The Man in the High Castle

The science fiction novel “The Man in the High Castle,” which brought the author the Hugo Award in 1963 (best novel of the year), tells of the path history might have taken if Nazi Germany and Japan had won the Second World War.

“The Man in the High Castle” is perhaps the most “multilayered” of P. Dick’s works. The novel contains none of the scenes so typical of the “post-holocaust” subgenre. There is no desperate struggle for survival, no heroic resistance to oppressors. The most intense struggle takes place in minds and souls.

Although “The Man in the High Castle” is based on the symbolism of the “Book of Changes,” and though it is saturated with the spirit, philosophy, and terminology of the East, it is a very American novel, where the teaching of the Tao, the images of the “I Ching” and the “Bardo Thodol” are woven into the life of America in the sixties, into its past and present.

Philip Dick himself said that while writing the novel he constantly turned to the I Ching.