Philip K Dick was a prolific writer of short stories and novels, and he continues to supply a steady source of material for people who make movies. The Adjustment Bureau was based on a Philip K Dick short story.
I first read The Man In The High Castle in about 1982 while I was working my way through of a number of the best SciFi books ever written. I was heavily into Asimov, Heinlein, Lem, and a number of other great writers of science fiction who had found their way onto Best Sci Fi Lists of one kind or another. Near the top of many of these lists was The Man In The High Castle.
An alternate history story in which the Allies loose World War II and the Japanese and Germans divvy up the world, with the small exception of a bit ceded to the Italians for their role in conquering the earth.
The real star of the novel is the I Ching, which plays a large role in the lives of those persons who find themselves under Japanese control. Anyone who wants a good life has done everything in their power to turn themselves into Japaneses clones, including using the I Ching at every decision point and following the formalized customs of the Japanese class system.
I went through a brief infatuation with the I Ching myself for a couple of years as a result of having read The Man In The High Castle.
On the other side of the world, The Nazis have perfected rocket travel to the Moon, Mars, and Venus-though they are still having problems with TV. Seems they might have killed off a good deal of the people who had the skills and talents needed to do electronics work as we knew it in the early 1960s. They did a really good job on population control, wiping everyone in Africa and killing everyone that didn’t meet their high ideals. This brought the world population to around 2 billion-which was only about a billion or so less than it was in our own world in 1962.
Among the many story lines winding through The Man In The High Castle is the tale of a couple of American craftsmen who are skilled at making fake antiques. They get tired of creating replicas and decide to create original artwork on their own. In the process they make a new breed of American art which is infuse with Wu-that certain nothing that is highly valued by the Japanese. A successful American merchant has the chance to become rich selling little plastic trinkets modeld on the artwork, but he decided that his pride in being an America outweights his natural greed.
There are small intrigues with Nazis and Imperial Japanese. There are people who hope to make the world a better place, if only they can find the chance. There is a little shift in reality at one point, where one of the Imperial Officers is transported to our world by some magic found in one of the little works of art the two craftsmen create. All kinds of odd and wonderful things happen.
Mentioned in passing in all the little stories is a book written by the Man in The High Castle, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This is a book about another world, an alternate world in which the Axis Powers loose World War II and things are vastly different than they are in the world the people inhabiting the novel’s world understand.
The end of the book has one of our characters make her way to see The Man In The High Castle-who no longer lives in the High Castle, as he decided he didn’t like elevators. They meet and talk about the I Ching and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, then she leaves.
The book ends there, with a couple of interesting, but slightly anti-climaxic revelations about the nature of the I Ching and the nature of the Universe and what it means to be a character living in a work of fiction. It seems a little cutesy now, but must have been a real attention grabber back in 1962 when it was written.
I like The Man in The High Castle well enough, but I think Do Andorids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Dick’s best novel length work. All of his short stories are pretty amazing and well worth reading.
