Genre: Science Fiction, Speculative History
Published: 1962 (first edition)
Blurb
It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.
This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.
My review
This book has more speculative history than sci-fi in it. It’s so philosophical and dreamy, almost meditative.
Elaborately written world, where the Third Reich and Imperial Japan have won the war and divided the rest of the planet into two, is full of paranoia, racism, and crisis of identity. However, there’s no peace between the winners either. The Reich is plotting to drop a hydrogen bomb on Japan, but only a few people are ready to sacrifice everything to stop the catastrophe.
In a neutral zone that divides the rival superpowers in America lives the author of a bestseller which is banned in the Reich. The book offers an alternative ending of the war where the Allies won and the Axis was defeated. He lives in the High Castle, protected by guards or…he just wants people to believe he does. His book gives hope for the new, reborn world.
In the minds of his readers, the parallel reality of the book clashes with the reality of their own. The world will never be the same again.
The Man in the High Castle is not the easiest read. It can be interpreted in many different ways. I hope I’ve found mine.
SaltandNovels 