Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. the few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.

This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.

Rating : - What if the Nazis / Japanese Won WWII, the U.S. Conquered & Divided?
What makes The Man in the High Castle so compelling is that it portrays a bleak alternate reality that could very well have come to pass. What many people in the modern age forget is that the Axis powers of Nazi Germany, Japan and Italy, very nearly won WWII. Furthermore, the United States was not always the dominant power that it is today. In fact, prior to WWII the global military might of the U.S. was just ranked at the bottom of the top 5. It was only after WWII, when the U.S. allowed Nazi German rocket scientists to become citizens and work on our missile program, that we became the world's only Super Power.

Given these circumstances, in some ways it seems amazing that no one came up with the idea of writing a book with this same premise before Philip K. Dick. But at the same time, even in today's modern age, his concept of a conquered, divided U.S. still feels fresh, new, and counterintuitive, all at the same time. PKD was truly a genius and The Man in the High Castle is among his greatest works. I have read this book twice over the years and it still continues to amaze me with its insight into a world that could have been if things had gone just a little differently.

There are a number of additional aspects that make The Man in the High Castle so gripping. PHD's ability to capture the true paranoia and collective hysteria of Hitler and other specific key figures in the Nazi German regime, and envision what the U.S. and the rest of the world would have become under these circumstances, feels authentic yet mind bending. Nazi German conquerors rule the East coast of the U.S. and the Japanese have the West coast. But the depicted different ways in which they control, repress and influence native U.S. citizens are indeed facinating. The elements of native U.S. people utilizing the historical Chinese book, the I Ching, to make decisions in daily life, ideas of determination versus fate etc. are all unique aspects conceptualized by PKD. Finally, the idea that there is an author that has written a book banned by the Nazi German regime fantasizing about an alternate reality where the Allied powers of the U.S. and Britain had won WWII (that is not exactly like our reality today) is, in a word, brilliant.

In conclusion, there is no denying that Philip K. Dick was a visionary. Like many of PKD's books, one central theme in The Man in the High Castle is a questioning of what we know as reality. They say history is written by the victors, but what if the victors had been different...?