This is a dazzling speculative novel of ‘counterfactual history’ from one of America’s most highly-regarded science fiction authors. Philip K. Dick’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick) The Man in the High Castle (1962) gives us a horrifying glimpse of an alternative world – one where the Allies have lost the Second World War. In this nightmare dystopia the Nazis have taken over New York, the Japanese control California and the African continent is virtually wiped out. In a neutral buffer zone in America that divides the world’s new rival superpowers, lives the author of an underground bestseller. His book offers a new vision of reality – an alternative theory of world history in which the Axis powers were defeated – giving hope to the disenchanted. Does ‘reality’ lie with him, or is his world just one among many others? The book won a Hugo Award (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award) in 1963 and has since been translated into many languages.
Philip Kindred Dick (1928-82) was born in Chicago in 1928. His career as a science fiction writer comprised an early burst of short stories followed by a stream of novels, typically character studies incorporating androids, drugs, and hallucinations. His best works are generally agreed to be The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner (1982, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/?ref_=nv_sr_1) by Ridley Scott, starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer and Sean Young.
256 pages in Essential Penguin paperback edition
ISBN 978-0140285628
Philip K. Dick