This io9 piece states that the TV series will be very different from the novel:
http://io9.com/man-in-the-high-castle-is-wildly-different-from-the-boo-1679953073
(BTW the opening titles shows Isa Dick Hackett- Dick's daughter- as one of the executive producers, as well as Ridley Scott... the latter prob means the visuals will be nice, not sure if his family's involvement will make any difference but they really care about his legacy afaik...
and I think probably because all the films from the 1980s based on his books turned out so incredibly awful- more Hollywood's fault than that of the original works, though- they're very keen to avoid that now...
The first successful film adaptation of his work of was probably Minority Report, although it's got that godawful cnut Cruise in it, it's a decent film and it got a lot of the mood and details right... )
Re: High Castle, it's interesting how people used to think Japan would grow to be this huge superpower, when in reality it turned out to be China...
A lot of the- especially 1950s- era science fiction authors were shaped by Cold War paranoia, what's so interesting with Dick though is the way he takes that one step further and merges it with personal fears and identity issues and creates all these confusing paranoid realities, shapeshifting worlds-within-worlds where you don't know what's real and what's just delusions in the main character's head...
(but there's always an urgency to find out what's real, you identify with the main character and want him to be able to shake off the delusions and see what his world is really like, of course that always comes at a price- because in these worlds delusion and deception is always used as a form of control- to lull the people into complacency, if you by some personal epiphany suddenly become able to see through the lies you also become an enemy to the powers who use this control...)
So many of his obsessive fears/worries for the future have actually materialised themselves eerily close to how he imagined it... how the increased technologisation(is that a word?) would also imply increased monitoring and mapping of the individual, and the near cryptofascist dangers of corporate control...
The book version of Blade Runner (Does Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) show a real worry about environmental destruction (in the novel all real animals are extinct and there's a high demand for expensive fake animal robot pets)
I don't remember anymore whether the orientalist future cityscape of Blade Runner did feature in the book, or whether it was mostly the creation of set designers Syd Mead and Moebius, but on the first test screening Dick was overjoyed and said they'd made it exactly like he'd imagined it in his head when he wrote it... he was overjoyed and moved and impressed... Sadly he died shortly after that, but good for him that he actually got to see it. I reckon it must've felt like a small victory too, for the way he'd suffered financially throughout most of his career and the condescending way he'd been treated for being 'only' an SF writer.
What's always great about a PKD novel is the way he makes you sympathise with the main character, we see things from his point of view and he's always struggling, always an outsider, always trapped in a system which is confusing and depressing and where he can't really breathe... So much american SF (both then and now) is disappointingly apolitical, but although he's not overtly political he still is because of the dystopian nature of the worlds/societies he portrays and the way 'the little man' suffers from the control systems/structures of that world.
- Did any SF films feature an orientalist high tech future before Blade Runner came along, or was this the first time it'd been shown on the big screen? So many have mimicked/copied the visuals and art design of BR that for films set in the future it's almost a cliché now, but it was a groundbreaking thing when it first came along...
(just noticed Johnny Mnemonic would fit as inspired by the Dick canon aswell, it's got a high-tech future, asian corporations dominating things, a digitally enhanced human courier 'plugging in' to the internet matrix, lots of paranoia and so on... not a good film, but definitely belong to that whole SF subgenre, or maybe it owes more to cyberpunk?)
Just remembered Dick wrote the Man In the High Castle using the I Ching, which means he let the random results of the oracle decide which direction he'd take... which is interesting. Unlike Burrough's cut-up technique it still gave him some control over what he wrote, but to give up the narrative structure to chance was a pretty daring thing to do, as that didn't guarantee him a logical progression or a readable result...
I'd be interested to see whether the (quality) visual direction of the series matches the performance of the actors, and to what degree they'd altered the script compared to the book version.
Could be amazing 
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