The Man in the High Castle

In a hilltop cabin, his "high castle," surrounded by barbed wire, a solitary writer conceives an imaginary account of history—in which FDR was not assassinated, in which Italy betrayed the Axis countries and the Allies won the World War II. His novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, is of course banned in the eastern portion of post-war America, dominated as it is by Nazi occupation forces. But in the Pacific States of America, which Japanese victors control and where the Oriental race is superior despite its puppet white government, where the I Ching—the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, which predicts the future and understands the present—has replaced the Bible, and a more permissive, humane philosophy dominates, the novel is tolerated by the authorities. And its incredible, fantastic image of a mythical post-war world is glimpsed against the real world of the present in The Man in the High Castle.

Against this background of a globe controlled by Germany and Japan, Philip K. Dick tells this bizarre, hilarious, terrifying, electrifying tale of a dealer in historic U.S. trivia who maintains an exclusive antique shop in San Francisco; of a Jewish artisan hiding from the Reich racial laws and his estranged wife languishing in the backwater country of the Rocky Mountain States; of a traveling "Swedish businessman" who is much more than he seems; of a Gestapo killer sent on the track of the man in the high castle.

Mr. Dick's vision of contemporary America is of a world that never was. But it might have been—and his brilliantly satiric image combines with the high suspense of his story to make The Man in the High Castle an uncommonly original entertainment.