The Man in the High Castle | Dick, Philip K.

The Man in the High Castle | Dick, Philip K. | mind bending

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The Man in the Hig...

	The Man in the High Castle Dick, Philip K. Blackstone Audiobooks, Inc., 2008 - 7 pages average customer review:based on 166 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

Hugo winning classic

Dick's novel is set in an alternative present where the Axis powers won WWII and the Japanese have taken over the Pacific states. Dick's eerily believable world is full of paranoia, which is what Dick does best. The only problem I had with the novel is that it is really about a group of people who are only loosely connected and their stories never converge.

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mind bending

the ending of the book, for people who are thinking about buying it, is confusing and probably leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about it. It takes place in an alternate history where Nazis and Japs rule the US, or the east and west while the middle is neither. there is also a really confusing ending to it which will make you go "HUH?" for quiet a while where you would probably have to draw your own conclusions from it.

Our world as it might have been ...

In this nightmarish "alternate history" novel, the United States and the Allied Powers were soundly defeated in World War II, and America is now occupied by Nazi Germany east of the Mississippi, and Japan in the West. Erwin Rommel is Military Governor of Nazi Occupied America, in which the Nazi racial purity laws are in full and vigorous effect. In the west, Japan rules with a more humane, but still an iron hand, and in both areas Americans themselves are a downtrodden minority and underclass in their own country, and America is being colonized by the victors.

But is this real? Or is this alternate universe a mistake; a kind of kink in time? The reader must judge. Author Dick specializes in stories that test the meaning and substantive nature of reality, and that is part of the theme of this compelling novel.

This is one of the great "alternate history" novels of Science Fiction, and you do not want to pass it up.

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Not a bad story,

but nothing phenomenal either. The basic premise of the story is "What would happen if the Axis won WWII?"

While this may have been the first attempt to answer the question, it was hardly the first that I personally experienced. This made it seem...lacking in focus. In addition, there are a number of very strange ideas in the book. For example, almost everyone consults the I Ching in the novel. While this has a host of interesting implications (almost all of which are more interesting than the book itself), it doesn't make any sense. The Japenese were attacking both China and the US. The I Ching is Chinese. Why would the Japanese have imported the Chinese book to the US in those numbers? A host of similar questions are never really addressed in this book.

One of the plotlines, involving a fictional novel called "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy", also ends in an extremely dissatisfying fashion. I am uncertain as to whether there was supposed to be more and it just got lopped off and simplified, or whether this was supposed to end like this.

The two best things about this book are: First, the use of language, particularly the dropping of articles to render a pseudo-Easternized language. This made for a more realistic feel, although it complicated reading. Second, the moment where the Japanese man, Mr. Tagomi, is studying the object in the park and is seemingly transported into our world, or some other alternate universe. This last most would have been an interesting question, and deserved fuller working.

A worthwhile read for Dick aficionados. For the rest of us, though, pass on this one in favor of his short stories.

Harkius
(Newly a Voice of Amazon)

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