It’s hard to describe exactly what kind of book Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle actually is. Part science fiction. Part alternate history. Part meditation on the nature of reality. Whatever you call it, though, it’s easy to see why it won the Hugo Award in 1963 and why it’s considered one of Dick’s best works.
The premise of the novel is pure alternate history. President-elect Franklin Roosevelt is assassinated in Miami in 1933 — an event which almost actually happened — and, as a result, America is unable to recover from the depression and does not come to the aid of Europe when World War II starts in 1939. The Nazis overwhelm England and Russia. The Japanese destory the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. And, in 1947, America surrenders and finds itself divided between German and Japanese spheres of influence.
Most of the plot of the book takes place in San Francisco, in what is called the Pacific States of America, which is under Japanese control. The German half of the world, though never directly visited is clearly shown to be as brutal and deadly as one would have expected a Nazi-controlled world to be. The Slavic population of Europe returned to the steppes of Asia. American Jews suffering the same fate as the European cousins. And, apparently, the continent of Africa the sight of a holocaust that makes the murder of the Jews seem tame by comparison.
The books focuses on several Japanese and American characters who are trying their best to live their lives in this world and on a book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which depicts a world in which the Germans and Japanese lost the war. Another plot focuses on power struggles in Germany after the death of the Furher, Martin Boormann (Hitler apparently having been confined to a mental institution with a syphallis-infected brain sometime before) and an apparently German plot to attack its one-time ally, Japan.
The question of what is real and what is not plays a prominent role in the book as well. Is the book-within-a-book correct ? Did Germany and Japan really lose the war ? And, if so, what does that really mean ? At one point, one of the characters finds himself in a San Francisco that more closely resembles our own than the sleeply seaside city ruled by the Japanese, suggesting that the world of Dick’s book is, in fact, an illusion.
Read the book and draw your own conclusions, though. This is truly a classic.
September 15th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I’ve owned this book for twenty years or more, but never got around to reading it. Maybe now, I will.
September 16th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
Make that 21 years.