Published Jun 25, 2026, 6:08 PM EDT
Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.
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In a truly impressive instance of expanding on existing source material, Prime Video’s classic sci-fi series managed to turn a great original novelette into a far longer four-season story. There’s never been a better time to be a fan of sci-fi TV. From Apple TV’s ambitious Isaac Asimov adaptation Foundation to its dystopian thriller Silo, to its upcoming William Gibson adaptation Neuromancer, there is a deluge of great shows in the genre.
Of course, that is just one streaming service’s sci-fi offerings. Netflix has Altered Carbon, Sense8, Stranger Things, and its eight-season sci-fi masterpiece Black Mirror. Meanwhile, Prime Video has The Expanse, a sprawling space opera that brought author James S.A. Corey’s series of bestselling novels to life onscreen. Prime Video was also home to an ambitious adaptation of the late, great Philip K. Dick’s work. Dick is best known for penning Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was adapted to the screen as Blade Runner.
However, the prolific author wrote much more than just that seminal sci-fi noir novel. Dick also wrote the source material for A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report, as well as the short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” The last was adapted by Robocop director Paul Verhoeven as the prescient sci-fi blockbuster Total Recall, and this adaptation’s loose approach to Dick’s writing might be part of what inspired Prime Video’s four-season sci-fi series The Man in the High Castle to experiment with augmenting the author’s original story.
The Man In The High Castle's Book Expansion Is Tastefully Done
As noted by a Syfy piece celebrating the show’s final season, The Man In The High Castle needed to expand on Dick’s novelette almost as soon as its pilot was finished. Set in a parallel universe where Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan won World War II, the series ambitiously introduced an entire alternate history of the world before honing in on specific characters.
While Prime Video’s other Philip K. Dick show, Electric Dreams, was an anthology that introduced new stories with every episode, The Man In The High Castle took the basic setup established in Dick’s 240-page novel and turned it into a four-season story. Although both the book and the show both focus on the mysterious title character, who is the author of an in-universe alternate history novel in which the Allies won, the show made many important changes.
Rufus Sewell’s villainous character John Smith is one such invention, and the fact that he wasn’t a character in the original novel initially concerned the actor before he saw the purpose of the American Nazi collaborator in the larger story of the series. Other changes that were added to the show were drawn from Dick’s abandoned research for a potential sequel novel that never materialized.
The Man In The High Castle's Book Expansion Started A Growing Trend
While The Man In The High Castle was an early adopter of this trend, the show’s critical success means it has become surprisingly commonplace for subsequent TV adaptations to expand beyond their source material. While HBO’s Game of Thrones franchise infamously struggled to end the story of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire saga without a book to adapt, its spinoffs House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms were commended for their judicious, surprising canon changes.
Similarly, Foundation made changes to Asimov’s source material much like The Man In The High Castle, expanding certain story elements and truncating others. At a time when ambitious, complicated sci-fi stories are increasingly becoming a welcome presence on the small screen, The Man In The High Castle helped pave the way for them to experiment with looser approaches to literary adaptation.
Source: Syfy
Release Date 2015 - 2019-00-00
Network Prime Video
Showrunner Frank Spotnitz
Writers Wesley Strick, Rob Williams, David Scarpa, Erik Oleson, Jace Richdale, Rick Cleveland, Thomas Schnauz, Mark Richard, Chris Collins, Kalen Egan, Elizabeth Benjamin, Emma Frost, Eric Overmyer, Eric Simonson, Julie Hébert, Walon Green, William N. Fordes, Evan Wright, Lolis Eric Elie, Francesca Gardiner, Dre Ryan, Chris Wu
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Alexa Davalos
Juliana Crain
English (US) ·