Synopsis
It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. the few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.
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.
Gale Research
The novel's "man in the high castle" is the author of an underground bestseller about an alternate world where America won the war. "I did seven years of research for The Man in the High Castle," Dick said in an interview for the Missouri Review. "I had prime-source material at the Berkeley-Cal library right from the gestapo's mouth--stuff that had been seized after World War II.... That's ... why I've never written a sequel to it: it's too horrible, too awful. I started several times to write a sequel, but I [would have] had to go back and read about Nazis again, so I couldn't do it." Dick used the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divining system, to plot The Man in the High Castle. At each critical juncture in the narrative, Dick consulted the I Ching to determine the proper course of the plot.