The Man in the High Castle
by Philip K. Dick
Summary
The Axis won. Germany and Japan divided the United States in 1947, the Reich holds the east and has drained the Mediterranean for farmland and sterilised Africa, Japan holds the Pacific States, and a neutral strip of Rocky Mountain states lies between them.
There is no resistance plot. Instead there are people getting through the day. Robert Childan sells overpriced American antiques to Japanese collectors in San Francisco and is sick with deference. Frank Frink, hiding that he is Jewish, loses his job at a factory making fake Colt revolvers and starts a jewellery business. Nobusuke Tagomi, a trade official, consults the I Ching before every decision and is decent in a way the situation cannot accommodate.
Circulating among them is a banned novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which describes a world where the Allies won, though not this one, and whose author is said to live in a fortified house in Wyoming.
Dick's real subject is authenticity: a lighter is worth a fortune if Roosevelt had it in his pocket and nothing if he did not, and the difference is invisible. That argument runs from the antiques through the counterfeit guns to history itself.
The most frightening passages are the calm ones. A German trade official mentions the Africa policy in the tone of a man discussing infrastructure, and Dick lets the sentence pass without comment, which is far worse than any scene of violence would be.
Around two hundred and sixty pages, restrained and unsettling rather than dramatic, with a large cast and several strands that never meet.
The ending is quiet and deliberately denies you a resolution, and readers who want the banned novel explained will not get it. Best for readers who want alternate history that is really about how anyone knows what is real.
Historical Context & Significance
The Man in the High Castle won the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the only major award Philip K. Dick received in his lifetime, and it lifted him out of the paperback obscurity in which he wrote most of his forty odd novels.
He composed it using the I Ching, consulting the hexagrams to decide plot turns, which is why several characters do the same and why the book's structure resists the shape a thriller would take. He planned a sequel, started it several times, and gave up because, he said, he could not bear to go back and read about Nazis again.
Dick died in 1982, just before Blade Runner was released, and his reputation has grown continuously since. Amazon adapted this novel as a four season television series from 2015, produced in part by his daughter Isa Dick Hackett, which invented a great deal the book does not contain.