Philip K. Dick ’s 1963 Hugo - gain ground novel is an alternate , Nazi - filled interlingual rendition of what ’s now our yesteryear . But was it an accurate prevision of our present circumstances , too ?
Marshall McLuhan quotes Ezra Pound as calling artists the “ antenna ” of the human species — they smell what ’s come before the rest of the being , and report it to us . I specially wish that in reference to Philip K. Dick , because he writes the sort of stories that make you think of antennae , the insect kind and the alien variety ( sometimes both at once ) .
But the metaphor does n’t seem precisely applicable to The Man in the High Castle , since ( as the book itself points out , at one point ) it is n’t a story about the hereafter — it ’s a fib about the present tense ( the nowadays at the time it was published , anyway ) , an alternate nowadays , one in which the Axis won World War II . Germany and Italy ( but mostly Germany ) rule Europe and Africa and Western Asia , and Japan rules the eternal rest of Asia , the West Coast ( practically if not nominally ) , and most of South America . ( There’sa map , if you want . )
The level , as Wikipedia will tell you , is about a bunch of different people tie in in various ways at various times , and deals with motif about what ’s authentic and what is n’t , how arbitrary the distinction can seem , and how deceiving appearances can be . These are pretty common ideas in Dick ’s work — even if all you have it away of his work is Blade Runner ( which , yes , technically is more like “ urge on by ” his body of work than fully part of it ) , you ’ve seen them at shimmer there . More subtly , I think those radical make out through in his style , too , all the metre . His writing always seems solid but gentle and a bit heartsick to me — not probationary , but as if he was cognisant of what a tenuous thing spirit is and needed to break it to his readers both totally honestly and with great charge . For as disconcerting as his stories can be , I never get the mother wit that Dick enrapture in upsetting his readers ( or in putting his character in upsetting situations ) , but rather that he was move by an enormous compassion to do it .
mayhap , if there ’s any truth to Pound ’s possibility , Dick sensed how cloudy reality was about to become . The Man in the High Castle strike out the spot , really , where SF literature break away from its Golden Age ancestor , where the mainstream stories stopped feel quite so straightforward and concrete , and started to handle ideas in a more nonfigurative style . It ’s a product of a time I guess we face back on now as when America initiate to become less sure of itself : The Vietnam War had just begun , all of a sudden the great unwashed who were n’t white were ask to be noticed , and the first coevals of kids raised on television was coming of age . The year High Castle gain its award , President John F. Kennedy was assassinate , usher in the era of the pop - culture conspiracy theory .
And half a 100 later on , the breakdown is in full swing . lily-white men , the demographic who for hundreds of years shaped westerly civilisation , rule themselves on the justificatory ; painstakingly craft program called “ realness ” show are an entertainment basic ; and the round-eyed head of where our president was born is a heatedly contested issue in some quarters .
Then there ’s the less obvious stuff , that ’s even trickier : We blab out to friends every Clarence Shepard Day Jr. whose face we do n’t see and whose voices we do n’t hear ; and though the fact of communicating is no less real , if we ’re wise , we ’re cautious — because no matter how absorbing online exchange are , they need a lot few of our perceptive senses . In this , we ’re not unlike one of High Castle ’s characters , the clean American Robert Childan , a minority man of affairs constantly try out to negociate the complicated globe of the wealthy Japanese who are his client , never quite sure of his footing and always nervous about it .
But that said , really the eccentric in the book are all cautious — or are if they ’re wise — because , despite last in a earth without the Vietnam War and notably without TV , and under the very tangible supervision of the Nazis , they seem to have a very shaky clutches on reality themselves , in some way or another . So maybe Dick was n’t an antenna at all . Maybe he was just foreground an panorama of the human condition — the anxiety and alienation of not knowing what is true — that obtains universally throughout solid ground and history .
I like that think better than another possibility . At the end of The Man in the High Castle , it ’s let out to some of the graphic symbol that the populace they inhabit may not be the substantial one — it may just be a false alternate that came into macrocosm whenGiuseppe Zangarasuccessfully assassinated FDR . It ’s implied that the real macrocosm is our own .
And peradventure when Dick wrote the book , ours was the veridical universe . But then mayhap the next year , when JFK was assassinated — maybe besides fueling the imaginations of one thousand of nuttos , that shot sent us off into our own substitute history ? And perhaps that ’s why we , like the novel ’s lineament , witness ourselves confront with a less ignore - and - dried perception of things every twenty-four hour period . I mean , probably not . But how would we know ?
“ Blogging the Hugos ” appear every other weekend . In the next episode : Here Gather the Stars ( aka Way Station ) , by Clifford D. Simak , from 1964 .
https://gizmodo.com/clifford-simaks-way-station-a-place-to-move-on-from-5481785
Josh Wimmer is a freelance writer in Madison , WI . He can usually be foundhere .
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