I did a double take when I heard Amazon planned to adapt Philip K. Dick‘s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle. Unlike the stories that inspired Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report, it’s not a sci-fi brain teaser. It’s not sci-fi at all, but a piece of speculative history, a dark Orwellian thought experiment. It asks us to imagine what life would be like had the Axis Powers won World War Two – definitely an odd premise for a drama produced for a 21st-century audience.

But series creator Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files, Millennium, Harsh Realm) has managed to turn Dick’s story into a truly exciting, original espionage thriller. Amazon posts the 10-episode first season on Friday.

Epic in scale, gorgeous, and beautifully acted, The Man in the High Castle is set nearly two decades after Nazi Germany defeats America by dropping an atom bomb on Washington.

The country is divided into three parts. The East and Midwest belong to Germany, and the Pacific states are a Japanese colony. Only the Rockies remain free of occupation.

Alexa Davalos (Defiance, Mob City) stars as a San Francisco native who gets caught up in the machinations of an anti-occupation spy network. She is passed a piece of film and told to deliver it to a small town in the Rockies.

Rupert Evans (Rogue, Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond) plays her Eastern counterpart. A naïve New Yorker who grew up hearing stories about his dad’s service during the war, he’s recruited by the Resistance to drive a truck to the same town.