The Man in the High Castle: Paperback

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The Nazi news media announces that Chancellor of Nazi Germany Martin Bormann has died after a short illness. The exterminations of the Jews, the Romani, the Bible Students, the Slavs, and all other peoples whom the Nazis considered subhuman ensued. These seemingly disparate characters gradually realize their connections to each other just as they realize that something is not quite right about their world.

A novel needs to be more than just words and ideas; it needs to be a journey or some sort for the reader as much as the characters involved. Dick's The Man in the High Castle", The Image of Power in Literature, Media, and Society: Selected Papers, 2006 Conference, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery. It was slow, and racist, and sexist, and the biases show in it probably even outside of the ways they're intended to. In Philip K Dick’s Man in the High Castle, one of the early novels of his career, there is a major storyline about an art and antique dealer, named Robert Childan, who sells old American artefacts to Japanese amateurs. At around the age of 12 Dick read his first science-fiction magazine, which led to a lifelong engagement with the genre.American society is peaceful and harmonious and is at peace with the other countries of the world; the war ends the Soviet Union. Neither of the two worlds, however, the revised version of the outcome of WWII nor the fictional account of our present world, is anywhere near similar to the world we are familiar with. The characters clearly struggle with trying to belong to the Japanese culture and failing, and feeling inadequate and resentful and proud of their own background. The Man in the High Castle' is a wonderful tale of the lives of ordinary people in an alternate realty where the allies have lost the Second World War. This is disturbing to me because programming is based off viewership, and obviously they have determined that people are tuning in to watch Nazi documentaries more than other much more fascinating time periods of world history.

There’s no reason the technicalities of this world, with its politics and cultural possibilities, could not be balanced with the ingredients that make effective fiction so compelling. Dick demonstrates his genius by creating a world where Germany and Japan won World War Two and America is occupied by the Axis forces. His best-known novels include The Man in the High Castle (1962; Folio Society, 2015), which won the Hugo Award in 1963; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep(1968; Folio Society, 2017); and Ubik (1969; Folio Society, 2019). The idea of infinite American ingenuity and resourcefulness has been discarded along with our belief in democracy. Dick, did you really just wasted a perfect plot by endlessly driveling about pseudo philosophical deeper meaning of art while being unable to establish other plotlines, any major action, suspense, believable characters with comprehensible motivations to let the mess culminate, again, in just ending the novel in the middle of nowhere without anything, resolution, explanation, maybe an excuse for publishing something like that?I'm appalled to read in today's Guardian that Donald Trump has been using openly authoritarian and dehumanizing language reminiscent of tropes taken from early 1930s Nazi speeches!

As their narratives intersect, Dick poses larger metaphysical questions concerning the authentication of history, perception and the building blocks of destiny.

This alternate history actually began in the thirties as Roosevelt is described as having been assassinated.

Just as if they wrote down whatever came to their mind without caring about the conventions and rules of the art of writing real, great, worldbuilding space opera sci fi, or meta social sci fi or full dystopian sci fi, or anything that has more than 2 grains of sci-fi trope elements, and not just egocentric, eccentric, very average novels with tiny amounts of fantastic elements and much drivel and delusion. As the judges, incredulous, asked him to prove his claim, he requested that a canvas and some painting be brought to his cell. Seamus Heaney’s deeply felt interpretation, widely acknowledged as the greatest Beowulf translation of modern times, is presented in parallel with the Old English verse in this fabulous Folio edition.

It is still different from our present day, but certainly more recognizable than the dystopia of The Man in the High Castle.