The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle
By Philip K. Dick

First published in 1962, Philip K. Dick’s Hugo-winning alternate-history novel (a relatively new genre at the time) has been re-released to coincide with the miniseries being produced under the same name.

The series, however, only borrows the novel’s basic premise: that the Axis powers won WW2 and now the U.S. is occupied by the Nazis in the East and the Imperial Japanese in the West, with a neutral zone in-between. The plot of the novel is a loose, hard to summarize affair, following the adventures of a number of tangentially connected characters as they struggle to adapt and survive in this threatening new political environment.

Uncanny and unsettling, The Man in the High Castle is also one of Dick’s most accessible books, moving beyond politics into the sort of speculations he is famous for about the nature of reality and who the ultimate author of the script of our lives might be.