Took ages to get into this book. Mildly interesting at times. Does really get going towards the end. ( )

(...)

Anyway, for me The Man in the High Castle‘s main draw is its collection of really, really good scenes. Scenes about a shop owner. About two guys trying to set up a handmade jewelry business. About a woman having a fling. Small, slow scenes, unspectacular in the light of World Politics or the African Holocaust. Yet somehow Dick manages to imbue them with life and atmosphere and humanity. Somehow they stand their own in the midst of sentences about history “passing us by”, the evocative power of fiction – “even cheap popular fiction”, “plutocrats”, “Fascist theory of action” or the fact that “it’s all darkness”.

So maybe Joe Cinnadella is right when he claims that it is no “big issue” who wins out. Maybe Dick was a cynic who tried to show that either way, life is life.

(...)

Full review on Weighing A Pig ( )

I found it hard to rate this - there's lots of interesting stuff here but the writing is pretty poor and although I kept reading cause the ideas were interesting it never really engaged me as a novel. This is a pretty typical problem with science fiction, but it's especially disappointing here given what he sets up.

So the setting is Bay Area USA except in a 1962 where Japan and Germany won the war. Tensions are rising between the two powers (Italy is mentioned but it's considered a joke in universe) with a possible change in Nazi leader, Germany's space colonisation program and their apparent new genocide in Africa (details aren't made explicit, except that it was really really really bad). A popular novel in the Japanese areas, banned in the German control area, depicts a world where the Axis lost and Britain and the USA split up the world between them instead. Race is a big deal - Japanese are above Americans and black people are below both, and obviously the little you hear about German areas is horrifying. Still, the Japanese are reasonably benevolent. There's a large trade in pre-war American "ethnic art". Many of the characters constantly consult the I Ching. It's a very interesting world. The racial aspects are obviously horrible but they're clearly supposed to be - we see things from different perspectives and the racial stereotypes are shown as clearly wrong, with each person having different views. I imagine the spiritual views are kind of Orientalist and wrong so take it with a pinch of salt.

First, the good: the subject of choice and fate comes up a lot, with it never being clear if people involved even have "free will" exactly, with their constant consulting of the I Ching - their reading of it as accurate could easily be just them seeing order in random patterns, but it's never clear. The ending is interesting with regards to this. The nature of reality comes up a lot, with several philosophical perspectives on how the world is and what the Nazis are, particularly stuff like nihilism, ideas of rebirth and struggle, the Nazis representing a force behind the scenes, if there's an alternative. The political situation isn't given in much detail, but it's enough to draw your own conclusions and it's definitely an interesting world. The multiple perspectives is good and does help give more depth to the ideas he talks about. The idea of what "authenticity" even is is talked about quite a bit, which is cool.

However, the writing is a bit bad. The characters generally come across as a bit naff - they're not exactly walking stereotypes but he doesn't give much meat to them so they often may as well be. The one woman character is written about particularly badly - nothing awful happens to her, but what does happen is pretty craply handled, I thought. None of the stories had any real depth past just moving the plot onwards, even though he tried sometimes - they just fell flat a bit. You never get a handle on their motivations. It's typical pulpy writing really. Which is a shame because the ideas definitely deserve better. It's just not engaging and doesn't really reward close reading or anything like that, I think.

If the idea sounds cool to you, then definitely read it because it's short, easy to read, and, although not really focused on the alternate history as such, does a good job building a different world and looking at the ideas behind it. Just don't expect a masterpiece or even much excitement past the great ideas. ( )

Interesting concept of the world if Germany would have won the war but it doesn't feel like much really happened throughout the story, there was potential but if felt like it could have been a little more developed. This was one of the few times I enjoyed the TV adaptation better than the book ( )

Like much of PKDs work it's an excellent premise that's too rough at the edges to be truly great. Roth's Plot Against America is a better execution of a tangential story, but lacks the PKD staples of being self-referential and reality questioning, as this work is. ( )