Comments on: The Man In The High Castle http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2011/01/09/the-man-in-the-high-castle/ A Life In Science Fiction Thu, 13 Feb 2014 16:58:27 +0000 hourly 1 By: Paul http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2011/01/09/the-man-in-the-high-castle/#comment-685 Mon, 30 May 2011 23:21:11 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/?p=411#comment-685 I stumbled across this following links from boingboing, but having just finished The Man in the High Castle about a week ago, I thought I’d comment. I can’t help but read this book except from within my particular historical perspective, so what hits me hardest is the idea that if in the book, High Castle, the reason that Grasshopper was written was that in fact Germany/Japan didn’t win the war, then in our world, the reason that High Castle was written is that because in fact Germany/Japan did win the war. I can’t help but feel an erie prescience emanating from High Castle, especially given the claims that Bruce Shneier and others have been making for the last decade: the terrorist won the moment we turned in to a society of fear. The leap I can’t make, and maybe it’s because I am a product of a later time, is what does Dick claim that the effect of WWII on the real world was. Did it lead to a fascist society, just one that is masked in freedom? Does it have to do with the control of individual liberty, as illustrated in the Frank Frink part of the novel, where perhaps the oracle is saying that even though the war was won by Germany, they didn’t succeed in destroying individual’s? This is what I’m thinking about anyway.

As an aside, I was miracled my copy of this book while walking my dog. I sat down on a bench in the park and saw it sitting on the ground nearby. Knowing of Dick, I of course picked it up and thought it was a strange enough thing to have happened. All the more strange now that I’ve read it. I gave it away immediately.

Very glad to have been directed to this blog.

]]> By: Kate Maddalena http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2011/01/09/the-man-in-the-high-castle/#comment-554 Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:52:23 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/?p=411#comment-554 What a very good review.

I imagine, still, that The Man in the High Castle is a sort of key to the alternate reality it describes…like…how do I explain it…a couple of centuries from now, some physicist will read it and realize how narrative has to be incorporated into some calculation to account for a complex time-space system. That didn’t explain it. Oh, well.

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