Philip K. Dick’s cult novel ‘Man in the High Castle’ becoming an Amazon TV pilot

Amazon is preparing its third round of TV show pilots, and Deadline reports that one of the upcoming titles will be an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel in which Germany and Japan have won World War II and taken over most of the United States. Titled The Man In the High Castle, the show will be based on Dick’s 1962 Hugo award-winning book of the same name. A writer from The X-Files will reportedly create a script for the pilot, which will be directed by David Semel — who was also behind the first episode of Heroes.

This is one of the occasions that Amazon’s pilot process is a huge win for viewers. Usually, only the network gets to take a look at a pilot before deciding if it should actually be ordered to series, but Amazon lets viewers watch pilots and vote on whether they’re interesting enough to succeed. That means, so long as the pilot is made, interested viewers will get the chance to see this vision of Dick’s haunting alternate future. There’s no date yet on when Amazon’s coming pilot season will start though. It’s also planning a thriller about a sickness that spreads over social media (yes, really), a comedy about young American expats in Paris, and a comedy about life in Chicago, among several others.