Africa has been blasted into a wasteland, the Mediterranean was drained for farmland, and Bob Hope does comedy routines about the Nazis' plans to colonize Mars. The book is full of bizarre speculative fiction details. Hitler's impending death has created a power vacuum, the Japanese are well aware that they're not safe from the Nazis' genocidal ambitions, and Americans are either erasing their culture or selling it off piece by piece to kitsch-obsessed Japanese businessmen. Most of it speculates on a familiar theme: what if the Allies had lost World War II? Two decades after an Axis victory, Germany and Japan each rule half the United States in an uneasy truce, and no one is satisfied by how things turned out. No matter how much we want to identify with the conquered, we can't seem to imagine actually living as themĬompared to unfilmable fever dreams like Ubik and VALIS, The Man in the High Castle is one of Dick's less mind-bending books. And apparently, that's true even in Ridley Scott's well-recieved Amazon pilot adaptation of Philip K. No matter how much we may identify with the conquered, though, we can't seem to imagine actually living as them. In our politics, it can manifest in nasty ways - nothing's more dangerous than a powerful group with a persecution complex - but in fiction, it's what gives us classics like Red Dawn and any number of alien invasion stories. We love the idea of re-fighting the Revolutionary War, reduced from a global superpower to a scrappy band of rebels. White middle-class Americans, as a rule, love pretending to be underdogs.
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