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.
Here’s your all-access pass into the ultimate historical fiction guide: revisionist history, speculative history, and good old-fashioned historical fiction can all be found here, spanning Biblical Ages through to the early new Millennium. Our list of the best historical fiction books includes bestsellers, bookseller favorites, and award winning titles.
There are a lot of different ways to measure the success of a novel. Sales, certainly. Lasting cultural impact counts. Influence on future writers is another great metric. A slightly more subtle but no less important aspect is an assessment of the barriers the book breaks through; the changes it causes in its genre. Sometimes the […]
Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is an unquestionable classic of more than one genre: a haunting alternate history, a dark and daring science fiction tale, a reality-warping work of philosophy. It’s a book that grabs you and really never lets go. It certainly doesn’t appear to have abandoned Peter Tieryas, the celebrated […]
For nearly two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. At the end of each month, he’ll be sharing the lists of B&N’s bestsellers in the genre, from new hardbacks, to trade paperbacks, to mass markets and media tie-ins, to graphic novels and manga. These are the […]