Ridley Scott's Scott Free Productions will produce a 4-hour TV adaptation of author Phlip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle", based on a script by Howard Brenton.
The original 1962 novel was a science fiction 'alternate history', that won a sci fi 'Hugo' book award in 1963.
Premise of the book, about daily life under totalitarian Fascist imperialism, occurs in 1962, fourteen years after the end of the Second World War in 1948. The victorious Axis Powers, Japan and Germany, conduct intrigues against each other in North America, specifically in the former US, which surrendered to them, after the Axis conquered Eurasia and destroyed the populaces of Africa.
"...the successful assassination by 'Giuseppe Zangara' of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1933, led to the weak governments of FDR's Vice President 'John Nance Garner' and Republican 'John W. Bricker' in 1940. "Both politicians failed to surmount the Great Depression and maintained the country's isolationist policy against participating in the Second World War. Thus, the US had insufficient military capabilities to assist the UK and the USSR against Germany, or to defend itself against Japan in the Pacific.
"Having defeated the Allies of World War II and won the war for the world, the Third Reich and Imperial Japan, as the resultant superpowers, consequently embarked upon a Cold War. Martin Bormann, as Nazi Party Chancellor, assumes power as Führer of Germany, proceeding to create a colonial empire to increase Germany's 'Lebensraum' by using technology to drain the Mediterranean Sea and convert it into farmland, while sending spaceships to colonize Mars and other parts of the Solar System in the name of the Reich..."
"In 1941, the Germans conquered the USSR, exterminating most of its Slavic peoples. In the Pacific, the Japanese destroyed the US Navy fleet in a decisive, definitive attack on Pearl Harbor. Thereafter, the Japanese military conquered Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and Oceania. Afterward, the Axis Powers, each attacking from opposite fronts, conquered the coastal United States, and, by 1948, Allied forces surrendered to the enemy.
"Japan established the 'Pacific States of America' out of Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, parts of Nevada and Washington, as part of the 'Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere'. The remaining Mountain, Great Plains and Southwestern states became the 'Rocky Mountain' states, a buffer between the PSA and the remaining USA, a puppet state in the style of Vichy France.
"Having defeated the Allies of World War II and won the war for the world, the Third Reich and Imperial Japan, as the resultant superpowers, consequently embarked upon a Cold War. Martin Bormann, as Nazi Party Chancellor, assumes power as Führer of Germany, proceeding to create a colonial empire to increase Germany's 'Lebensraum' by using technology to drain the Mediterranean Sea and convert it into farmland, while sending spaceships to colonize Mars and other parts of the Solar System in the name of the Reich..."
As the novel begins, Bormann dies, initiating an internal power struggle between Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Göring and other Nazis to succeed him as Reichskanzler.
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