Sunday, October 15, 2017

Amazon Previews Season Three of The Man In the High Castle


Amazon recently let slip its teaser trailer for the third season of its critically-acclaimed The Man In the High Castle.  And what a teaser it is. 



In this one scene, we see SS Obergruppenführer Smith meeting with the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele. Mengele is showing Smith an unfortunate woman whom he has strapped to a table.   According to Mengele, she has the ability to travel between the worlds of the multiverse. Mengele is cold and clinical, while Smith seems awestruck and perhaps a little afraid. Smith is also told by Mengele, almost as an aside, that the SS is also working on a means of traveling between worlds. 

The apparently natural ability to move between worlds has been already been established as both Trade Minister Tagomi and Juliana Crain have traveled across the time stream, with Juliana seemingly meeting an alternate version of her dead sister Trudy in the last minutes of the second season's final episode, and Tagomi making several transits over the course of the first season and second seasons. Tagomi's assistant,  Kotomichi, is also revealed in the second season to have come from a world where presumably the Americans A-bombed Hiroshima.

In a way, the teaser mirrors one of two chapters Philip K. Dick wrote for an unnamed and unpublished sequel to The Man In the High Castle (published in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, 1995 Vintage Books), where  the senior Nazi leadership is discussing the return of an expedition to the Nebenwelt, which is a parallel world where the Allies won the Second World War, and is in fact clearly stated as our world, and not of the-book-in-the-book of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.

However, what we are presented only whets our appetite as many questions remain to be answered. What will happen to Smith’s son, Thomas, who has a form of muscular dystrophy?  Smith has already taken great pains to hide his son’s condition, including murder, and betraying his SS oath, from a system that would classify his son as unfit and would destroy him. What is really happening when Juliana meets Trudy?  And although the situation between Germany and Japan seems to have settled out – for the moment – how long will this last? And if indeed the Nazi scientists led by Josef Mengele are working on a way to travel the multiverse, what will be the results of their experiments?


We shall see.

Up Next:

We’ll raid my bookshelves for a look at more of my favorite alternate history fiction. Promise. 

Meanwhile, you can help out a poor unemployed writer by purchasing Elvis Saves JFK! for just 99 cents and War Plan Crimson, A Novel of Alternate History, for $2.99 and now The Key to My Heart, also $2.99 (all are free to preview). All books -- which are already on Smashword's premium distribution list -- are also available through such fine on-line retailers such as Sony, Chapters Indigo, Barnes & Noble and Apple's iTunes Store.  Thanks.