The release of Blade Runner in 1982 catapulted Philip K. Dick from cult writer to pop icon. Many of his novels are now collected in the prestigious Library of America series, and his work is regularly praised by literary stars like Jonathan Lethem. But Dick’s biggest impact has been in Hollywood. Science fiction author John Kessel is amazed at just how popular Dick’s work has become.

“There must be a dozen films now based on Philip K. Dick novels or stories, far more than any other published science fiction writer,” Kessel says in Episode 179 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “He’s sort of become the go-to guy for weird science fiction notions.”

The latest Dick story to get the Hollywood treatment is The Man in the High Castle, about a world in which the Axis powers won World War II and occupied the United States. Laura Miller of Slate praises the book for its literary and philosophical qualities.

“It’s about living as a defeated people,” she says. “It’s really just a look at the psychology of that, which is kind of alien to the very idea of being American, and that was really fascinating to me. Culturally it’s just such an astute novel.”

And while Hollywood has long been enamored with Dick’s mind-blowing concepts, studios have been less thrilled with his plots, which tend to focus on baffled, powerless outcasts. As such, it’s been standard practice to adapt his stories into action blockbusters like Paycheck or Total Recall.

The new Amazon adaptation of The Man in the High Castle takes a similar path, introducing a resistance movement that’s wholly absent from Dick’s book. Miller isn’t surprised. A show about docile, downtrodden Americans would probably flop.

“There’s almost no way this could have been made into a really faithful reproduction of Dick’s book,” she says, “because it just goes so much against what we want to believe America is like and is all about.”

Kessel laments that the show departs so dramatically from Dick’s vision, but he enjoys when scenes from the book do show up, such as an awkward dinner in which an American shopkeeper fawns over his Japanese hosts. Kessel says he’ll keep watching to see how the show develops.

“I may have my questions about exactly how they’re doing it,” he says, “but I’m engaged, and I think it offers opportunities for really intriguing things that I have not seen before in a TV series.”

Listen to our complete interview with John Kessel and Laura Miller in Episode 179 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Laura Miller on Philip K. Dick and the I, Ching:

“He was very interested in esoteric Western philosophy, and also Eastern spirituality and culture, so he was particularly fascinated by the I, Ching. He and his wife made a lot of decisions in their life after consulting the I, Ching, as do the characters in the novel. … They throw the I, Ching and they collect the hexagrams, and they decide what to do based on that. And while he was writing the novel, every time one of the characters would cast a hexagram, he would do that himself, and he claimed that he decided what direction the novel would go in from the results that he got.”

John Kessel on authenticity:

“One thing they did also, which I hope they will pick up on if they continue the series, is this question of authenticity. It comes up with regard to these two Zippo lighters—that’s also right out of the book—that Childan has in the TV show. It’s not him in the book, but at any rate, the question of where does authenticity lie, or what is the value of something? Is it inherent in the object itself? In its historicity, its associations? Or is it all in the head? And of course in a story like this, where so much of reality is a matter of perception—and it gets to be more so as the story goes on—that’s a fundamental idea that I think they understand, and I hope they’ll continue to work with.”

Laura Miller on John Smith:

“I think that he is one of the most interesting characters in the series, partly because they aren’t trying to take a character who Dick conceived of as being, essentially, pretty passive and turn them into active characters. They’re freed to create this guy, and then they just really run with the idea that he feels the same way about fascism that your typical Middle American Ward Cleaver-type guy feels about Americanism, and so they’re really doing something with picking out the ways that the idealized, wholesome, controlled notion of normal family life is something that both Nazism and classic mom-and-apple-pie Americanism have in common.”

John Kessel on Hitler:

“Hitler is not even in the book, he’s gone, and Martin Bormann is the Führer in the book, which is interesting because I saw some criticism of this series saying, ‘Oh well Dick didn’t understand that Hitler was enfeebled by the end of the war and could never have been the Führer in 1962,’ when in fact Dick knew that. But the TV people—I think quite understandably—needed to have Hitler in there.”