Bryan Cranston is sweating. Beside him, a rocket ship stands in the courtyard of a disused razor-blade factory in suburban southwest London. Surrounded by dirt and rocks, the ship is illuminated by spotlights that pierce the predawn air. It's the hottest day of the year so far and Cranston is crammed into a spacesuit, with a cooling vest to keep him comfortable. On the set of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, it seems that even the weather is out to get you.

When Channel 4 lost Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror to Netflix, Electric Dreams was its secret weapon. The ten-episode anthology series, which Cranston executive-produced, is based on Dick's lesser-known short stories. Cranston also appears in the episode Human Is, originally published in 1955 as part of pulp sci-fi magazine Startling Stories. The plot is typical of Dick's work: the strains of human nature pushed to the limit by sci-fi dystopias.

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Cranston and co-star Essie Davis live in a future where Earth's air has become unbreathable. They inhabit separate bedrooms in circular, concrete bunkers made liveable by art-deco accents. Inside, succulent gardens hover in glass globes; outside the window lies an unforgiving desert landscape. The planet's air is so dangerous that Davis's character, Vera, runs inside on a treadmill, surrounded by VR projections of long-lost woodland. It's a clever bit of visual trickery, but also somewhat prescient. Off camera, production staff are cooling down by standing in paddling pools amid warnings from London officials against outdoor exercise, due to poor air quality.

Dick is best-known for adaptations of his work - sci-fi movies such as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report - but the author's Cold War-era stories are where he really gets to grips with human nature. Five years ago, his estate approached director Michael Dinner and asked him to read through the author's 125 short stories to see if any could be developed for television. "After a week or two, I called them and said: 'How about all of them?'" says Dinner. As well as Cranston, Dinner also enlisted the help of science-fiction demigod Ronald D Moore (Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica), to bring Dick's bite-size visions to the small screen.

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"Five or six years ago, if you went into a network or studio and mentioned the 'a' word - anthology - they would say: 'No thank you, exit now,'" Dinner says. But for someone who grew up watching The Twilight Zone, the sci-fi stars had aligned. Streaming services have made anthology productions de rigueur, and although Channel 4 holds the UK broadcasting rights, Electric Dreams will be shown on Amazon Prime Video in the US. The format also makes it easier to obtain the best on-screen talent without taking up too much of their time. That allowed the Electric Dreams producers to enlist, among others, Greg Kinnear (Little Miss Sunshine), Janelle Monáe (Moonlight), Richard Madden (Game of Thrones), Anna Paquin (True Blood) and Steve Buscemi (Boardwalk Empire).


The same went for writers and directors, with each able to choose the story that excited them most. Writer David Farr, best known for this work on The Night Manager, recalls reading nine of the ten short stories selected for Electric Dreams and thinking: "This isn't quite my thing." Then he encountered The Impossible Planet, a tale of a cynical space-tour guide's search for the mythical planet Earth. "It's a story that just kept coming back into my head," he says. One of the characters in particular - an apparently bumbling, steampunk - style robot - really got his attention. "I find him deeply intimidating and rather interesting," he says. "A moral being in a piece where humans are morally compromised."

"Art is so subjective that nobody is wrong in whatever you are feeling. We could all watch a film together and have nine different reactions." Bryan Cranston, executive producer of Electric Dreams

While the anthology format allowed writers to focus on individual stories and eased schedules for actors, it made for a gruelling production, with ten unique casts, crews and sets split across the US and UK. "Everything is multiplied, it's the difference between having one child and triplets," Cranston jokes.

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Black Mirror may have tapped into unease about humanity's near future - the "pig sex" storyline from the show's first episode was, according to Cranston, "indelible" - but Dick's stories hone right in on what's really at stake. The core of Electric Dreams and Dick's original stories is not an elaborate vision of the future, but the humanity at the centre of those allegories. On the face of it, Human Is examines a single marriage, but the questions it poses are far more wide-ranging and slippery. So what's the message behind the dystopia?

"I like the ambiguity of it," Cranston says, pausing. "I didn't answer that question. Art is so subjective that nobody is wrong in whatever you are feeling. We could all watch a film together and have nine different reactions to it, and neither one of us is right or wrong. Fill in your own answer."

The first episode of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams will be broadcast on Channel 4 at 2100 on September 17.