The Man in the High Castle (1962) is an alternative history novel by Philip K. Dick wherein the Axis Powers won World War II. The story occurs in 1962, fifteen years after the end of the war in 1947, and depicts the life of several characters living under Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany as they rule the partitioned United States. The titular character is the mysterious author of a novel-within-the-novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a subversive alternative history of the war in which the Allied Powers are victorious.
Dick's thematic inspirations include the alternative history of the American Civil War, Bring the Jubilee (1953), by Ward Moore, and the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination that features in the story and the actions of the characters. The Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963, and was adapted to television for Amazon Prime Video as The Man in the High Castle in 2015.
Synopsis
Background
In The Man in the High Castle alternative history, Giuseppe Zangara assassinates President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, resulting in the continuation of the Great Depression and the policy of United States non-interventionism at the start of World War II in 1939. American inaction allows Nazi Germany to conquer and annex continental Europe and the Soviet Union into the Reich. The exterminations of the Jews, the Romani, the Bible students, the Slavs, and all other peoples whom the Nazis considered subhuman ensued. The Axis powers then jointly conquered Africa, and still compete for the control of South America in 1962. Imperial Japan invaded the West Coast of the United States, while Nazi Germany invaded the East Coast; the surrender of the Allies ended World War II in 1947.
By 1962, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany are the world's superpowers, fighting a geopolitical cold war over the world, and in particular over the former United States and South America. Japan extended the Co-Prosperity Pacific Alliance with the establishment of the Pacific States of America (PSA), with the politically neutral Rocky Mountain States acting as a buffer with the Nazi states to the east. Nazi North America is composed of two countries: The South, and the northeastern part of the former contiguous United States of America, which is referred to as "the U.S." in the book, both ruled by collaborationist pro-Nazi puppet regimes. Part of Canada remains an independent country.
The aged Adolf Hitler is incapacitated by tertiary syphilis, Martin Bormann is the acting Chancellor of Germany and the inner-circle Nazis—Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Göring, Arthur Seyss-Inquart—vie to succeed Hitler as the Führer of the Greater Germanic Reich. Technologically, the Nazis have drained the Mediterranean Sea for lebensraum and farmland, developed and used the hydrogen bomb, developed rockets for traveling throughout the world and into outer space, such as the colonization missions to the Moon, and to the planets Venus and Mars.
Plot
In 1962, it has been fifteen years since Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany won World War II. In San Francisco, in the Pacific States of America, Japanese judicial racism has enslaved black people and reduced the Chinese residents to second-class citizens. Businessman Robert Childan owns an antique shop there that specializes in Americana for a Japanese clientele who fetishize cultural artifacts of the former United States. One day, Childan receives a request from Nobusuke Tagomi, a high-ranking trade official, who seeks a gift to impress a Swedish industrialist named Baynes. Childan can fulfil Tagomi's request because he is well-stocked with counterfeit antiques made by the metal works Wyndam-Matson Corporation.
Recently fired from his job at a Wyndam-Matson factory, Frank Frink (formerly Fink) is a secret Jew and war veteran who agrees to join a former co-worker to start a business making and selling jewelry. Meanwhile, in the Rocky Mountain States, Frank's ex-wife, Juliana Frink, works as a judo instructor in Canon City, Colorado and, in her private life, has entered a sexual relationship with Joe Cinnadella, an Italian truck driver and ex-soldier.