Man in the High Castle

"They want to be agents, not the victims of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness."

Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle

We all play the "What if?" game. What if I had asked him out? What if I had quit this job, or gotten that one? What if that butterfly flapped its wings? Some "What ifs?" have small consequences, while others can be felt around the world. What if Guiseppe Zangara's assassination attempt had been successful? What if he shot Roosevelt in Florida in 1933?

These are the questions that Philip K. Dick asks in The Man in the High Castle. He shows us a world where the Allies lost the War, Germany and Japan control much of the world. Space travel has been achieved but television is still a work in progress in 1962. The US has been divided into the Pacific States of America (run by a puppet government controlled by Japan), the indipendent Rockies and Plains, and The United States of America (part of the German Empire). Death camps have been set up in New York. The governments are Fascist. 

The story follows several different characters, their stories weaving in and out. A Jewish man making a living in San Francisco after fleeing New York, a Japanese security agent, a German revolutionary trying to war Japan of impending attack, an American antiques dealer attempting to adapt to new markets, and a woman in the Rockies who is reading a book that tells what could have been. Their stories weave together creating a wonderful answer to the question of "what if?" while examining the ideologies and racism's that occurred after World War II.

I enjoyed this book. It was well written, adopting different voices for the many points of view that it follows. The characters were well rounded and unique, behaving believably as people might have had things been different. It was fast paced and exciting, one of those books you can't wait to find out what happens. I highly recommend it and I cannot wait to see the show that Amazon has made of it.