| | Author: Dick, Philip K.
| 2007-07-03 | 0679740678 | The Man in the High Castle | Dick, Philip K. | | | | Apparently this book, while not the first instance ever of alternate historical fiction, was one of the first to sell well. I came across it after having read Fatherland by Robert Harris and searching for more such fiction. Both Harris's and Dick's books contemplate alternate histories in which the Nazis won WWII. In the former, the US stayed out of the war and retained its independence; in Dick's FDR is assassinated early in his term, leaving the country in the throes of the Great Depression and leading to defeat in WWII by Nazi Germany and Japan, who divide America between them. For whatever reason these stories of what might have been interest me, and Dick heightens his readers' interest by including another alternate history novel within his own alternate history novel. That novel within a novel, entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, details a world in which Germany and Japan lost WWII, but that world is not our world. It is Grasshopper's author after whom Dick's novel is named, and the novel ends in an encounter with that author in which what is real and what is fiction come into question. The only other work of Dick's with which I'm familiar so far is A Scanner Darkly, the film based on his novel, another work in which what is real is not easy to discern. | |
| |