Published shortly before Philip K. Dick’s breakout novel The Man in the High Castle, Vulcan’s Hammer might not be one of the celebrated author’s best-known titles. But its pulpy story is — like so many of Dick’s works — eerily prescient, and director Francis Lawrence, who’s roamed some dystopian landscapes in the past thanks to films like The Hunger Games and I Am Legend, and Apple TV+ series See, sees big-screen potential in it.
This news comes courtesy of the Hollywood Reporter, which sums up the story thusly: “Hammer is set after a devastating world war, when the nations of Earth form the Unity party and cede global governance to the Vulcan AI system, which algorithmically dictates policies for Unity to carry out. However, after Vulcan is attacked and a special agent is murdered, Unity director William Barris is called to unravel the mystery to figure out who, or what, wants to destroy the system he has dedicated his life to.”
Among the producers: Isa Dick Hackett, Dick’s daughter, who also worked on previous adaptations like Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, as well as the feature film The Adjustment Bureau. Those are, of course, just a few of the titles based on Dick’s body of work, alongside the likes of Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, Total Recall, and Minority Report.
So far there’s no word on who might star in the film, or when we might get to see it. Lawrence’s next release is Slumberland — a Netflix film adaptation of the Winsor McCay comic book Little Nemo in Slumberland, starring Jason Momoa — and after that he has Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.