The next big science fiction anthology series won’t arrive until 2018, but the first glimpses of it are arrestingly good. Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams will adapt for the screen, several short stories written by the science fiction legend.
Although the series is already airing on Channel 4 in the U.K., the North American release date has now been pushed to sometime in 2018. It will be exclusive to Amazon Prime customers, a fact which will make many people feel like we’re already living in some kind of oppressive Philip K. Dick universe.
“His paranoid thinking is our reality now,” Isa Dick Hackett, Philip’s daughter and an executive producer on the series, told Inverse at New York Comic Con.
Most adaptations of Dick’s haven’t been strictly faithful to the author’s original work, and Electric Dreams will be no exception — by design. Executive producer Ronald D. Moore, perhaps best known for the clearly Dick-inspired Battlestar Galactica, said they pushed writers who worked on the anthology series to interpret the work. “We’re not looking for a transcription,” he said.
Though the trailer looks pretty sci-fi, producers said only two of the episodes are really about outer space. The others have a distinct science fiction bend, of course, but they feel connected to the present day — one of the reasons why producers encouraged writers to interpret the original stories for 2017.
“He was no predictor of technology, but he knew what technology meant in terms of the human experience,” producer David Kanter said.
Game of Thrones actor Liam Cunningham, who appears in one of the episodes, “Human Is,” as a character named General Olin, compared the show favorably to another classic bit of anthology science fiction.
“It’s almost like Rod Sterling would introduce it, like a glorious episode of The Twilight Zone, he said.
Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams will premiere on Amazon in 2018.
