A review by gwyneira
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

4.0

In Dick's alternate 1962, Germany and Japan won World War II and have occupied the United States jointly, with the Germans controlling the East Coast and the Japanese the West. The eponymous "man in the high castle", author Hawthorne Abendsen, has written a seditious book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, describing what would have happened if the Allies had won the war, and Dick brilliantly uses this as well as the I Ching to illuminate and crystallize his characters' thoughts and feelings about their reality. He follows various characters through various conflicts, and though there isn't a lot of action, and nothing is really resolved at the end, that's not the point: it's really about the inner lives of the novel's people, and their individual responses to their world.