by Philip K Dick
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by Philip K Dick |
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I'm wondering whether this should be a full 'proper' recommendation at some time in the future...maybe I should let the dice decide...The Man In The High Castle is one of my favourite books, and a masterpiece of speculative fiction. It's set in a twisted version of our own 60s, a world where the Axis powers won the war and America is now divided between a Nazi-ruled East and Japanese-ruled West, with the nominally independent Rocky Mountain States acting as a buffer between them. Dick was an expert at creating dystopias, but this is probably his finest, a world where all hope seems to have been extinguished where all actions seem to lead to just making things worse for all concerned.
The characters all seem to have had their decisiveness and capacity for independent action washed out of them, with many of them dependent on the ancient method of the I Ching to make their decisions for them. There's only one source of potential hope - a book written by Hawthorne Abendsen (the Man in the High Castle of the title) called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy that tells a tale of a different world where the Allies won the war...
The question of just how real what we perceive to be 'reality' actually is was a predominant theme in much of Dick's work and this is one of his best treatments of the subject. His vision of the Axis-dominated world is chillingly realistic (he actually began work on a sequel but abandoned it as he found the Nazi mindset too upsetting to write about) and although the book contains some small amount of hope, even that is tempered by the knowledge that some form of predestination could render all attempts at redemption worthless.
Want to read another recommendation? Roll the dice and click on the number below, then!
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