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:
On the evening of February 15, 2023, I talked via Zoom to the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County about alternate history stories on TV and in the movies.
Among the shows I discussed were The Man in the High Castle, Hunters, The Plot Against America, Watchmen, For All Mankind, The Last of Us, Fatherland, Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood, & Juliet, It’s Real Life, and Snodgrass.
This seems to be my year -- by which I mean all of 2021 and 2022 -- for alternate history. The second season of For All Mankind in February 2021, Ronald D. Moore's masterful alternate history about the race to the Moon in the 1960s, and ensuing decades, was even better than the first. My 90-minute interview with Rufus Sewell in July 2021 about The Man in the High Castle series on Apple TV+ got me even deeper into that one-of-a-kind stunning story. And just this month, a favorite story that I've written was published -- "It's Real Life," my alternate history about The Beatles.
So I was well prepared to catch up in my reading with Rosemary Claire Smith's "The Next Frontier" in the July/August issue of Analog Magazine. And the novelette exceeded my high expectations, delivering a memorable mix of alternate history about our species reaching the Moon, heart-throbbing detailed astronaut action in space, keen social valence, and even a scene that brought tears to my eyes.
Here's the set-up, with just some introductory spoilers: Natalya Orlova has defected from the Soviet space program, and has joined Armstrong, Aldrin, Bean, et al as possible to likely candidates for our American missions to the Moon. Jackie Kennedy has become co-director of NASA (I just love that!), and she's far tougher than the media allowed us to see in our reality. Bobby Kennedy survived the attempted assassination in June 1968 (with just a scar on his head) -- another facet of this alternate history that I love -- and is locked in a tight race with Nixon for the U. S. Presidency.
If that doesn't tempt you to read this story, I guess alternate history is not your thing. Smith's novelette makes important statements about the role of women in getting our species off this planet (similar in that regard to For All Mankind), as well as the realpolitik of space travel. Highly recommended, to say the least, not just to read but as the best novelette for the AnLab, Nebula, and Hugo Awards this year.
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.
Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 222, in which I share the talk I gave yesterday in Krakow, Poland via Zoom at PhilosophyCon about the aesthetics and philosophy of assessing the screen adaptations of the science fiction classics Dune (1984, 2021), Foundation (2021), The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019), and The End of Eternity (1987).
Thanks to Michal Tadeusz Norworyta for moderating.
Q & A at conclusion.
Relevant videos:
Relevant blog posts:
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.
Just what we needed, right? A series about a virus that's spreading quickly from city to city -- and killing children no less? And the plot hinges on a hyped vaccine that may not be effective at all? So, yeah, Utopia on Amazon Prime is all of that and more, and at the worst possible time. But maybe at the best possible time, because I found the first season of this series really enjoyable and binge-watched all eight of its episodes yesterday.
As for the specific story, first, just to get this out of the way: the part I liked least -- by which I mean, it was ok, but did not in itself make Utopia worth watching -- was the graphic novel, i.e. comic book, set-up, which was the foundation of the narrative. At its best, the "Utopia" comic serves the same purpose as "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" in The Man in the High Castle -- a secret manuscript which provides the heroes clues to what's going on -- and that was not my favorite part of The Man in High Castle, either. In Utopia, the comic book does provide entre into a fandom story which provides a strong argument in favor of virtual conventions and which was well done in terms of the individual characters, but cliched in its overall concept. So, in sum, I think Utopia could have done just as well without it.
The main strength of the series were the stunning surprises that pop up at or near the end of just about every episode. Excellent characters are unexpectedly killed, apparent allies are suddenly revealed as villains, and other villains themselves evolve into something better. Although the transformations could have been a bit more plausible, with better prior signalling of traits emerging or latent in the characters, they are believable enough, and make Utopia an adrenalin spurting rollercoaster ride, always welcome in a television series, and the essential element in a bingeable series, which Utopia most certainly is. (I'll note that I was very unhappy with the death of one of the characters, though it certainly moved the shocked needle way off the dial.)
The overall plot has touches of The Boys from Brazil, and also offers a familiar prosecution of the evils of corporate greed. But applied to the pandemic, it has a searing and even frightening relevance to our world off the screen, and since it (presumably) is not something that is current happening in our world, it is strangely refreshing to see. As I was watching it, I was thinking that Utopia threaded the needle between disconcerting because it was so close to our reality, and fun to see because it actually isn't that close (I hope), just perfectly. Amazon Prime deserves plaudits for scheduling and streaming Utopia in this crazy Fall of 2020.
***Note added October 26, 2022: On a friend's recommendation, I just finished binging the 12 episodes (two seasons) of the British Utopia, which aired 2013-2014. It was much better than the American version, and I'll be reviewing that British version here soon. Here's my review.
In Autofac, we have Dick addressing his perennial what's real and what's fantasy, dream, alternate whatever conundrum in a form likely best known these days, and for better than three decades: which one is more human, the android (robot) or the humans who made it/her/him. This is the theme of Bladerunner, original movie and recent sequel, based on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - two words of which are part of the title of this 2018 streaming series.
