rendition of Anka's incredible inspiring life and journey. At 84 years old, he's still going strong, hasn't reached the top of the mountain yet (as he says), and I'm looking forward to hearing and hearing about the rest of the climb.
Another superb episode in the third season of Foundation -- 3.4 -- in which the series continues to integrate the Cleon triumvirate story with Asimov's original Foundation trilogy, alternated in many ways but still ringing true enough to Asimov's vision to be expansive rather than smothering of what Asimov put on his pages.
My favorite sliver of a scene has Day chiding Demerzel with a question borrowed and transmuted from Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, brought to the movie screen in 1982 by Ridley Scott as Blade Runner. Day concludes his testy conversation with Demerzel -- he's understandable uncomfortable with her -- with a question, "Do robots dream of wiping their own asses?" Not as elegant as Philip K. Dick, but, hey, a lot of years have passed since he came up with that title.
And it was good to hear Demerzel talk about Asimov's three laws of robotics, and then the zeroth law, as she struggles to understand how she has evolved, who and what she's become and must do. She's an advanced piece of work, indeed. Not only can she think and talk with her head physically detached from her body, she can navigate the complexities of the universe with the best of 'em -- e.g., Hari and Gaal -- and knows that the Second Foundation is the best way of stopping The Mule.
[Spoilers ahead ... ]
Speaking of which -- the Second Foundation and The Mule -- I actually like that Pricher wasn't converted by The Mule (who did manage to read his mind), and is literally in league with Gaal. This is a significant departure from Asimov's story, and I think it's a good one. I've always been at least slightly unhappy about Pricher's conversion to The Mule all those years before their story was streaming on Apple TV+, and it will be fun to see where this twist goes.
Gaal continues to play a vastly more important role in this rendition of the Foundation saga than her male counterpart in the trilogy. Not only is she in bed with Pricher, she has intellectually seduced Dawn, and drawn him into the cause of the Second Foundation. As I said in a previous review, this realignment of the major players in the story of The Mule, in which powerful elements of the Empire are joining the Foundations in their desperate looming war with that demon manipulator of minds, is refreshing and promises some major unexpected developments. As became clear back in the days back when television was just being born as a mass medium, Seldon's psychohistory can only go so far.
See also Foundation 3.1: Now We're Talkin'! ... 3.2: "The Fault, Dear Brutus, Is Not in Our Stars" ... 3.3: Dawn and The Mule
And see also Foundation 2.1: Once Again, A Tale of Two Stories ... 2.2: Major Players ... 2.3: Bel Riose and Hari ... 2.5: The Original Cleon and the Robot ... 2.6: Hari and Evita ... 2.7: Is Demerzel Telling the Truth? ... 2.8: Major Revelations ... 2.9: Exceptional Alterations ... Season 2 Finale: Pros and Cons
And see also Foundation 1.1-2: Mathematician, Man of the People, and Cleon's Clones ... Foundation 1.3: Clonal Science Fiction, Hari Seldon as V. I. Lenin ... Foundation 1.4: Slow Hand, Long Half-Life, Flipped Coin ... Foundation 1.5: What We Learned in that Final Scene ... Foundation 1.6: Folded Variations ... Foundation 1.7: Alternate History/Future ... Foundation 1.8: Divergences and Convergences ... Foundation 1.9: Vindication and Questions ... Foundation Season 1 Finale: Right Up There
Readers of this blog will know that my favorite genre -- as a viewer, reader, and author -- is time travel, and its close relative alternate history. You'll know this because I say it in just about every other post. But you would also know this because, at least by my lights, excellent and even good examples are not easy to find (and, I'll immodestly or modestly say, as an author, to write).
But Aporia, a 2023 movie I saw last night on Hulu, is an excellent example. The heart of its narrative is that a would-be inventor (later, inventors), of a time machine discovers that the clanky machine he's struggling to build in his home can't quite do it -- it's not powerful enough to hurtle a human back in time -- but it can send a subatomic particle back to a specific time and place (the time just a handful of years or a little bit in longer into the past), where it will cause a very minor explosion. And the inventor realizes that if the place in the past where the subatomic particle lands is inside someone's head, well, what he the inventor has created is a gun that can reach back and kill someone in the past, by putting one of these time-travelling particles into the target's head.
[And I'll here I'll tell you that there will be spoilers ahead ... ]
So, there are three main characters in Jared Moshe's movie (which he wrote and directed): Jabir and Mal were working on the time machine in Jabir's home, when Mal was killed by a drunk driver. This of course left his wife Sophie desolate. Jabir is desperate to ease her pain, and restore her life, and comes up with a plan: send one of those lethal subatomic particles back in time, to land in the drunk driver's head, before he gets into the car and accidentally kills Mal. And the plan works!
But that's when Aporia really gets riveting and ethically wrenching, as Sophie struggles with the fact that although she got her husband back, she had to take another human life to do it. She reaches out to the drunk driver's widow. They become friends, and so do their daughters. And here the movie excels in depicting how the people who know the original reality, and know that it has been altered, deal with the new reality they now inhabit. (I tend to like this metaphysics of time travel -- that people who cause the changes in time are aware of the changes, even if the changes affect them -- maybe because I always employ such a narrative structure in my own works.) As Sophie gets to know the drunk driver's family, she finds she can't bear the fact that she was responsible for killing the drunk husband and father, however much he may have deserved it ... but any attempt to change the past again by killing someone else with a time-traveling particle could have unforeseen consequences ...
Aporia resonantes in all kinds of ways. The build-your-machine-at-home continues the tradition started by H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, and furthered more recently by Primer and just a few months ago Quantum Suicide. The idea of sending something rather than people or living things back in time was put to good use by Gregory Benford in his 1980 award-winning novel, Timescape, in which information could be sent back in time. And the idea of apprehending criminals, not because they committed a crime, but because you know they will commit a crime, was of course memorably developed by Philip K. Dick in his novel The Minority Report.
But Aporia has a story and an ambience all its own, brought to life by really excellent acting by Judy Greer as Sophie, Edi Gathegi (who has been great in For All Mankind, and before that, StartUp) as Mal, and Payman Maadi as Jabir. And all of this builds up to a top-notch ending, in which a smile tells us almost everything.
my interview with Jared Moshe
watch the movie on Amazon Prime Video -- read the novelette here
in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover
Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 355, in which I interview Dan Abella about the upcoming Psychedelic Film and Music Festival he is organizing. The Festival will take place October 20-22, 2023 in New York City, and there will both live and remote events and access.
Links to some of what we discuss in the podcast:
Beyond honored and delighted to announce that my 2019 novelette, "Robinson Calculator," will be in Robots Through the Ages, an anthology with stories by Ambrose Bierce, Philip K, Dick, and other past masters of the genre, to be published by Blackstone Press on July 25, 2023.
Here's the Table of Contents. More details including blurbs, reviews, etc over here.
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION by Robert Silverberg
PERFECTION by Seanan McGuire
MOXON’S MASTER by Ambrose Bierce
WITH FOLDED HANDS by Jack Williamson
GOOD NIGHT, MR. JAMES by Clifford D. Simak
INSTINCT by Lester del Rey
A BAD DAY FOR SALES by Fritz Leiber
SECOND VARIETY by Philip K. Dick
THE GOLEM by Avram Davidson
FOR A BREATH I TARRY by Roger Zelazny
GOOD NEWS FROM THE VATICAN by Robert Silverberg
DILEMMA by Connie Willis
THE ROBOT’S GIRL by Brenda Cooper
THAT MUST BE THEM NOW by Karen Haber
R.U.R.-8? by Suzanne Palmer
ROBINSON CALCULATOR by Paul Levinson
OF HOMEWARD DREAMS AND FALLEN SEEDS AND MELODIES BY MOONLIGHT by Ken Scholes
TODAY, I KNOW by Martin L. Shoemaker
AFTERWARD & RECOMMENDED READING by Bryan Thomas Schmidt
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
[Spoilers follow ... ]
My favorite moment in this superb episode is Spock smiling, ever so slightly but noticeably, when he and the crew on the bridge learn that Uhura and Hemmer survived. An always timely reminder that Spock is not only Vulcan but human.
And speaking of reminders, let's talk about the Gorn, who first appeared in the original Star Trek. Back then in the 1967 episode "Arena," Kirk's combat with a Gorn captain was evocative of Fredric Brown's 1944 story, also titled "Arena," and Brown received story credit for the episode. In SNW 1.4, the Gorn are evocative of Philip K. Dick's "Beyond Lies the Wub," his first published story, which appeared in Planet Stories in 1952. Both deal, in very different ways, with an intelligent species that hunts another intelligent species as food. I guess that's not enough for Dick to get story credit, but it's worth noting the degree to which Dick's ideas continue to percolate through so much subsequent science fiction.
Noonien-Singh also had another excellent episode, and is now among my favorite new characters in this series. Indeed, she has the potential to be up there with the best characters in all the Star Trek series. Meanwhile, Hemmer is increasingly interesting, and also had a strong, thoughtful episode.
If you're a devotee of classic science fiction, you just can't miss with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and I'll see you back here next week with my review of the next episode,
See also Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 1.1-1.2: Great Characters, Actors, Stories ... 1.3: "Instead of terraforming planets, we modify ourselves ..."
I interview Rufus Sewell about Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
So it occurred to me, as I was watching the enthralling third and fourth episodes of Outer Range, that this new series on Amazon Prime has a lot of Twin Peaks in it. I mean, an investigation of a murder against a backdrop that has a Philip K. Dickian mind-bending vibe is a rare thing, with a pulsing potential to be memorable if it's done up right. If Deputy Sheriff Joy, one of my favorite characters (and being played really well by Tamara Podemski) expresses a joy in cherry pie, I may be on to something.
Outer Range is one strange bird, if I may mix metaphors, and getting stranger by the episode. In the third and fourth episodes, and linguistically evocative also of Twin Peaks, we have a mountain disappearing. This gives the time shifting or time traveling or whatever exactly is going on a much longer timeline. If we're talking about mountains coming and going, we're entering the NBC series La Brea territory, and even further back than that.
Autumn probably has the most knowledge of what's going on at this point, and she's not saying too much, despite her seeming willingness to answer every question. On the other side of the being informative curve, it's not clear how much of what happened to Royal (good portrayal Josh Brolin), when he spent the better (or worse) part of the dead of night in that waterhole, is something he either doesn't really remember or doesn't want to talk about. I hope his wife Cecilia keeps pushing him for a briefing, and he does more than looked pained when she walks away, frustrated, because he's not talking.
He does have a lot on his mind. A dead body is bad news in the most normal of times, and Outer Range is most assuredly not normal. Wayne (well played by Will Patton) knows a little more than what he's saying, too, and the fact that he's more focused on that west pasture than who killed his son, says a lot, too.
But back to that in-and-out mountain: You can't beat Burl Ives singing "Big Rock Candy Mountain," and with Juice Newton's "Angel of the Morning" also playing in episode 1.4, we've got some timeless music in this time warping narrative.
See you back here with my review of the next two episodes next week.
See also Outer Range 1.1-2: Elusive Hybrid
[Spoilers ahead ... ]
Well, if you saw the episode, up since Friday on Apple TV+, you'll know why: Helly takes her life, or tries to take her life, at the end of the hour. I make that distinction because, you know how it is on television, if a character's head isn't literally severed (for want of a better word), than she or he might well have survived. In Helly's case, someone in that hell on Earth might have come by and rescued her.
What drove her to do this? She was betrayed by her outie, who appears in a video explaining that she doesn't want to end the severance of her and her innie. Though, it occurred to me that that video could have been a deep fake. I mean, deep fakes already abound in our own off-screen world, so, surely the dementos who built that innie world would know how to make them.
The other important aspect of 1.4 is the development of Irving as a character. We saw a lot more of him in the story than usual. But ... what did we learn about him? He may or may not be ok with a visceral relationship with Burt. At first, Irving pulls his hand away and soon after walks out of the room when Burt puts his hand over Irving's. But, later, perhaps after Irving has thought it over, he seems to seek Burt out. Not only does this behavior leave us still unclear about what Irving really wants, it's a metaphor for just about everything else in this harrowing narrative.
I'm sure it's been noted by others, and I may have already mentioned this myself, but Severance could fit comfortably into Philip K. Dick's uncomfortable corpus of work. Talk about A Scanner Darkly, in Severance, just about everything we scan with our eyes comes up blurry and unclear. The harder we focus, the more we get the feeling that we're looking into an infinite regress of possibilities. (Hey, I like working the name of this blog into my reviews.)
In any case, I'll be narrowing my gaze for some true meaning, and I'll see you back here with my review of the next episode, next week.
See also Severance 1.1-1.2: Erving Goffman Meets The Prisoner ... Severance 1.3: The History and the Neighbor
I guess this was a perfect night to watch Munich: The Edge of War on Netflix. Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine. The Trumpists -- including Trump himself -- have still not been brought to justice for their insurrection and attack on our Capitol last January 6. And the movie is based on the novel Munich by Robert Harris, author of the alternate-history masterpiece Fatherland, in which Germany won the Second World War. Not as much of a masterpiece as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (made into an incandescent series on Amazon), for sure, but I'd watch a movie based on a Harris novel any time.
And Munich: The Edge of War is one memorable powerhouse of a movie. As Neville Chamberlain goes to Munich to sign a deal with Hitler which gave Germany a piece of Czechoslovakia, which as we learned in school led to Chamberlain proclaiming "peace in our time" and Hitler to start gobbling up the rest of Europe less than a year later, two young diplomats, a Brit and a German, formerly classmates at Oxford, try to stop that deal from happening.
Their failure is a fact of history. Their existence, I assume, is not. What I'm not sure about is the way Chamberlain is portrayed in this brilliant film, in which he seems to really know what he's doing, deliberately delaying a hot war with Germany to give Britain and the United States crucial time to build up their forces. That's what we get for watching a movie based on a novel by an author who is so deft at writing alternate histories.
But the movie, as I just said, is brilliant, and eminently worth seeing. Historical dramas can be powerful and suspenseful even if we know the ending. As a measure of how good this movie was, I felt bad that these two central characters -- the British and German friends -- didn't really exist. That's probably because they are fiction, and where the rise of Hitler is concerned, fiction can often be better than reality -- unless we're talking about Fatherland or The Man in the High Castle.
So here we are again. Critics are giving Reminiscence (on HBO Max) mixed reviews, saying it's derivative. I agree that it's derivative, but think it's excellent. In general, I think being derivative is not a bad thing, and I disagree with the myopic critics who miss how well Reminiscence does it.
Yes, Reminiscence is reminiscent of Blade Runner. Even more so in some ways of Total Recall, and for that matter, of all things Philip K. Dick. But it also recalls a lot of Christopher Nolan's work, as well as movies as far back as the 1940s like Laura, and even Body Heat in 1981 to some extent. And if it harkens to Westworld, well, Lisa Joy plays a central creative role in both.
I was a little bothered by Thandiwe Newton's character Emily motivated by the exact same thing as her character Maeve in Westworld -- finding her daughter -- but that's just one unnecessary misstep in a long list of gambits and interludes done very well in Reminiscence. Among them are the deft mix of a flooded world and the refuge in memories, and outstanding acting by Hugh Jackman in the lead role, and Rebecca Ferguson as his all-consuming love interest Mae.
This is first time I've seen Ferguson, and I'm very impressed. She's Swedish, and even before I knew that, she reminded me of Ingrid Bergman. Come to think of it, Jackman's Nick Bannister reminded me a bit of Bogart. Is that supposed to be bad? Of course not. It makes Reminiscence even more fun to watch.
I won't go into the plot, so as not to risk spoilers. I will say that I like happy endings, and I'll leave it to you to decide where the ending of Reminiscence resides on the happy/sad meter. Nick tells Mae that there are no happy endings, especially of happy stories, presumably because to end them is sad. Mae responds that therefore she'd like to hear a happy story that ends right in the middle. That's the kind of dialogue that lifts Reminiscence into a top tier, and if it reminds us of triumphs in cyberpunk ranging from Incandescence to Altered Carbon, so much the better.
Hey, I'll be teaching a brand new course at Fordham University this summer that I proposed, created, and developed over the past few months: "Science Fiction from Page to Screen". I'll be teaching the course entirely remotely, via live Zoom lectures and interviews, and group and individual email discussions, so you don't need to be in New York City to take it -- you can be anywhere in the world. And you don't need to be a student at Fordham. The course carries four undergraduate credits, and you can take the course as a visiting student from another university, or if you're a college graduate, or, if approved, if you're a high school senior (and in exceptional cases, a high school junior).
The focus of the course this summer will be Philip K. Dick's iconic award-winning 1962 novel, The Man in the High Castle, made into the Emmy-winning four-season series (2015-2019) on Amazon Prime Video, starring Rufus Sewell -- who will be be making a special Zoom appearance in our course for a live interview by me in July!
For those you who may not know me, I'm a tenured professor (former Chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies) at Fordham University, author of seven science fiction novels (including The Plot to Save Socrates and my Locus Award winning first novel, The Silk Code) and more than forty stories, former President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (1998-2001), and a lifelong admirer of Philip K. Dick's work. More about me here.
I'm really looking forward to teaching this course and welcoming Rufus Sewell to Fordham!
Here is the course description:
FITV 3635 PW1 - Science Fiction From Page to Screen
Session III, June 1 - August 5, 2021
Online: TTh, 3-5 p.m.
This course examines the unique, dynamic relationship between written words published as novels and short stories and their adaptation in TV series and motion pictures, in the genre of science fiction. Issues include the reader’s expectations about screen adaptations, the challenge of visualizing the impossible in science fiction, multiple movies from a single source, and books within books as a literary and cinematic device. The course will focus on a single iconic novel adapted into a multi-season TV series.
CRN: 12993
Instructor: Levinson
4 credits
Registration details for visiting students are here. Tuition details are here.
There were lots of good scenes, savvy dialogue, wonderful locales (my favorite: Sal's apartment on Wadsworth Terrace in Manhattan), and a pretty good twist at the end (which I won't tell you), but Anon nonetheless lacked, I don't know, a certain depth and profundity, even though that's exactly what it was trying to convey. Anyone, especially police detectives, having access via your brain to what you see and do is a pretty traumatic and revolutionary development in human life, and for all the characters' remonstrating about that in the movie - or, in some cases, celebrating it - the ambience fell short of kicking you in the cosmic gut. Probably there was a little too much emphasis on the murders and the police work. Perhaps seeing scanning in other contexts a little more would have given Anon a more universal grounding. 
