Frank Spotnitz et al. The Man in the High Castle. Produced by Christian Baute et al, Amazon Prime Video, 2015-2019.

From my experience, a television or film series that follows a book closely—in other words, it is not rewritten for a one to three hour box office film—usually lasts six to ten hours. I seem to recall a BBC version of A Tale of Two Cities which copied most of the book’s dialogue and followed the story chapter by chapter had, I believe, eight episodes of 30 to 40 minutes each. (Correct me, if I am wrong. It was nearly forty years ago.) When I saw that The Man in the High Castle was ten episodes, I figured that they were following the novel line by line. After all, Dick’s novel is shorter than Dickens’.

When I got to episode ten, I discovered that this was just season one! This would take four seasons and a total of 38 episodes. I was already invested in the show, so I watched the whole thing over a period of about two months. It was worth it, I think.

The Amazon Prime show is very loosely based on the novel. At first, it seemed like there were a few modifications to make it more effective for an audience watching the show rather than reading the story. For example, instead of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy being a novel, it is a film—and instead of a single film, we learn that there are a whole series of films.

The basic foundation of the story is the same: The Axis won World War II; Japan rules the Western United States, Germany rules the Eastern States, and part of the Rocky Mountains is a semi-independent neutral zone (in the novel, it is run by Japan). One of the characters is a San Francisco antiques dealer. Another is a New York Jew who managed to escape to the Western States before the Nazis took over the East Coast. In the book, he is the same person.

Then there is the so-called Man in the High Castle who seems to believe in an alternate history where the Allies won the war, and, yes, his name is Abendsen. Yes, there is a German assassination plot as it seems Germany believes they can drive Japan out of North America. But then the current fuehrer dies—in the book he is Bormann, in the film Hitler still lives at the beginning (1961). There is also a Japanese official who consults the I Ching in both stories.

The Amazon version is an original work in its own right, though. Older viewers may get a kick out of the early sixties settings, especially those in Abendsen’s world. They include a lot of popular music from all genres, headlines concerning the Cuban missile crisis and the Beatles, and hints of incipient military action in Vietnam. In other words, the Amazon version takes the novel as a foundation and builds on it.

Because it has so many episodes, it is structured more like an epic than a novel. Because it was produced in 2015, it has sex, something missing from the 1962 novel. It does have a lot of action and many characters and subplots. Nearly every episode has a different director and different scriptwriter. Still, it hangs together pretty well. As it builds on the novel’s foundation, the Amazon series borrows from the film Inception and the television series Lost.

I am trying to avoid spoilers, but there are a few things I feel I must note so viewers do not miss them. There is a terrific juxtaposition of two scenes at one point in the third season. A group of Jewish survivors in the neutral zone are celebrating a bar mitzvah. Meanwhile in German-occupied New York, the government is starting a new calendar with the current year being year one. Tradition vs. Utopia. Which one will really last in the long run? We are told the bar mitzvah is 5,000 years old (well, really closer to 4,000, but we get the message). How long will the Socialist New World Order last? Or any other man-made scheme or empire?

As with the novel, there is an interesting juxtaposition of fate and free will. The oriental tradition as typified in the I Ching is fatalistic. The Nazis speak of the will to power. In one version a boy is killed by the Nazis because of a birth defect. In the “Allies win” version, the boy volunteers for Vietnam where it is implied he will be killed. The house always wins…and you can’t get out of the game.

Anyway, the miniseries of The Man in the High Castle flows out differently from the novel. Still, it is quite entertaining with some flashes of brilliance. As implied earlier, fans of Lost or Inception should get a kick out of it. Because of its scope there is something or someone in it for everyone.