The Man in the High Castle

This article is about the novel. For the 2015 television series adaptation, see The Man in the High Castle (TV series).

The Man in the High Castle

File:The Man in the High Castle.jpg Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	Philip K. Dick
Language	English
Genre	Alternate history
Publisher	Putnam
Publication date	January 1, 1962
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	239
OCLC	145507009

The Man in the High Castle (1962) is an alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The novel is set in 1962, fifteen years after the end of a fictional longer Second World War (1939–47). It concerns intrigues between the victorious Axis Powers—Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany—as they rule over the former U.S., as well as daily life under the resulting totalitarian Fascist and imperialistic rule. The Man in the High Castle won a Science Fiction Achievement Award (Hugo Award) in 1963.

Reported inspirations for the work include Ward Moore's alternate Civil War history, Bring the Jubilee (1953), various classic World War II histories, and the I Ching (which is referenced in the novel). The novel includes the construction of a novella within the novel that constitutes an alternate history within this alternate history (wherein the Allied Powers defeat the Axis Powers, though in a manner distinct from this actual historical outcome).

Plot summary

Background

Giuseppe Zangara's assassination of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 led to the weak governments of John Nance Garner (formerly FDR's Vice President), and subsequently of Republican John W. Bricker in 1941. Both politicians failed to lead the country to recovery from the Great Depression and also maintained the country's isolationist policy against participating in the Second World War; thus, the U.S. had insufficient military capabilities to assist the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, or to defend itself against Japan in the Pacific.

In 1941, the Nazis conquered the USSR and then exterminated most of its Slavic peoples; the few whom they allowed to live were confined to reservations. In the Pacific, the Japanese destroyed the entire U.S. Navy fleet in a decisive, definitive attack on Pearl Harbor; thereafter, the superior Japanese military conquered Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand and Oceania during the early 1940s. Afterward, the Axis Powers, attacking from opposite coasts, conquered the coastal United States and, by 1947, the United States and other remaining Allied forces had all surrendered to the Axis.

Japan established the puppet Pacific States of America out of Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, parts of Nevada and Washington as part of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. The remaining Mountain, Great Plains and Southwestern states became the Rocky Mountain States, a buffer between the PSA and the remaining USA, now a Nazi puppet state in the style of Vichy France. Having defeated the Allies of World War II, the Third Reich and Imperial Japan became the world's superpowers and consequently embarked upon a Cold War.

One of the core narrative elements, Operation Dandelion, is centered on a preemptive Nazi nuclear strike on the Japanese Home Islands. The Nazis "have the hydrogen bomb" and the ability to wipe out the Home Islands. Their nuclear energy capabilities also fuel extremely fast air travel and the colonization of the moon, Venus, and Mars.

After Adolf Hitler's syphilitic incapacitation, Martin Bormann, as Nazi Party Chancellor, assumes power as Führer of Germany. Bormann proceeds to create a colonial empire to increase Germany's Lebensraum by using technology to drain the Mediterranean Sea and convert it into farmland (see Atlantropa), while Arthur Seyss-Inquart also oversees the colonization of Africa and extermination of most of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Reich sends spaceships to colonize Mars and other parts of the Solar System.

Soon after the novel begins, Führer Bormann dies, initiating an internal power struggle between Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Göring, and other top Nazis to succeed him as Reichskanzler.

Characters

The Man in the High Castle focuses on a loose collection of characters. Some of them know each other, while others are connected in more indirect ways as they all cope with living under totalitarianism. Three characters guide their lives based on the I Ching:

• Nobusuke Tagomi is a trade missioner in Japanese San Francisco. Initially, the reader is led into his world only slightly; this character seems like he will be a minor functionary and unimportant, but events unfold in a way that drags him into both central and peripheral conflicts with agendas beyond his control.
• Frank Frink works for the Wyndham–Matson Corporation, which produces forgeries of pre-war Americana artifacts, fraudulently supplying them to Robert Childan, who sells them to visiting Japanese tourists who romanticize the American past; Frink is fired for expressing his anger. He is a secret Jew (né Fink) who conceals his identity to avoid extermination in a Nazi camp. He is a veteran of the Pacific War.
• Juliana Frink, a judo instructor, is Frank's ex-wife. Her character's importance grows throughout the book and she becomes central to the plot. She is also unwittingly used throughout the book by a hired assassin.

Others believe different things:

• Robert Childan owns American Artistic Handcrafts, an Americana antiques business on Montgomery Street supplied in part by Wyndham–Matson Inc. He believes the items he sells are genuine, but does not have the ability to distinguish between the authentic and the counterfeit; Tagomi is one of his best customers, who buys "gifts" for himself and for visiting businessmen. Childan has adopted the manners, cadences of speech in English, aesthetics, and ways of thinking of the Japanese occupiers, and admires the Nazis. Yet, despite his deference to the Japanese, he is privately contemptuous of them, retaining his pre-war racist beliefs, according to which Asian and African races are essentially inferior. Nonetheless, he is very conscious of his image, often deliberating [to himself] in an Asian mentality, how his actions might appear to others.
• Wyndam-Matson (Frank Frink's boss) muses about the difference between a real antique and a reproduction antique; via his mistress, he introduces the novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy to the plot and is the plot device used to show the initial differences of opinion in the novel regarding the authentic and the false, the differing opinions being those who believe The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is merely a work of good fiction, and those that believe it shows something more (a theme that reaches its climax at the end of the novel).
• Mr. Baynes, a wealthy Swedish industrialist, is actually Rudolf Wegener, a Captain in Reich Naval Counter-Intelligence, who is en route to meet Tagomi, through whom he expects to meet an important Japanese representative. He is taken aback by the pride Tagomi takes in gifting him with a "genuine Mickey Mouse watch" (bought at the American Artistic Handicrafts Inc. shop).
• Joe Cinnadella is the false identity of a Nazi deep cover spy tasked with assassinating Hawthorne Abendsen, author of the Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Juliana has a psychotic episode and slashes his throat in a Denver hotel room and he bleeds to death. Inadvertantly, Juliana has therefore saved Abendsen's life by the end of the novel.

Storylines

The narrative storylines of the plot alternate among those of the characters, providing a broad picture of quotidian life in totalitarian America:

• Baynes travels undercover to San Francisco as a Swedish merchant. There, he talks with Tagomi, but, in pursuit of his true mission, must postpone further meetings until the arrival, from Japan, of Mr. Yatabe (General Tedeki, formerly of the Imperial General Staff). His mission is to warn the Japanese of Operation Löwenzahn (Operation Dandelion), a nuclear attack upon the Japanese Archipelago Home Islands planned by Joseph Goebbels's faction within the ruling Nazi Party and opposed by Heydrich's faction.
• Frank Frink and his friend Ed McCarthy start a jewelry business; their beautiful, original craft works strangely move the Americans and Japanese who see them. He is arrested after Wyndham-Matson contacts the authorities to report that Frink is Jewish—an accusation that Wyndham-Matson knows will result in Frink's extradition and extermination.
• Tagomi, unable to acknowledge the unpleasant rumors he has heard, finds solace in action, fighting the Nazi agents attempting to kill Baynes; he uses the "authentic" Colt U.S. Army revolver bought from Childan for this task. Then, he retaliates against local Nazi authority.
• Juliana, living in Colorado, begins a sexual relationship with Joe Cinnadella, a truck driver claiming to be an Italian war veteran. He wants to meet Hawthorne Abendsen (the eponymous Man in the High Castle, so called, because he allegedly lives in a guarded residence), who wrote the novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Juliana travels with him, but discovers that he is actually a Swiss assassin hired to kill the writer, who is using her to seem more respectable and to help him to gain access to the Abendsen home; she attempts to leave, but he bars her way. Distressed beyond reason, Juliana cuts Joe's throat with the razor blade which she had considered using to commit suicide. She completes the journey alone, meets author Abendsen, and induces him to reveal the truth about The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
• Robert Childan desperately attempts to retain his pride despite his subordination to the Japanese overlords. Although ambivalent about the lost war and foreign occupiers of his country, whom he both loathes and respects, he discovers a sense of cultural pride in himself while holding Frink's jewelry. He also investigates the widespread forgery in the antiques market amid increased Japanese interest in genuine Americana.

Story-within-the-story

Several characters in The Man in the High Castle read the popular novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by Hawthorne Abendsen, whose title, putatively, derives from the Bible verse: "The grasshopper shall be a burden" (Ecclesiastes 12:5). Thus, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy constitutes a novel within a novel, wherein Abendsen writes of an alternate universe where the Axis powers lost WWII (1939–1947). For this reason, the Germans have banned it in the occupied U.S. Nevertheless, it is a widely read book in the Pacific and its publication is legal in the neutral countries.

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy postulates that President Franklin D. Roosevelt survives assassination and forgoes re-election in 1940, honoring George Washington's two-term limit. The next president, Rexford Tugwell, removes the U.S. Pacific fleet from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, saving it from Japanese attack, which ensures that the U.S. enters World War II a well-equipped naval power. Great Britain retains most of its military-industrial strength, contributing more to the Allied war effort, leading to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's defeat in North Africa; the British advance through the Caucasus to guide the Soviets to victory in the Battle of Stalingrad; Italy reneges on its membership in the Axis Powers and betrays them; British armor and the Red Army jointly conquer Berlin; and, at the end of the war, the Nazi leaders—including Adolf Hitler—are tried for their war crimes; the Führer's last words are Deutsche, hier steh' ich ("Germans, here I stand"), in imitation of the priest Martin Luther.

Post-war, Churchill remains Britain's leader and, because of its military-industrial might, the British Empire does not collapse; the USA establishes strong business relations with Chiang Kai-shek's right-wing regime in China, after vanquishing the Communist Mao Zedong. The British Empire becomes racist and more expansionist post-war, while the U.S. outlaws Jim Crow, resolving its racism by the 1950s. Both changes provoke racialist-cultural tensions between the US and the UK, leading them to a Cold War for global hegemony between the two vaguely liberal, democratic, capitalist societies. Although the end of the novel is never depicted in the text, one character claims the book ends with the British Empire eventually defeating the US, becoming the world's only superpower.

Inspirations

Later, Dick explained he conceived The Man in the High Castle when reading Bring the Jubilee (1953), by Ward Moore, which occurs in an alternate twentieth-century U.S. wherein the Confederate States of America won the American Civil War in the 1860s. In the acknowledgments, he mentions other influences: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), by William L. Shirer; Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1962), by Alan Bullock; The Goebbels Diaries (1948), Louis P. Lochner, translator; Foxes of the Desert (1960), by Paul Carrell; and the I Ching (1950), Richard Wilhelm, translator.

The acknowledgments have three references to traditional Japanese and Tibetan poetic forms; (i) volume one of the Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955), edited by Donald Keene, from which is cited the haiku on page 48; (ii) from Zen and Japanese Culture (1955), by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, from which is cited a waka on page 135; and (iii) the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1960), edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz.

Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) is also mentioned in the text, written before the Roosevelt assassination divergence point that separated the world of The Man in the High Castle from our own. In this novella, "Miss Lonelyhearts" is a male newspaper journalist who writes anonymous responses as an agony aunt to forlorn readers during the height of the Great Depression; hence, "Miss Lonelyhearts" tries to find consolation in religion, casual sex, rural vacations and work, none of which provide him with the sense of authenticity and engagement with the outside world that he needs. West's book is about the elusive quality of interpersonal relationships and quest for personal meaning at a time of political turmoil within the United States.

Phillip K. Dick used the I Ching to make decisions crucial to the plot of The Man in the High Castle just as characters within the novel use the I Ching to guide decisions.

File:PKD-high castle-penguinclassics.jpg

The Man in the High Castle, 2001 Penguin Classics edition, cover by James P. Keenan.

Reception

Avram Davidson praised the novel as "a superior work of fiction", citing Dick's use of the I Ching as "fascinating". Davidson concluded that "It's all here—extrapolation, suspense, action, art, philosophy, plot, [and] character."

The acclaim afforded this novel was a career highpoint for Dick; as noted in his 1982 obituary in The New York Times, The Man in the High Castle won a Science Fiction Achievement Award (Hugo Award) in 1963,

Adaptations

Audiobook

A Man in the High Castle audiobook—read by George Guidall, unabridged, approximately 9.5 hours over 7 audio cassettes—was released in 1997. Another audiobook version was released in 2008 by Blackstone Audio. The audiobook, read by Tom Weiner, is unabridged and runs approximately 8.5 hours over 7 CDs.

Television

In October 2010, it was announced that the BBC would co-produce a four-part TV adaptation of The Man in the High Castle for BBC One together with Headline Pictures, FremantleMedia Enterprises and Scott Free Films. Ridley Scott, who directed Blade Runner, a loose adaptation of another Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was to act as executive producer of the adaptation by Howard Brenton. In February 2013, Variety reported that SyFy was adapting the book as a four-part miniseries, with Ridley Scott and Frank Spotnitz as executive producers, co-produced with Scott Free Prods., Headline Pictures and Electric Shepherd Prods.

In October 2014, Amazon's film production unit began filming the pilot episode of The Man in the High Castle in Roslyn, Washington, for a new television drama to air on the Amazon Prime web video streaming service. The pilot episode was released by Amazon Studios on January 15, 2015, and was Amazon's "most watched pilot ever" according to Amazon Studios' vice president, Roy Price. The pilot had been greenlit by Amazon to run as a series, describing it as being "set in an America that's been colonized by Japan and Germany after Axis powers won World War II," and as "deeply flawed, but… decent-looking and [a] moderately faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel."

Sequel

In a 1976 interview, Dick said he planned to write a sequel novel to The Man in the High Castle "And so there's no real ending on it. I like to regard it as an open ending. It will segue into a sequel sometime." Dick said that he had "started several times to write a sequel", but progressed little, because he was too disturbed by his original research for The Man in the High Castle and could not mentally bear "to go back and read about Nazis again." He suggested that the sequel would be a collaboration with another author: "Somebody would have to come in and help me do a sequel to it. Someone who had the stomach for the stamina to think along those lines, to get into the head; if you're going to start writing about Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, you have to get into his face. Can you imagine getting into Reinhard Heydrich's face?"

Two chapters of the proposed sequel were published in a collection of essays about Dick titled The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. The chapters describe Gestapo officers reporting to Nazi Party officials about their time-travel visits to a parallel world in which the Nazi conquest has failed, but which contains nuclear weapons, available for the stealing by the Nazis back to their world. Ring of Fire, describing the emergence of a hybrid Japanese–American culture, was a working title for the novel.

On occasion, Dick said that 1967's The Ganymede Takeover began as a sequel to The Man in the High Castle, but that it did not coalesce as such; specifically, the Ganymedans occupying the Earth began as the Imperial Japanese occupying the conquered U.S.

Dick's novel Radio Free Albemuth also is rumored to have started as a sequel to The Man in the High Castle. Dick described the plot of this early version of Radio Free Albemuth—then titled VALISystem A—writing: "... a divine and loving ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] ... help[s] Hawthorne Abendsen, the protagonist-author in [The Man in the High Castle], continue on in his difficult life after the Nazi secret police finally got to him... VALISystem A, located in deep space, sees to it that nothing, absolutely nothing, can prevent Abendsen from finishing his novel." The novel eventually evolved into a new story unrelated to The Man in the High Castle. Dick ultimately abandoned the Albemuth book; it went unpublished during his lifetime, though portions of it were salvaged and used for 1981's VALIS. The full book was not published until 1985, three years after Dick's death.

See also

• Simulated reality in fiction

External links

• Review and analysis
• Review and analysis via archive.org
• The Man in the High Castle cover art gallery
• The Man in the High Castle at the Internet Book List
• The Man in the High Castle at Worlds Without End