The Man in the High Castle
First edition, 1962
The Man in the High Castle (1962) is Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning alternate history novel, the work that established him as a serious literary figure and remains his most widely read and discussed book. Set in a 1962 America divided between Japanese and Nazi occupation, it imagines daily life under the consequences of an Axis victory through a cast of characters in San Francisco and the neutral Rocky Mountain States. An underground novel circulating among them, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, imagines in turn a world where the Allies won, and the novel's final pages ask whether that imagined world might be more real than the one the characters inhabit. First published in hardcover by Putnam in 1962. The true first is identified by the date code "D36" at the lower left margin of page 239. Winner of the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel, Dick's only Hugo.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black cloth with red lettering on spine and front cover. Date code "D36" on lower left margin of page 239. New York: Putnam, 1962. Hugo Award winner (1963). Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (37). Levack 23a. PA-SF23.1. #10732.
Fine copy in a bright, near fine dust jacket with light wear and minor nicking at crown of spine and folds with very slight loss.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black cloth with red lettering on spine and front cover. Date code "D36" on lower left margin of page 239. New York: Putnam, 1962. Hugo Award winner (1963). Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (37). Levack 23a. PA-SF23.1. #10732.
Fine copy in a bright, near fine dust jacket with light wear and minor nicking at crown of spine and folds with very slight loss.
Additional Details
The Man in the High Castle (1962) is the novel that changed Philip K. Dick's standing in American literature. Winner of the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel, it remains his most discussed work and the one that most explicitly places his obsessions within the conventions of serious fiction. It is set in 1962 in an America that lost the Second World War. The Pacific Coast is now the Pacific States of America, governed by Imperial Japan, the Eastern seaboard a Nazi Reich satellite, and the Rocky Mountain States a neutral buffer between them.
The novel moves among several characters rather than following a single protagonist. Robert Childan runs an antiques shop in San Francisco, selling American historical artifacts to a Japanese clientele that prizes them as cultural curiosities. Childan's position is one of excruciating ambiguity. He is servile toward his Japanese customers in a way that humiliates him, yet he craves their social acceptance with an intensity that borders on self-destruction. When he discovers that some of his most valuable pieces are forgeries produced by the Wyndam-Matson Corporation, the revelation is not just commercial. It threatens the entire basis on which his identity rests. His stock-in-trade is authenticity, and it may be hollow.
This connects him to Frank Frink, a former Wyndam-Matson worker and Jewish man concealing his identity, who leaves the company and starts making original jewelry with a partner. When Childan shows Frank's pieces to a young Japanese couple, Paul Kasoura describes what he finds in the best of them. He calls it wu, a quality of inner truth, something that makes an object genuinely itself rather than a representation of something else. The jewelry is not historically significant and has no provenance. But it possesses wu in a way that a genuine Civil War artifact displayed in a glass case might not. The distinction that Childan has built his life around, original versus fake, authentic versus manufactured, begins to dissolve.
Mr. Tagomi, a senior Japanese trade official whose storyline runs parallel to Childan's, undergoes his own crisis of perception when events push him to violence. In its aftermath, sitting with one of Frank's pieces of jewelry and concentrating on it, he briefly perceives a different version of San Francisco, our San Francisco, the one where the Allies won. Whether the object has shown him something true about the world, or only about himself, the novel declines to say.
Meanwhile Juliana Frink, Frank's estranged wife living in the neutral states, encounters a man who introduces her to The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a banned novel by the reclusive Hawthorne Abendsen, who supposedly lives in a fortified house, the High Castle of the title. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy imagines a world in which the Allies won the war, and it is circulating underground throughout occupied America, offering its readers an alternate history of their own alternate history. The man traveling with Juliana turns out to be a German agent sent to kill Abendsen. When she realizes this, she acts to stop him, and then continues on to find Abendsen alone.
The I Ching runs throughout the novel as both plot device and philosophical frame. Multiple characters consult it at moments of crisis, and Dick used it himself while writing, allowing its hexagrams to shape plot decisions. He later said this was why the book felt to him as if it had been written by something outside himself. The novel's final scene makes this explicit. Juliana reaches Abendsen and asks whether the oracle wrote The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. His wife confirms it, every choice, every character, every plot turn determined by the hexagrams. Juliana then asks the oracle directly why it wrote the book. The hexagram it returns is Chung Fu, Inner Truth. "It means," Juliana says, "that my book is true." She says my book, not his, and the choice is precise. She has made the book her own by traveling toward it, by staking her life on what it might mean. What she is saying is that the world The Grasshopper Lies Heavy describes, the Allied victory, the history that didn't happen, is the real one. Germany and Japan lost the war. Abendsen closes the volumes and says nothing. The people in the room go back to their drinks. And the occupation continues.
The question the novel leaves open is what that truth means and whether it changes anything for the people living under occupation. The same question applies to every object in Childan's shop, every piece of jewelry Frank makes, every hexagram the characters throw. What makes something genuine? What makes a history real? Dick never settles either question, and the novel is richer for refusing to.
The novel was adapted as a television series by Amazon Prime in 2015, running for four seasons through 2019, and introduced Dick's work to a significantly wider audience.
The novel moves among several characters rather than following a single protagonist. Robert Childan runs an antiques shop in San Francisco, selling American historical artifacts to a Japanese clientele that prizes them as cultural curiosities. Childan's position is one of excruciating ambiguity. He is servile toward his Japanese customers in a way that humiliates him, yet he craves their social acceptance with an intensity that borders on self-destruction. When he discovers that some of his most valuable pieces are forgeries produced by the Wyndam-Matson Corporation, the revelation is not just commercial. It threatens the entire basis on which his identity rests. His stock-in-trade is authenticity, and it may be hollow.
This connects him to Frank Frink, a former Wyndam-Matson worker and Jewish man concealing his identity, who leaves the company and starts making original jewelry with a partner. When Childan shows Frank's pieces to a young Japanese couple, Paul Kasoura describes what he finds in the best of them. He calls it wu, a quality of inner truth, something that makes an object genuinely itself rather than a representation of something else. The jewelry is not historically significant and has no provenance. But it possesses wu in a way that a genuine Civil War artifact displayed in a glass case might not. The distinction that Childan has built his life around, original versus fake, authentic versus manufactured, begins to dissolve.
Mr. Tagomi, a senior Japanese trade official whose storyline runs parallel to Childan's, undergoes his own crisis of perception when events push him to violence. In its aftermath, sitting with one of Frank's pieces of jewelry and concentrating on it, he briefly perceives a different version of San Francisco, our San Francisco, the one where the Allies won. Whether the object has shown him something true about the world, or only about himself, the novel declines to say.
Meanwhile Juliana Frink, Frank's estranged wife living in the neutral states, encounters a man who introduces her to The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a banned novel by the reclusive Hawthorne Abendsen, who supposedly lives in a fortified house, the High Castle of the title. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy imagines a world in which the Allies won the war, and it is circulating underground throughout occupied America, offering its readers an alternate history of their own alternate history. The man traveling with Juliana turns out to be a German agent sent to kill Abendsen. When she realizes this, she acts to stop him, and then continues on to find Abendsen alone.
The I Ching runs throughout the novel as both plot device and philosophical frame. Multiple characters consult it at moments of crisis, and Dick used it himself while writing, allowing its hexagrams to shape plot decisions. He later said this was why the book felt to him as if it had been written by something outside himself. The novel's final scene makes this explicit. Juliana reaches Abendsen and asks whether the oracle wrote The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. His wife confirms it, every choice, every character, every plot turn determined by the hexagrams. Juliana then asks the oracle directly why it wrote the book. The hexagram it returns is Chung Fu, Inner Truth. "It means," Juliana says, "that my book is true." She says my book, not his, and the choice is precise. She has made the book her own by traveling toward it, by staking her life on what it might mean. What she is saying is that the world The Grasshopper Lies Heavy describes, the Allied victory, the history that didn't happen, is the real one. Germany and Japan lost the war. Abendsen closes the volumes and says nothing. The people in the room go back to their drinks. And the occupation continues.
The question the novel leaves open is what that truth means and whether it changes anything for the people living under occupation. The same question applies to every object in Childan's shop, every piece of jewelry Frank makes, every hexagram the characters throw. What makes something genuine? What makes a history real? Dick never settles either question, and the novel is richer for refusing to.
The novel was adapted as a television series by Amazon Prime in 2015, running for four seasons through 2019, and introduced Dick's work to a significantly wider audience.
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