That’s the name of his fortress-like home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, according to his author’s bio on the novel’s jacket. That’s why she’s able to talk so assuredly about how Roosevelt would have been if he hadn’t been assassinated.Ībendsen is the guy who, as the title says, lives in the High Castle. That’s the book that Juliana Frink has been reading and has gotten very excited about. In crafting his speculative fiction, Dick adroitly heightens the tension of the story by introducing an unusual wrinkle - a popular novel of speculative what-if fiction, banned in Germany but rabidly read in those places where it’s available, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorne Abendsen. And they have the hydrogen bomb.Īs I said, much that is bad has happened. They’ve drained the Mediterranean Sea to create farmland. The Germans have traveled to the Moon and to Mars. Throughout much of the world, the Nazis are able to round up any Jews who are discovered and ship them back to Germany for extermination. (Between the East and West are the independent Rocky Mountain States from the Canada to Mexico.) The Germans also control Europe and Africa and have split the former Soviet Union with the Japanese.ĭick makes clear that the Germans have conducted some sort of genocide of black Africans - what’s called the Final Solution of the African Problem - although he doesn’t spell out the details. The Germans dominate the rump United States of America (the East Coast and Midwest) and are allied with the South, a separate nation for the first time since the Civil War. And, after that, the Japanese have control the West Coast, now known as the Pacific States of America, as well as Asia. He is succeeded by Vice President John Nance Garner who fails at the job, especially in the face of German and Japanese aggression.Ĭapitulation Day by the U.S. Much that is bad results from Roosevelt’s death. In his novel, Dick has this shooting happening after Roosevelt had already served a year in office. In our real world, Zangara took his potshots when Roosevelt was still President-Elect and still had seventeen more days until inauguration. He showed it in the year he was President, all those measures he introduced.”ĭick is doing a little finessing here. “If Joe Zangara had missed him, he would have pulled American out of the Depression and armed it…Roosevelt would have been a terribly strong President. As Juliana Frink, one of the Dick’s central characters, explains: In the novel, world history is much different because of Zangara’s better accuracy. Dick, by the way, was born in Chicago in 1928.) (And, presumably, Cermak survives, changing the history of Chicago in ways that Dick doesn’t address. In the world of The Man in the High Castle, Zangara is a better shot. On February 15, 1933, in our real world, Zangara did actually try to kill FDR in Miami, Florida, but missed him, hitting instead Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak and four other bystanders. “A terribly strong President”įor Dick, the turning point is the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Italian immigrant Joe Zangara. For Kantor, history was different because of the death of U.S. It was such a hit that it was republished in 1961 as a book. In the November 22, 1960, issue of Look magazine, MacKinlay Kantor published If the South Had Won the Civil War. Moore wasn’t the only one with an alternative history of the Civil War. ![]() Lee had won the Battle of Gettysburg and gone on to take Philadelphia, leading to a Confederate triumph in the Civil War. In that book, Moore envisioned how history would have unfolded if Robert E. ![]() There’s been a lot of this sort of alternate history, what-if history, published over the past half century, but the first stirrings of this genre were already present in the 1950s and 1960s.ĭick told an interviewer that he’d come up with the idea for The Man in the High Castle after reading Ward Moore’s 1953 novel Bring the Jubilee. That story is what’s called speculative fiction, and it has to do with how the world would have been if the Nazi-led Germans and the Japanese had won World War II. ![]() Suffice it to say, however, that it fits the story he has told. I won’t get into how he does this so as not to ruin any surprise for future readers of the book. Dick performs a clever feat of literary dipsy-doodle at the end of his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, and he throws into question the reality of the world in which his reader lives.
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