But Man in the High Castle is one of his most respected novels. There are around 44 novels, 120+ stories, several essays, a giant memoir recording this religious experience he had (check out " Brain Snacks"). That comes out in this book in a few ways: the antique seller who realizes his antiques are forgeries the woman who realizes the guy she's with isn't what he appears to be and the novel inside this novel that might just tell the truth about history.
There's a lot of paranoia and insecurity in his work. In his books, there might be robots who think they're human (or who want to be human) humans who discover that they are just the playthings of aliens or robots and humans who realize that reality isn't what they thought it was. Dick kept returning to themes of perception and fate, of reality and identity. (Seriously, he has an entire novel where the protagonist's main skill is that he can fix broken pots.) Though the spy plot is very important, Dick spends a lot of time here on the arts and crafts, which is another big interest he has. While one of the plots is a straight-up spy thriller (including secret information disguised as cigarettes), there are whole big areas here about people making objects, including forging antiques, making jewelry, and writing books. We'll be honest: there are about three big plots running through this book, so it can get a little confusing. It's also about how regular people survive in very dark times. So Man in the High Castle isn't just a fun story about people fighting back against Nazis-although there's totally a spy plot here that's about exactly that. A lot of PKD's stories are about just regular folks-the underdogs fighting or just trying to survive against a much bigger system.
(This is a pretty common end in alternate histories history gets "fixed" by some heroes.) But Dick took this topic and made it his own, so it's not just "oh no, Nazis." And he did that in three ways, which help us see how this work fits in with his other stories about Martian colonization, post-apocalyptic America, robot impostors, and alien gods with broken pottery (in other words: his crazier, less realism-based works of science fiction),įirst: just regular folks. Other authors might take a story like this and tell some adventure story about how brave US resistors fought back against Hitler and made everything OK in the world. What makes it special is, well, Philip K. What makes The Man in the High Castle special if it's just another "Hitler Wins" story? There are so many stories where the Nazis win-but you're reading this one. Alternate what?Īlternate history is a work that says "what would the world be like if some historical event happened differently?" (If you want to be fancy, you can also call them "uchronias." But "alternate history" works just fine and won't freak out your spellchecker.) Dick didn't invent alternate history in fact, the earliest alternate history might be from 35 BC, when ancient Roman historian Livy asked "what if Alexander the Great tried to conquer Rome?" (His answer: Romans still would've kicked his keister.) But there've been a lot of alternate histories since then.įollowing in Livy's sandaled footsteps, a lot of modern alternate histories focus on big war questions, like "What if the Confederacy won the US Civil War?" or "What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo?" But the most popular question is "What if the Nazis had won World War II?" It's such a popular question that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has an entire entry on "Hitler Wins" stories. This isn't the history that we know from class-this is an alternate history.
Dick invites us into with The Man in the High Castle(1962), a world where the Axis has won World War II and America is split between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. So if we imagine a world where the Nazis won World War II, it would probably be a pretty bad world, worse in every way, right? (Except for the History Channel-that would pretty much stay the same.) Nazis are pretty much worse than everything.
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