'The Man in the High Castle' - Phillip K Dick

(Originally posted to my facebook on the 8th March 2016)

Fourth book finished. Here's my thoughts.

'The Man in the High Castle' - Phillip K Dick

Having watched the (rather excellent) Amazon series of the same name, I decided I should read the book that inspired it.

My taste in books is generally firmly grounded in non-fiction, but I do make exceptions for certain genres. Speculative fiction is one of those genres. Speculative fiction can either imagine a version of the future or the present based on an alternate history, almost always dystopian.

The Man in the High Castle imagines a world in which the allies lost world war II. North America has been split in two, the Japanese Empire controls the western half (the Pacific States of America - P.S.A.), while the Nazis control the eastern states as part of the Greater Geerman Reich. A buffer zone exists between the two super powers, known as the Rocky Mountain States, which is effectively all that remains of the U.S.A. that was. A state of cold war exists between the two superpowers. It is never expressly stated why such a status exists between them, while it is explicitly explained that the Nazis possess nuclear weapons, no such suggestion is made about the Japanese.

Having been written in 1962, the author (either deliberately or unknowingly) overestimates the rate at which certain technologies would evolve. In the book the Nazis are already sending manned rockets to Mars and Venus, and are beginning to colonise said planets, yet television is not spread across the entirety of the country yet. At the time of writing, the apollo missions had yet to send a man to the moon, so perhaps the writer had high ambitions for space travel. The TV series reverses this; television is wide spread, but space flight is not mentioned.

Both book and TV series share the same characters (the TV series also introduces some original ones); Juliana and Frank Frink, Robert Childan, Mr Tagomi, Mr Baynes and Joe, but the roles they play differ wildly between the two. The world they live in also differs greatly, although both take place in North Amercia in the world described above.

The book follows these characters, but their stories are almost entirely exclusive of one another, with different characters only occasionaly bumping into one another. I would equate it to a series of intersecting short stories that share  the same universe.

One common element between the chacacters in the world is the novel 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy', a work of fiction in which the allies win the war (but in a manner slightly different to how it actually happened). This book is mentioned by all the characters, and acts as the main plot point for a couple of them.

Despite the excellent world building, I couldn't help but feel dissatisfied in the end. Most of the individual characters stories end without any resolution or closure, their endings left rather ambiguous.

'Fatherland' (Robert Harris), another book set in a post war Nazi ruled europe has, in my opinion a better story, but 'The Man in The Castle' is a superior work of world building.

I highly recommend firstly watching the TV series. If you like that, it's worth reading the book as well.

'The Man in the High Castle' - Phillip K Dick on Amazon