Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, available now on Amazon Prime, is not an answer to Black Mirror. In fact, when Anonymous Content first approached showrunner Michael Dinner with the "crazy notion" of making a show out of Dick's short story collection, he wasn't even aware of the like-minded anthology series that would be his biggest competition. (He became aware later when dealing with Channel 4 in the U.K.)

"We were never really worried about them," Dinner told SYFY WIRE. "We didn't chase after them. We just said, 'Let's do an anthology show.'"

The approach was different – not a traditional writers' room, but an invitation to a select group of writers to "play in our sandbox," to write and direct (or be paired up with a director) an episode based on a story they loved. If they didn't have one immediately in mind, Kalen Egan from Electric Shepherd, the production wing of the Dick estate – "I call him the Crypt Keeper, like Tales From the Crypt," Dinner said – would help curate.

"It was like casting," Dinner said. "We cast the story to the writer, what might be in their wheelhouse. Kalen would say, 'How about I send them these five stories?' And if those didn't click, he would send another five, until they found one that spoke to them." There was a little bit of a tussle over some of the favorites – both Ronald D. Moore and Dinner wanted to adapt "The Hanging Stranger" (which became the episode "Kill All Others"). "We were wrestling over it, and I tried to be magnanimous, and I said, 'Why don't you do it?'" Dinner recalled. "So he fiddled with it, and then decided not to do it, but by that time, I had already moved on to 'Father Thing.' So we asked Dee Rees to do that one."

For this first batch, the team developed a dozen scripts, 10 of which were made into episodes. Some of them are faithful adaptations (or mostly faithful), and some are not at all recognizable from the original form, save for an extraction of a character or philosophical notion or an observation. "The Hanging Stranger," for instance, was about an alien invasion, and Rees' take has no aliens – but both rest on a central idea.

"Here's what we told the writers," Dinner said. "We said, 'Make this your own. Personalize it. Don't get lost in the spectacle. Feel free to strip away the genre aspect. Make it work as a human story.' We had an innate sense that it would all hang together because it's all Philip K. Dick, just filtered through our writers and directors, and all the stories deal with the great genre themes: What does it mean to be human, what does it mean to be faced with authoritarianism, what is the nature of reality. Where are we as humans, where are we headed, and where are we going to end up? Together, it's like a collection of movies, or an impressionistic novel."

Here's a look at the stories they chose and how they made them — spoilers ahead.