The Man in the High Castle

Dick’s 1962 alternate history, set in a 1962 fifteen years after an Axis victory, with the United States partitioned between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Its characters live under occupation while passing around a banned novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which describes a world where the Allies won — a book inside the book that makes the reader’s own history the speculative one.

Context: a16z list it second under Dick and cite “changing who won WWII” as one of his signature moves. The structural trick is the part worth the attention: a counterfactual that refuses to privilege any one version of events as the real one.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Philip K. Dick — the author.
• Ubik — the other Dick novel on the list built on unstable reality.
• Historical Futurism — the lens Kyle’s research applies to imagined pasts and futures.
• Speculative Fiction — the genre page.