The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Philip K. Dick had written a run of science fiction novels before it, and this one is the book that established the alternate history as a serious form rather than a thought experiment. The novel is set fifteen years after the war ended in 1947 in its own timeline, so the occupation is not a fresh catastrophe but the ordinary background of adult life, complete with bureaucracy, paperwork and people who have adapted.

Dick's concern is authenticity rather than geopolitics. The antique dealer cannot sell American objects without explaining what they mean; the Germans are building rockets and committing atrocities in Africa that the other powers know about; and the Japanese officials in San Francisco are written with more nuance than the Germans, which is part of the book's uneasy argument. The subversive novel inside the novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, is the device that holds everything together: it is banned in the German-controlled east, it circulates in the Pacific states, and the character who wrote it lives in a fortified house in Colorado.

The title refers to that author, who appears only in the last part of the story. Dick's later novels pushed further into questions about what is real and what is manufactured, and this one ends by asking the reader to weigh the fiction inside the fiction against the world the characters think they live in. It was adapted into a television series that ran from 2015, and it remains one of the two or three books that define its subgenre.