Amazon is making a series about The Man in the High Castle, a 1962 novel by Philip K. Dick.

The Man in the High Castle is Dick’s alternative history story, based on a chilling hypothetical: What if the Allies had lost World War II? The action takes place on American soil in 1962, almost a generation after the war. Back when the novel was written, that was the present day. Now it’s a period piece, but that somehow makes it even more evocative.

It’s not the country we remember from the ’60s. It has been divided up by its conquerors, with the Nazis ruling the East, the Japanese ruling the West, and a strip of desolate neutral zone around the Rocky Mountains.

Both sides of the Rockies are police states, but in different ways — and there’s a resistance, an underground, working to topple the oppressive governments in charge. One of the weapons used by the resistance is a psychological one. Film canisters contain what look to be vintage newsreels, but show an alternate history that we recognize as our own: the Nazis losing, the Japanese surrendering, and America and England emerging triumphantly.

Dick is a sort of master oblique story teller – the book is like a series of short stories about the lives of fairly ordinary people, with extraordinary events occurring in the background that you learn about only gradually. It forces you to fill in the details of the story yourself using your imagination. Or you can watch the TV show where someone else does it for you. Of course, this has been done before. We can Remember it for you Wholesale (aka “Total Recall”) and Minority Report were both short stories where all Hollywood writers had to do was fill in some details. It’s really worth reading through a collection of Dick short stories, such as Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. A couple of my favorites are Autofac and Second Variety.