The Man in the High Castle

I've read quite a few Philip K Dick books over the years. They have proven popular with Hollywood as well with Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and Paycheck amongst films adapted from his novels and short stories. Most of his books are loose Sci Fi tales dealing with the fragile nature of reality; usually they end up messing with your head. However, The Man in the High Castle is an exception as it is an alternate history novel; in this case it imagines what America would have been like if the Axis powers had won the Second World War.

In fact, his starting point for the divergence of histories goes back to an attempted assassination of Roosevelt by Giuseppe Zangara in 1933; except in Dick's timeline this is successful leading to a weakened United States and a World War II that ends in 1948 with the partition of the US - the East to Nazi Germany and the West to Japan. In this alternate World the Japanese are authoritarian but honourable, with a penchant for old American memorabilia; whereas the Nazis are as stark raving bonkers as they have ever been portrayed - committing genocide against Africans, draining the Mediterranean and sending rockets to the Moon and Mars. Given that real Nazi scientists did eventually send rockets to the Moon (only with American money) this means the only real Sci-Fi element is draining of the Med.

The book takes the form of examining what daily life for a defeated United States would have been like and, interestingly, this means that most of the main protagonists just get on with life. As an added complication, there is a book within a book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is a controversial novel portraying what life would have been like if the Allies had won the war. However, this is not strictly our history but one in which Britain was to emerge from the war as the world's only superpower. The only real action involves a Nazi plot to kill The Grasshopper's author, Hawthorne Abendsen - the "Man in the High Castle" of the novel's title. We also discover that this book was written using I Ching. This was probably Dick's way of challenging what reality really is; although it strikes me as being typical of the bonkersness of many of his books.

The alternate history subgenre is quite interesting but it hasn't really had that many decent film treatments - Robert Harris's Fatherland springs to mind as a notable exception. There have also been odd episodes of Star Trek and Doctor Who that have dealt with this but it would be interesting to see something more ambitious - maybe a Harry Turtledove adaptation or a screen version of The Difference Engine. Possibly audiences will not buy into the deceit, but it seems odd that filmmakers should shy away from the genre considering the number of superhero adaptations that there have been in recent years.