The Man in the High Castle in Building a SciFi/Fantasy Library

Jul 27, 2007 Dr M rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

This is an alternative-history novel with a twist. It is the 1960s in North America, and after the axis powers won World War 2, the former United States is divided into Japanese-controlled Pacific States of America on the west coast, the German-controlled United States on the east coast, and the neutral Rocky Mountain States in between. In this neutral zone lives The Man in the High Castle, the writer of an alternative-history novel describing the world as it would have been if Germany and Japan This is an alternative-history novel with a twist. It is the 1960s in North America, and after the axis powers won World War 2, the former United States is divided into Japanese-controlled Pacific States of America on the west coast, the German-controlled United States on the east coast, and the neutral Rocky Mountain States in between. In this neutral zone lives The Man in the High Castle, the writer of an alternative-history novel describing the world as it would have been if Germany and Japan had lost the war.

Mostly, "The Man in the High Castle" is a book about issues such as culture-dependent human interactions, colliding cultures, racism etc. To a lesser extent, it also deals with the evils of totalitarian societies, but also emphasizes how different the societies of the P.S.A. and the Reich U.S. have become, despite being in their own ways totalitarian. It is also very much a story of views of reality and in particular East-Asian mysticism. The alternative history within the alternative history plays a surprisingly small role both in the plot as a whole (being truly relevant only to one of three parallel sub-plots), and in the ideas presented in the novel.

The story is told in an erratic manner, with quick changes between and within subplots. The story is told entirely through the characters, with very little descriptions in between. Much of the describing is done by the method of internal monologues of the characters.

"The Man in the High Castle" is a widely praised science-fiction classic. I wish I could join the cheering crowd, but I cannot. For me this is an interesting novel, but ultimately one that never really "gets there" for me. One problem is that I don't find the insights presented in the book very... well, insightful, with a few notable exceptions. In particular I cannot stand Dick's almost fetischist interest in eastern mysticism and fortune telling, and I really expected Dick to make much, much more of the extremely intriguing idea of alternative history within alternative history. Also, I find Dick's language irritating. He tends to write in short, erratic sentences, and after a while this becomes an annoyance and an impediment to the reading. What is much worse though is his use of "Japanese English". It is all well and good when the Japanese characters speak their broken English, with missing articles and what not, but when the characters think, we get long monologues in the imitation of a Japanese accent. Not only is this unnecessarily hard to read, it also breaks the illusion, since native speaker of Japanese would hardly formulate his internal thoughts in broken English, but rather in fluent Japanese (which must the be rendered as fluent English). Finally, the abrupt ending is characteristic of Dick, as I understand, but in my book that is not an excuse for it being too abrupt and leaving just too many thoughts half-thought.

"The Man in the High Castle" is worth reading simply for being an interesting classic, it is well worth the time and effort. It is, however, not as full of interesting ideas as one might expect, and there are some flaws in the language and the plot that I simply cannot ignore. Therefore, three stars. ...more

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Oct 19, 2010 Bradley rated it liked it

Truly a strange bird. An alternate history sci-fi novel. Not bad.. it is laced with several pearls of oriental wisdom. I do not plan to retain my copy but I feel I gained a small slice of enlightenment from ingesting this tale. What more can we ask? =)

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Jun 23, 2009 NebulousGloom (FK) rated it liked it

Interesting but really badly written. I had been reading a book of the best short science fiction novellas, and to go from that to this was painful. Also, Dick tends to write the Japanese dialogue with few articles (ie "the", "a", etc) and short, choppy sentences, but this carries over into the speech of the non-Japanese characters who are talking to them, and ultimately to the narrator. I found the ending a bit confusing. ...more

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