Book Review - The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick is perhaps the most famous alternate history book that there is. It is also one of Philip K. Dick's most famous novels, and one of his best - because it is one of the most tightly structured and well-written - possibly because Dick had the luxury, unusually of him, of preparing several drafts before releasing the novel.The novel is set in an alternate United States that was defeated by the Axis in World War II, and which is divided between Japanese and German occupation zones (with an autonomous central region serving as a buffer).The story itself contains no single plot, but instead is a collection of interconnected story lines about various characters, many of these involving a fictional alternate history book called "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy". In the now familiar fashion for Double Blind What Ifs, "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" imagines a world where the Allies had won the War - although, of course this imagined world is rather
different from our own.According to Dick, he wrote the book using I Ching to determine plot events - Dick even blamed I Ching for those plot elements that he was unhappy with. This is mirrored in the novel itself, where I Ching is used by several Japanese and American characters to make life decisions, and was supposedly even used by Hawthorne Abendsen, the fiction author of "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", to determine its plot.As with many of Dick's works, a persistent theme throughout the novel is difference between real and false realities. The most prominent example of this theme is "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", but it also occurs in characters selling fake historical artifacts, characters travelling under false identities, and characters even seeing hints of our reality.There is a lot more that I could say about this book, but let me simply say this: get it. If really is not only one of the defining books of the alternate history genre, but also one of the best pieces of
science fiction literature that there is.

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