Rating: 
Summary: Not for the weak of heart or mind
Review: This book is a slice of life from a set of interrelated characters who live in a world or reality where Japan and Germany won World War II and split up the world. The one main plot thread involves a German spy who sneaks into the Japanese held portion of the former United States in order to warn the Japanese of a plan to nuke the home islands. Another major plot thread deals with a novel written by the man in the high castle which is about what the world would be like had the United States and England won the war. I was thrown off by the ending. I felt totally confused and thought that I must have missed something. So I searched on the web and found that I hadn't. Everyone is confused by the ending. The story just stops. Also, time is not linear in the book. The threads of the characters actions are lined up and both end at the end of the book, but time wise they are weeks off. I didn't pick this up, but found it out after. It is a very intriguing and interesting story and method of telling a story. It deserves to be put on the short list of books to be read more than once.
Rating: 
Summary: Dated Dick
Review: I had heard that this slim novel, in which Germany and Japan have divided up American, after winning WWII, was one of the best alternate history books ever. Being a moderate counterfactual history fan, I was excited to such a book by someone as respected as Dick. Unfortunately, while the setup is excellent, there's almost no plot to hold the reader's attention. The story, such as it is, hovers around San Francisco and a few people trying to work within this postwar system, where everyone has "place" or rank. There are some interesting incidents and characters, but ultimately they get bogged down in meaningless mystic nonsense. I can see how in 1962, when the book first appeared, the combination of alternate history and I Ching-babble must have been revolutionary, but both have been been done so much better since, that this ends up feeling quite dated and inadequate. Most disappointing of all is the obscure non-ending.
Rating: 
Summary: My introduction to the late, great PKD . . .
Review: Dick's alternate history of a world where the Axis powers prevailed in World War II goes way beyond the macro level. He gets deep into his characters' lives. His characterizations of the young Japanese couple and the accomplished Mr. Tagomi have remained with me in the years since I originally read the book. PKD is one of those rare authors who makes you feel that he is scratching the surface of deeper truths. Although it's true that the ending fails to deliver, rumor has it that Dick wrote the whole book using the I-Ching and lived with the ending it gave him. Don't worry, it's still well worth your reading. My friends and I felt compelled to spend the next few weeks at work contemplating the "Wu" and "Wabe" of everyday objects and composing haikus.
Rating:
Summary: One of Sci-Fi's best works.
Review: Any reader must own this book, if only to get an idea of how good Philip K. Dick could be. Easily the most creative mind in sci-fi, Mr. Dick is possibly at his literary best with this novel. Truly a best-of-genre item.
Rating:
Summary: Philip Dick talks to the reader
Review: The only reason this novel doesn't get five stars is that Philip Dick wrote better novels. This is a serious, steady novel that lacks the shifts and reality twists that are so common in Philip Dick's works. It has a broad range of well fleshed out characters that we, the readers, can identify with. Their traumas and misadventures become ours. Although the novel is driven by a pilgrimmage to meet the author of 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy' it is the incidents around the pilgrimmage that give the novel its content. Philip Dick was a great stylist as a writer, but his most distinct attribute was his ideas. It was an interesting enough idea to have a novel about America divided by an iron curtain between Japan and German occupied zones after the allies had lost WWII. Interesting but hardly astounding. The way Philip Dick writes, especially about Japan occupied America, creates a real alternate world for the readers - a convincing image. That, again, demonstrates technical competence of the writer - but many writers can achieve this level of creativity and detail. When Philip Dick adds the component of having a writer in his imagined world write a novel about an alternative world to him - our world - now, that's a real innovation. Many critics have felt flat at the end of the novel when the pilgrimmage rather peters out. The author of 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy' (the novel that depicts our world in Philip Dick's created world) turns out to be rather a disappointment. There are no revelations here that we, the readers, might have hoped for. But that made me look back into the novel - what is it all about? And I settled for the moment when the Japanese politician - elderly, frail, compassionate - experiences the one reality-shifting moment in the novel. A flash of light off an item of custom jewellery momentarily blinds him at a moment of physical weakness and vulnerability. For several well chosen paragraphs this Japanese gentleman is in our world - the world of 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy'. Suddenly the reality of the alternative world that Philip Dick has created in this novel is overlaid by a greater reality - one every reader can readily identify with. Is Dick wondering what triggers there might be in our reality - the reality of our lives - that might expose us to a greater reality? (See 'The Doors of Perception' by Aldous Huxley.) Perhaps the 'I Ching' is a way to revelation - Philip Dick wrote about this in his personal life and my own experiments were a bit challenging to accomodate. So what of that fade-out ending? I don't think it is any accident that the object of the pilgrimmage is an author, and one of some disrepute. I suggest that Philip Dick was leading the reader to himself and saying - 'Look, don't come to me asking me what it all means. I just write the stuff. Read the words and find what you can from them yourself.'
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: "The Man in the High Castle" ranks among the greatest novels I have ever read. Set in a post-WWII US shattered by war and occupied by Germany and Japan, it combines a well thought out, brilliantly plotted alternate history with a deft literary touch rarely seen in the genre. It's enigmatic ending suggests a "many worlds universe" that leads the reader to question the nature of reality. More fundamentally, though, the reader is left to question, What is an American? Would I suit my lifestyle to a totalatarian regime with relative ease? Am I as moral as I think? Dick offers no real answers, which is fine, because the questions are more evocative than the answers ever could be. A brilliant, wonderful read that you will not regret picking up.
Rating: 
Summary: intriguing novel if not taken too seriously...
Review: Philip K. Dick (PDK) certainly writes some fascinating and diverse material, but there seems to be a common thread of: - social commentary/satire. - space travel and Martian colonization, even if there is little connection to the story. The Man in the High Castle follows this pattern. PKD examines American life after WW II should the Japanese and Germans have won the war, and the USA is shared amongst the victors. PKD exploits the rather unflattering (and outdated) American stereotypes of the Germans, and most especially, the Japanese to paint a rather twisted picture of American life under occupation. While PKD's views have certainly fallen from the realms of what might have been viewed politically correct when he wrote this novel (..in the early 1960s), his rascist stereotypes eventually grated upon the nerves of this (usually) tolerant reviewer. And I didn't find PKD's more philosophical messages very clear (unlike the some of the other reviewers). Yet true to form, in PKD's world space travel and Martian colonization (by the Germans) flourish (no, these incidentals have nothing to do with the story). PDK fans should and will read The Man in the High Castle. However I found the sci-fi elements disjointed from the main story, and PDK's cruel view of the Germans/Japanese to be way over-the-top. PDK has done much better in Ubik and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; I heartily recommend either of these to the PDK neophytes.
Rating:
Summary: SF NOVELS OPUS NINE
Review: One should return to Philip K. Dick's books every three or four years in order not to forget what an adult sci-fi book looks like. Of course, one has to be careful because Philip K. Dick, amidst a dozen masterpieces, also wrote a certain number of books to pay his rent, books which could deceive the curious reader. THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE won the 1964 Hugo award and gave to Philip K. Dick the opportunity to write his best novels without being worried by financial problems. It's not my favorite Dick novel but I nevertheless read it on a regular basis because this writer, in my opinion, is one of the most important american writers of the XXth century and each of his books is way better than the 99 % of today sci-fi production. Numerous Dick's obsessions can be found in THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE like his fear in front of any kind of totalitarism or his intimate belief that reality is only a mask hiding another reality which could hide... and so on. His problems with the F.B.I. have also inspired the scenes describing how innocent people are hunted and arrested by members of the german secret police. I should say that THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE is a good introduction to Philip K. Dick's universe for those of you who want to discover this writer. It's adult science-fiction at its best. A book to read again. And again. And again.
Rating:
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: I'd been told about this novel for a long time, and the idea seemed interesting enough: a novel about a what would have happened if America had lost WWII, featuring a man writing a novel about what would have happened if America had won the war. Thinking the idea through was interesting: how would it be if the California of the 1950's had become Nihonified rather than the Japanese become Westernized, how normal, everyday people in the Eastern US would have reconciled the ideals of the German National Socialists with a cultural sensibility shaped largely by the assimilated Jewish culture surrounding Hollywood movies and the American WASP intellectual culture of Roosevelt and the New Deal, and so on. Would we see Shinto and Buddhist festivals replacing our own Halloween and Easter? Samurai TV replacing Westerns? Would American popular music be centered around Wagnerian opera instead of Delta Blues? How would people think of Jews, if all they knew of them was a distant memory, some rumors of them living at the edge of society (either as fugitives or slaves), and anti-Semitic propaganda? What would have happened to all the various and sundry technical and scientific innovations that were spurred by the exodus of European scientists of all faiths to America? And what of the book about the war being *won* by the Americans? Would it have been accurate, or a projection of paranoid Nazi fantasies about a world subject to the Law of Israel? Instead, we get the predictable "resistance" plot, which means that most of the characters don't have to change a hair of their ideologies, and a posited "nostalgia" fad on the part of the victors, which means that almost nothing really needs to change in popular culture. And the I Ching. Somehow, Mr. Dick latched onto the (apparently novel) fact that (some) Asians take fortunetelling seriously, and used it as a centerpiece for this work. The American characters are constantly flipping coins (about once every hour, it seems) and quoting chapter and verse from the Boellingen series translation (the only one used), all the while bitching about how the Japanese are shoving this practise down their throats (as if Americans didn't already have superstitions). Um, like real-life Asians-who-take-it-seriously only consult the Book for important decisions? And, like, it's not the Japanese who are forcing the coins into peoples' hands to figure out where to eat for lunch? It's as ifthey're downright willing to abnegate any kind of intuitive thought in favor of coinflips (and why isn't anyone using yarrow?) Somehow, it seems to speak more of the fact that Americans enjoy adopting foreign customs, exaggerating them to a freakish extent, and then bending them to their own uses than anything Japanese. Be that as it may, it's endlessly bandied about in this book how the I Ching is or isn't accurate as a predictor of events, how it dominates all society, and so on. In the 60's, it was probably a great revelation that people could actually think this way. Now, with almost everyone having heard of astrology, tarot, biorhythms, and runestones, it sounds superficial and dull. Mostly, the Japanese don't act like any Japanese I'veever met or read about (and I've had a pretty good grounding in their culture), I don't think they'd behave that way if they took over America and no, it doesn't work as an allegory of "what we did to Japan" either. They're supposed to be so onesidedly smitten with prewar American culture that fine jewelry from contemporary artisans is rejected in favor of Mickey Mouse watches. (Mostly, Dick seems to think that we gave them exactly what they deserved.) The Germans don't come off as that interesting either: they've brought back slavery, but it hasn't affected the economy all that much, Jews are forced to take assumed last names, but Nazi racial ideas haven't affected America that much, and we don't have all that much of a difference between America with the influx of scientists and without. I suppose at thetime it was written, there wasn't that much of a difference yetbetween the world before the war and that after it: as for me, I'mjust going to eat my ramen noodles before turning in on my futon. I'vegot a date at the sushi bar tomorrow, and I'm dying to tell him aboutthe cool anime I just saw. But I'm leaving nothing to chance.
Rating:
Summary: Resonant, Dignified, Moving, The Man in the High Castle
Review: TMITHC is probably not PKD's best book (although many would disagree) but it is certainly the best written, most resonant, and has one of PKD's best characters, Mr. Tagomi. It is a book about fascism, the I-Ching, and more besides, and is very moving. It is the sort of book that, once read, you can never forget. It is a world of contradictions, many of which are not resolved, and this is PKD's strength. Many have complained about the novel's ending, the man himself most of all (he said the I-Ching, which he used to plot the book, spoke with 'forked tongue' and claims the I Ching copped out). Here, I disagree. What is wrong with the ending? It leaves everything up in the air, yes, but how could be resolve all that he had brought into question. The scene where Tagomi is transported to our own world is possibly the best scene in the whole PKD canon, and it is this book that will probably be longest lasting of the novels PKD wrote.
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