The Man in the High Castle

"Exactly. This is the one he wrote out of desperation, and it’s his first masterpiece. I’m sure many of your readers are familiar with it. Whenever I run into old-time fans, they always remember The Man In The High Castle. It’s set mostly in California. The world has been conquered by the Japanese and the Nazis, World War Two was lost by the Allies. They occupy the United States: the Germans have the eastern part, and the Japanese have the western part, the Pacific coast and all that. And in the middle in the Rocky Mountains is a buffer zone, and a lot of the action takes place there. There’s machinations and plots… It’s not like the series they had on Netflix, which did not do him justice – I couldn’t make my way to the end of it. It was so fundamentally against what Philip K. Dick was writing! He’s dealing with a form of racism that went on when he wrote in in the 1950s and 60s, racism here in America; but now instead of black people and minorities, the white people are the minority in the novel. This is distorted in the series on Netflix – there is no organised anti-Japanese or anti-Nazi resistance in the novel, which is where the series is flawed. That’s all fabricated. “He wrote a lot of science fiction novels, and he wrote very fast. He was on amphetamines a lot of the time” Phil is playing with reality in a very subtle way. There’s a novel within the novel – written by one of the characters, ‘the man in the high castle’ – where the actual truth of the matter is revealed, that the Allies won the war. So there’s the search for this man up in the high castle, up in the Rocky Mountains somewhere. Mr. Tagomi, the main character, is a Japanese functionary – a minor functionary in the trade mission in San Francisco. He’s trying to keep the Nazis at bay – because the Nazis are secretly trying to decide, do we really want to want to coexist with Japanese, or should we just wipe them out? Operation Dandelion. So Mr. Tagomi, one day, he’s weighed down by all these plots and machinations; and he gets a piece of jewellery made by one of the local American artisans. He’s looking at it, this blob of shiny metal, and all of a sudden he finds himself transformed into what may be our universe – where the allies won the war. He’s freaked out! He’s happy to scuttle back to his comfortable reality… To get into PKD you have to read The Man In The High Castle , there’s a reason it won the Hugo Award back in 1962. Let’s put it this way: he’s a science fiction writer, he makes things up. Alternate reality is not anything he came up with, it’s an old science fiction trope. But he certainly looked at it differently. The novel I mentioned earlier, Eye in the Sky , is all about alternate universes. There’s so many novels I could recommend, I didn’t pick this one I but I should have! In Eye in the Sky there’s a bunch of people visiting the Bevatron, which is a particle accelerator. They’re all watching this thing in operation and it blows up, and they all fall down – and then they wake up, and they’re in an alternate universe. They don’t know that they’re in an alternate universe, because it’s real weird; but it turns out that there’s not just one alternate universe, there’s a succession of alternate universes. The first universe they wake up in is in the worldview of this religious nut, who’s one of the people who was in the accident. You’ve got things like, if you take the Lord’s name in vain, a bee will come out and sting you; and if you look up at the heavens the Eye of God is looking down at them – and they’ve got this umbrella, and they’re floating up to the Eye of God and it burns the umbrella and they fall to the ground – it’s totally nuts. And that’s just the first alternative reality! When they finally figure that one out they’re into another one, and this goes on for four or five different realities, getting shorter and shorter as we get towards the end of the book. So when you finish the book you look up and… what is reality? You don’t know! Am I in somebody else’s personal reality, is everybody in my personal reality? Welcome to the worlds of Philip K. Dick! The Man in the High Castle is not so exuberant. It’s much more of a serious novel than Eye in the Sky."

"It’s set in 1962, in a parallel reality in which Roosevelt was assassinated in 1933, so the whole of the Second World War was completely different and lasted until 1948 with the US forced to surrender. America is ruled by the Germans and Japanese, and it’s all about what people end up doing in this reality. There’s all these different people masquerading, and specialising in the trade of fakes; the whole of reality has collapsed, and nothing can be trusted as real. There’s a novel within the novel, called “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy”, by a character called Abendsen who lives alone in a castle, which is set in another reality again – not ours – in which the Axis lost the Second World War, but the war lasted 1939-1948. The climax of this novel, which is brilliant, is that a woman finds Abendsen and says what does your novel mean? She also asks the I Ching, and the I Ching symbol is “inner truth”: so it’s a suggestion that they’re living in yet another reality while a whole load of others are going on – that of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is happening in another place, and there’s probably another reality that we’re in. You think you’ve acquired one truth: but that truth is really that there are infinite truths and infinite worlds, and nobody knows what the hell is going on, basically. Exactly, and attempts to order it are always a bit suspicious."

"The Man in the High Castle is, for my money, Philip K Dick’s best book. It’s set in the 1960s, in a world where Germany and Japan have won the Second World War and jointly occupy the United States: the Japanese in the western half and the Germans in the eastern half. And it’s about trying to stay alive under those circumstances. It also features the I Ching , which Dick used to write the novel. The fictional author in the novel wrote an alternate history – talk about meta! – called ‘The Grasshopper Lies Heavy’, in which Germany and Japan lost the war. It’s not quite our world, but it’s pretty close to it. The fictional author, Mr. Abendsen, used the I Ching to write the novel, and believes it to be true, in some sense. The interesting thing, if you’re a bit of a science fiction insider, is that Mr. Abendsen is rather closely modelled on Robert Heinlein , whom Dick knew. Heinlein lent him money now and then when he was broke, which he often was. I read it for the first time when it was new, when I was 13 or 14 years old, and it created a sizable impression on me. It was one of the first alternate histories that I read. I can’t prove it was the first one, after more than 60 years! – but it was certainly one of the first. When you’re writing a novel you need to have interesting characters in it, and big exciting things going on. It’s much easier and much more dramatic to imagine a world where, say, John Kennedy survives, or where FDR doesn’t survive. Those are easy to dramatize. It’s much harder to dramatize historical forces, because they’re just there . They aren’t exciting, they just happen. And you need both to explain, as much as anyone can explain, the way things really did turn out. The historical forces are there, but the people are there too. If Alexander had not been born, if his father Philip of Macedon had gone to war against Persia instead, the world would look different now, because Philip was much more pragmatic than Alexander was. The others who immediately leap to mind who changed the world are Jesus and Muhammad; the world would look different without them. How different? That’s why you write the stories… Yes – you can change a history altogether, organically, or you can do time travellers meddling in history. I’ve got a story under submission right now that does that, and we’ll see if anybody’s rash enough to buy it… You can change things however you want to change things. I had South Africans give Robert E Lee a whole raft of AK-47s in what’s probably my best-known book, The Guns of the South."