The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick

Background

In The Man in the High Castle alternative history, Giuseppe Zangara assassinates President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, resulting in the continuation of the Great Depression and the policy of United States non-interventionism at the start of World War II in 1939. American inaction allows Nazi Germany to conquer and annex continental Europe and the Soviet Union into the Reich. The exterminations of the Jews, the Romani, the Bible Students, the Slavs, and all other peoples whom the Nazis considered subhuman ensued. The Axis powers then jointly conquered Africa, and still compete for the control of South America in 1962.[1] Imperial Japan invaded the West Coast of the United States, while Nazi Germany invaded the East Coast; the surrender of the Allies ended World War II in 1947.

By 1962, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany are the world's superpowers, fighting a geopolitical cold war over the world, and in particular over the former United States and South America. Japan extended the Co-Prosperity Pacific Alliance with the establishment of the Pacific States of America (PSA), with the politically neutral Rocky Mountain States acting as a buffer with the Nazi states to the east. Nazi North America is composed of two countries: The South, and the northeastern part of the former contiguous United States of America, which is referred to as "the U.S." in the book, both ruled by collaborationist pro-Nazi puppet regimes. Canada remains an independent country.

The aged Adolf Hitler is incapacitated by tertiary syphilis, Martin Bormann is the acting Chancellor of Germany and the inner-circle Nazis—Joseph Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Göring, Arthur Seyss-Inquart—vie to succeed Hitler as the Führer of the Greater Germanic Reich. Technologically, the Nazis have drained the Mediterranean Sea for lebensraum and farmland, developed and used the hydrogen bomb, developed rockets for traveling throughout the world and into outer space, such as the colonization missions to the Moon, and to the planets Venus and Mars.

Plot

In 1962, it has been fifteen years since Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany won World War II. In San Francisco, in the Pacific States of America, Japanese judicial racism has enslaved black people and reduced the Chinese residents to second-class citizens. Businessman Robert Childan owns an antique shop there that specializes in Americana for a Japanese clientele who fetishize cultural artifacts of the former United States. One day, Childan receives a request from Nobusuke Tagomi, a high-ranking trade official, who seeks a gift to impress a Swedish industrialist named Baynes. Childan can fulfil Tagomi's request because he is well-stocked with counterfeit antiques made by the metal works Wyndam-Matson Corporation.

Recently fired from his job at a Wyndam-Matson factory, Frank Frink (formerly Fink) is a secret Jew and war veteran who agrees to join a former co-worker to start a business making and selling jewelry. Meanwhile, in the Rocky Mountain States, Frank's ex-wife, Juliana Frink, works as a judo instructor in Canon City, Colorado and, in her private life, has entered a sexual relationship with Joe Cinnadella, an Italian truck driver and ex-soldier.

Frink blackmails the Wyndam-Matson Corporation for money to finance his jewelry business, threatening to expose their supplying counterfeit antiques to Childan. Tagomi and Baynes meet, but Baynes repeatedly delays conducting any real business because he awaits a third party from Japan. The Nazi news media announces that Chancellor of Nazi Germany Martin Bormann has died after a short illness. Childan takes some of Frink's "authentic metalwork" jewelry on consignment, to curry favor with a Japanese client, who, to Childan's surprise, says it possesses much Wu, spiritual awareness. Juliana and Joe travel by road to Denver, Colorado, but en route Joe impulsively decides that they take a side trip to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to meet Hawthorne Abendsen, the mysterious author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel of speculative fiction that presents an alternative history of World War II, wherein the Allies defeat the Axis. The Nazis banned it in the U.S., but the Japanese allow its publication and sale in the Pacific States of America. Supposedly, Abendsen lives in a guarded estate named the High Castle. Meanwhile, the Nazi news media inform the public that Joseph Goebbels is the new Chancellor of Nazi Germany.

After much delay, Baynes and Tagomi meet their Japanese contact, while the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi security service, is close to arresting Baynes, who is actually Nazi defector Rudolf Wegener. Baynes warns his contact, a Japanese general, of the existence of Operation Dandelion, a plan of Goebbels for a Nazi sneak attack upon the Japanese Home Islands, with the goal of destroying the Empire of Japan. Frink is exposed as a crypto-Jew and arrested by the San Francisco police. Elsewhere, two SD agents confront Baynes and Tagomi, who uses his antique American pistol to kill both agents. In Colorado, Joe changes his appearance and mannerisms before the side trip to the High Castle in Wyoming; Juliana infers that Joe intends to assassinate Abendsen. Joe reveals himself to be a Swiss Nazi when he confirms his intention; Juliana kills Joe and goes to warn Abendsen.

Wegener flies back to Germany and learns that Reinhard Heydrich (a member of the faction against Operation Dandelion) has launched a coup d'état against Goebbels, to install himself as Chancellor of Nazi Germany. Tagomi is shocked by having killed the SD agents and goes to the antiques shop to sell the pistol back to Childan; instead, sensing the spiritual energy from one of Frink's jewelry creations, Tagomi buys the jewelry. Tagomi then undergoes an intense spiritual experience during which he momentarily perceives an alternative version of San Francisco, evidenced by the Embarcadero freeway, which he has never seen and by the fact that white people do not defer to Japanese people.

Tagomi later meets with the German consul in San Francisco and compels the Germans to free Frink, whom Tagomi has never met, by refusing to sign the order of extradition to Nazi Germany. Juliana has a spiritual experience when she arrives in Cheyenne. She discovers that Abendsen lives with his family in a normal house, having abandoned the High Castle because of a changed outlook on life; thus the possibility of being assassinated no longer worries him. After evading Juliana's questions about his literary inspiration, Abendsen says he used the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination, to guide the writing of his novel. Before leaving, Juliana infers then that Truth wrote the novel to reveal the Inner Truth that Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany did lose World War II in 1945.