Alternate History Book Club: Man in the High Castle Discussion

Well, to kick things off: as I understand it, there are three "worlds" in the book: the Nazi victory one that comprises most of the story, what appears to be our world (a Japanese character stumbles into it, IIRC through the power of the I Ching ), and the book written by the "man in the high castle", an alternate alternate in which while the Allies defeat the Nazis, the world is soon divided again in a British-US cold war. Aside from the issue of whether our world or the Nazi victory world, IIRC the author has said that, at least in the context of the book, it's the Britwank world of the story-within-a-story which is, so to speak, the 'prime' reality. Does anyone recall whether this is so or not?

Bruce
 
Yeah, I remember that idea that neither OTL nor the Axis victory ATL are the "real" history. To me, that kind of blew the wheels off of the wagon of an otherwise good story. Added a weird meta, Matrix-like "this is all an illusion" feel to an otherwise realistic story, which was out of place, imo.

You know, the main reaction to reading this story that I got is that, for better or for worse, I am SO glad that the Cold War we got ended up being between the United States and the Soviet Union. World War II was what really decided the course of human culture for the rest of the century up to today, legitimizing some belief systems and discrediting others.

You can spend days picking apart the problems with both American capitalism and Soviet communism, but I'd pick either of them to live under any day than the worldviews that would've won out in the High Castle world. At least with capitalism and communism both, they have pretensions of internationalism and equality, claiming to work for the benefit of all of mankind regardless of nationality. But Nazism and Japanese imperialism were fundamentally about the fact that their people were the only people on Earth worth a shit, and that the rest of the world was good for nothing other than bowing in humiliation before them. The only difference between them was that the Japanese simply assumed that they were better than everyone else and condescendingly treated others like peons, whereas the Nazis don't even bother to do that; they just wiped out the whole African continent after treating it like a giant fucking chemistry lab.

That, to me, cuts to the heart of why this story has been a successful dystopia for so many years. Can you imagine how humiliating and not-worth-living it would be to live in a world where not only are you treated like a lower level of human for the crime of not being German or Japanese, but on top of that, the world just fought a bloody war that ended with such a train of thought being legitimized and enshrined by those who society considers the most progressive and intelligent among them?

On a more specific note related to this theme, the scenes that always stand out to me, because of my own personal experience, are Childan's interactions with Tagomi and the rest of his Japanese customers. Especially the way that Childan is constantly fretting about properly getting his way through the labyrinthine unspoken rules of Japanese etiquette, and the way in which Tagomi and others get away with psychologically slapping him in the face while simultaneously being as polite as cats about it.

Having lived in Japan myself, I have to say...even in OTL, this is something that happens. I love Japan and its people to death, but even to this day, some of them can be incredibly smug and condescendingly racist, and they often do so in the subtlest, most taciturnly polite way. When I was living there, I got into heated verbal spats on more than one occasion when I called people out on their racist microaggressions.

But that's just it: I live in a world, where, culturally, I have enough pride in myself to not care so much what people think if I don't conform 100% to their byzantine idea of civility, and act differently from the majority. Childan does not: because his culture was conquered, he had a constant idea of self-loathing that really made him feel worthless to the core next to the Japanese overlords. If I were in his position, I would've gotten pissed and blown up at those people minutes into the conversation, but because they had power over him and were writing the cultural rulebook, he had to lie down and take it.

And then I start second-guessing myself: I'm grateful that I'm not put in a position of cultural self-loathing like that, but what about the self-loathing that Japanese and Germans were forced to endure? What about the ways in which Germans had the evils of Nazism rubbed in their wounds, instilling a psychological guilt that continues to this day? What about Japan being demilitarized, occupied, and being called a "nation of children" by MacArthur (and yes, MacArthur's point was more nuanced than those paraphrased words would imply, but still)?

I'm a big believer in the idea that diverse cultures all over the world each have something good to offer. In that regard, capitalism and communism were definitely the lesser of two evils in comparison to Nazism and imperialism. But it's still not 100% great, either.
 
There are several elements that really strike me. The way how characters in Japanese-ruled California think in the sort of stilted way that someone trying to speak a second language would, whereas those in the Rockies are far more normal in thought.

Then there's the fascinating set up where Nazi Germany is very peripheral to the story, much as Japan usually is, and the really very chilling concept of Hitler having been shipped off to a sanitorium- that even the high command are unsettled by the thought they've built everything on the dreams of a madman.

And of course we have the concept that within the world of High Castle, the concept of a British Empire which gasses the leaders of the Indian independence movement and crushes dissent is a vision of a better world:eek:
 
In our world Imperial Japan was making some half-assed gestures towards multiculturalism, though probably it would be better to call it an attempt to create a multi- ethnic empire like you'll find in contemporary Europe. So a victorious Japan would not necessarily be based on racial superiority, though in practice it would probably still work out that way.
 
And of course we have the concept that within the world of High Castle, the concept of a British Empire which gasses the leaders of the Indian independence movement and crushes dissent is a vision of a better world:eek:

Compared to a world where entire continents worth of people are exterminated outright? Yeah, definitely an improvement. :(

Bruce
 
Yeah, I remember that idea that neither OTL nor the Axis victory ATL are the "real" history. To me, that kind of blew the wheels off of the wagon of an otherwise good story. Added a weird meta, Matrix-like "this is all an illusion" feel to an otherwise realistic story, which was out of place, imo.

Well, that comes with the territory with Philip K Dick.In his later years he began thinking that _this_ world was an illusion.

You know, the main reaction to reading this story that I got is that, for better or for worse, I am SO glad that the Cold War we got ended up being between the United States and the Soviet Union. World War II was what really decided the course of human culture for the rest of the century up to today, legitimizing some belief systems and discrediting others.

Well, if you're going to have a cold war in the first place...:D


On a more specific note related to this theme, the scenes that always stand out to me, because of my own personal experience, are Childan's interactions with Tagomi and the rest of his Japanese customers. Especially the way that Childan is constantly fretting about properly getting his way through the labyrinthine unspoken rules of Japanese etiquette, and the way in which Tagomi and others get away with psychologically slapping him in the face while simultaneously being as polite as cats about it.

Yes, it's quite well done - the eternal humiliation of being a member of the "inferior race" even under the best of circumstances. Side thought: the Japanese empire probably never recruits the diplomats it sends to Germany from Californian/west coast Japanese - all the wrong instincts in dealing with white people, you see..


I'm a big believer in the idea that diverse cultures all over the world each have something good to offer. In that regard, capitalism and communism were definitely the lesser of two evils in comparison to Nazism and imperialism. But it's still not 100% great, either.

This seems like an appropriate point for the Churchill quote:

"...democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."


Bruce
 
Since we're talking about TMitHC, I hope people don't mind if I bring up a pet peeve of mine: the scientific and technological triumphs of victorious Nazi Germany. Germans are always building cyborg mutant apes, sending rockets to Mars, building flying saucers, or, as in this story, draining the Mediterranean for shits and giggles. Now, as anyone who actually knows anything will tell you, the technological achievements of the Nazis OTL were achieved by drawing on the cultural capital created by the Second Reich, and the Nazis did a great deal of harm to German science: would have done more, if they stayed in power.

We can disregard comic books, but even more serious SF and AH writers tend to oversell the capacity of the Nazis. Why would they assume an ideologically nutty dictatorship would be more capable, technologically speaking, than the US? I suspect it may come down to what bloggers and SF reviewer James Nicoll called the Green Lantern Theory of R&D [1]: all you need is sufficient willpower. And the Nazis were all about Triumph of the Will. (Insert rant about how we would have colonized space already if it weren't for all those weak liberals draining our national vital fluids).

Nazi science is somehow disconnected from economic limits or fundamental engineering problems. Also, since they don't believe There Are Things Man Was Meant to Know, and they will be supported in "worthy" projects by an absolute leader able to cut through all red tape and crush any institutional resistance, of course they will achieve great-and terrible- things. It's not that a lot of SF and AH writers are objectively pro-Nazi: it's just that they, I think, have trouble imagining a democratic society which isn't "hampered" by its own liberties in achieving what a strong dictator might do.

Thoughts?

Bruce

[1] Riffing of Matthew Yglesias's phrase of "Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics" applied to GW Bush.
 
Since we're talking about TMitHC, I hope people don't mind if I bring up a pet peeve of mine: the scientific and technological triumphs of victorious Nazi Germany. Germans are always building cyborg mutant apes, sending rockets to Mars, building flying saucers, or, as in this story, draining the Mediterranean for shits and giggles. Now, as anyone who actually knows anything will tell you, the technological achievements of the Nazis OTL were achieved by drawing on the cultural capital created by the Second Reich, and the Nazis did a great deal of harm to German science: would have done more, if they stayed in power.

We can disregard comic books, but even more serious SF and AH writers tend to oversell the capacity of the Nazis. Why would they assume an ideologically nutty dictatorship would be more capable, technologically speaking, than the US? I suspect it may come down to what bloggers and SF reviewer James Nicoll called the Green Lantern Theory of R&D [1]: all you need is sufficient willpower. And the Nazis were all about Triumph of the Will. (Insert rant about how we would have colonized space already if it weren't for all those weak liberals draining our national vital fluids).

Nazi science is somehow disconnected from economic limits or fundamental engineering problems. Also, since they don't believe There Are Things Man Was Meant to Know, and they will be supported in "worthy" projects by an absolute leader able to cut through all red tape and crush any institutional resistance, of course they will achieve great-and terrible- things. It's not that a lot of SF and AH writers are objectively pro-Nazi: it's just that they, I think, have trouble imagining a democratic society which isn't "hampered" by its own liberties in achieving what a strong dictator might do.

Thoughts?

Bruce

[1] Riffing of Matthew Yglesias's phrase of "Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics" applied to GW Bush.

This is a good point. It's especially baffling, since Dick should know better about this problem. He directly sites, in the intro to the book, William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" as one of his main research sources in writing TMITHC.

But Shirer devotes a large part of one of his chapters to the topic of the Nazification of German universities and science programs. How they were indoctrinated to claim that science wasn't international, but racial. How the theory of relativity was denounced as a Jewish conspiracy put forth by the evil Jew Einstein who clearly was incapable of real scientific reasoning. Enrollment in technological institutes plummeted from 20,474 to 9,554 in six years, and academic standards lowered accordingly. And on top of that, German universities had a long tradition, dating back to the German Empire, of towing the authoritarian line of the government and being nationalist and anti-Semitic, meaning that this pattern was not going to change anytime soon.

Imagine a whole country whose scientific education system churns out an endless supply of Trofim Lysenko equivalents. How they hell would they be able to find their own butts with both hands, let alone construct rocket planes and industry in space?

I think the reason Dick and other authors assume that Nazi Germany would build space rockets to the furthest frontiers and invent the Internet decades early is simply because of the interpretations of Nazi ideology as a whole. Nazism had so many pretensions of futurism and such grandiose sociocultural ambitions, that I think authors choose to look at the ambitions rather than the economic and educational realities that would've tripped them up.

Plus, it serves as a bit of a balancing act to the story, adding a small light of wonderment and impressive accomplishment to an otherwise awful world. "Yeah, humanity is enslaved, and one of the world superpowers thinks genocide is what you do when you need more real estate. But on the somewhat bright side, we landed on the moon way earlier, and you wouldn't believe how convenient transportation is!"
 
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Not to mention that Atlantropa is a terrible idea anyway and there's no evidence that the Nazis thought any differently about this.
 
I suspect that the whole "Nazi-Super-Science" stems not only futurism (the Stalinists among others had similar ideas) but from the lonely fact that the Reich beat the Allies to large-scale rockets and functional jet fighters. Aside from that, they missed inventing Radar and completely botched nuclear weapons development. A paranoid society that subordinates science to ideological purity will always (in the long run) run second to free societies.

Back in the Fifties there was a book titled Engineers Dreams authored by Willy Ley, a colleague of Von Braun both in Germany and then in the US. Even post-war men like him thought that draining the Med or damming the Congo to flood central Africa would be neat things to try. (to be fair, some of the projects he proposed, like the Channel tunnel actually did come to pass) The human and ecological consequences of such ideas would have been catastrophic in the extreme. As nasty as things got OTL, the High Castle world would have been a hundred times worse.
 

Thande

Donor
I always regarded the superscience aspects as being derived from the fact that The Man in the High Castle was intended as a dark mirror of the contemporary world of the early 1960s, when it seemed as though new frontiers were being conquered every week (supersonic aircraft, space programme, megaprojects, advances in medicine, etc.). Dick's world is both an exaggeration of and a dark twist on this, with rocket airliners, colonies on Mars and Venus, the aforementioned Atlantropa (remember that this was written only a few years after the Australian government considered nuking the Great Barrier Reef to make a new shipping channel) and so on. I don't think he himself realistically thought that they could have got quite that far in less than 20 years, but it is to my mind a deliberate exaggeration of the zeitgeist. You can see something similar, without the dark twist, in Gerry Anderson's works, which modelled the 2060s as "like the 1960s, BUT MORE SO".
 
I always regarded the superscience aspects as being derived from the fact that The Man in the High Castle was intended as a dark mirror of the contemporary world of the early 1960s, when it seemed as though new frontiers were being conquered every week (supersonic aircraft, space programme, megaprojects, advances in medicine, etc.). Dick's world is both an exaggeration of and a dark twist on this, with rocket airliners, colonies on Mars and Venus, the aforementioned Atlantropa (remember that this was written only a few years after the Australian government considered nuking the Great Barrier Reef to make a new shipping channel) and so on. I don't think he himself realistically thought that they could have got quite that far in less than 20 years, but it is to my mind a deliberate exaggeration of the zeitgeist. You can see something similar, without the dark twist, in Gerry Anderson's works, which modelled the 2060s as "like the 1960s, BUT MORE SO".

What the heck!

They seriously considered doing that:eek::eek::eek:
 

Thande

Donor
What the heck!

They seriously considered doing that:eek::eek::eek:

Yes, though looking it up it was a bit more of a fringe suggestion than the reference I'd seen before made it out to be. Nuclear engineering used to be all the rage in the 50s and 60s, used to blast out canals, make artificial harbours, etc. Like I say, The Man in the High Castle was an exaggeration of then-current trends.

(Fun fact: I found it very hard to search for the reference to the Great Barrier Reef nuke project, just because the Google Search was swamped with references to when the United States accidentally dropped unarmed (non-nuclear) bombs on the Great Barrier Reef earlier this year...)
 
About Nazi superscience. I don't think Dick was ever intending to write a plausible depiction of an "Axis wins WW2" world (if he was he sure had a rosy picture of Japan). In his future Dystopia he was contrasting the technological abilities and horrors of Nazi Germany with what he believed would be much more humanistic Japanese culture. In one of the opening scenes, the "Swedish" buisnessman riding a Nazi suborbital rocket plane into San Francisco sees a Japanese baseball stadium ("see the japs are not so bad if they like baseball") and thinks it's a rocket launching station. The Japanese come off as cute souvenier-hunting Imperialists who like American knick-knacks, the Germans just plain evil.
 

Dirk_Pitt

Banned
About Nazi superscience. I don't think Dick was ever intending to write a plausible depiction of an "Axis wins WW2" world (if he was he sure had a rosy picture of Japan). In his future Dystopia he was contrasting the technological abilities and horrors of Nazi Germany with what he believed would be much more humanistic Japanese culture. In one of the opening scenes, the "Swedish" buisnessman riding a Nazi suborbital rocket plane into San Francisco sees a Japanese baseball stadium ("see the japs are not so bad if they like baseball") and thinks it's a rocket launching station. The Japanese come off as cute souvenier-hunting Imperialists who like American knick-knacks, the Germans just plain evil.

Thing is there is some truth to that last bit. Really the Japanese were only doing what the Europeans had done decades prior. The just tried to do too much too soon, plus were a bit more brutal. Still doesn't justify what the Japanese did, but still...
 

Thande

Donor
I always found the bit about Americans emulating the culture of their Japanese overlords to be quite intriguing in hindsight, when you consider that much the same cultural effect - but under VERY different circumstances - can be found in the cyberpunk of two decades later.

I believe our own Tony Jones recognised the same connection and used it as the basis for one of his lesser-well-developed AH RPG scenarios, where the gimmick was that it was recognisable futurist cyberpunk, but set in a Nazi victory TL.
 
I dunno: doesn't look much like OTL 1960s to me, aside from the "unlimited science" zeitgeist.

Yeah, the Japanese "merely" killed some 25 million Asians through famine, forced labor, and military assault. Then there was the biological warfare experiments, the "Three Alls" policy, as the Chinese call it... The Japanese weren't Nazis, but they were exceedingly brutal in practice: Dick's picture of the "civilized' Japanese tends to leave that out of the picture. Of course, in the world of MitHC, where Slavs and Africans have been exterminated in their entirety, a few tens of millions more dead Asians to maintain Japanese rule might simply pass unnoticed.

Bruce
 
Thing is there is some truth to that last bit. Really the Japanese were only doing what the Europeans had done decades prior. The just tried to do too much too soon, plus were a bit more brutal. Still doesn't justify what the Japanese did, but still...

Nobody is attempting to justify anything. That is just how Dick wrote his novel. When Dick wrote TMITHC, the Nazi holocaust was well documented, still on people's minds, and could easily be extrapolated to Africa and so forth in an AH where they won WW2. Japanese crimes were far less widely known in America - especially the Chinese stuff. 1960's drug addled SF writers enamored with Asian culture, buddhism, Zen, Karate, the I Ching and other ways to expand oneself just didn't see the Japanese Empire in a particularly negative light. This lasted until fairly recently. I remember Spielberg's 1941. The Japanese submariners trying to attack LA are basically just fuinny and human - the Nazi officer on the Japanese sub played by Christopher Lee, however, was pure evil. It really took Chinese cinema to become mainstream for people to get another perspective on Japanese war crimes in WW2 and before.
 
The Nazi super-science, I think, is part of Dick's contrasting the Japanese and the Germans. Everything we see of the Japanese, from the souvenir-hunting to them running parts of the United States shows them as willing to simply stand on what they've taken, while the Nazis are blasting off in a hundred evil directions as fast as they can. Technologically-obsessed Nazis are constructing a space empire and discovering that African ankle bones can be used in cigarette lighters, while Japan's domain is strung together with bamboo and bric-a-brac.

Certainly the book should not be looked at from the perspective of 'realistic' AH, as that often does not a good story make (if we're going to demand realistic AH, we should probably demand 'realistic' action films and love stories, too, and nobody wants that:p). It's Dick playing to his strengths creating a disturbing intellectual playground filled with strange people.

EDIT: Also, if you're into audio books, the 1997 version read by George Guidall is quite good, but was on cassette. The newer version read by Tom Weiner is alright, and can be found online here. I listened to the Guidall version after I read the book for the first time, and I understood a lot more of it that way, characters especially. Pleasantly, both versions are unabridged.
 
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davidr151

Banned
Yeah, I remember that idea that neither OTL nor the Axis victory ATL are the "real" history. To me, that kind of blew the wheels off of the wagon of an otherwise good story. Added a weird meta, Matrix-like "this is all an illusion" feel to an otherwise realistic story, which was out of place, imo.

You know, the main reaction to reading this story that I got is that, for better or for worse, I am SO glad that the Cold War we got ended up being between the United States and the Soviet Union. World War II was what really decided the course of human culture for the rest of the century up to today, legitimizing some belief systems and discrediting others.

You can spend days picking apart the problems with both American capitalism and Soviet communism, but I'd pick either of them to live under any day than the worldviews that would've won out in the High Castle world. At least with capitalism and communism both, they have pretensions of internationalism and equality, claiming to work for the benefit of all of mankind regardless of nationality. But Nazism and Japanese imperialism were fundamentally about the fact that their people were the only people on Earth worth a shit, and that the rest of the world was good for nothing other than bowing in humiliation before them. The only difference between them was that the Japanese simply assumed that they were better than everyone else and condescendingly treated others like peons, whereas the Nazis don't even bother to do that; they just wiped out the whole African continent after treating it like a giant fucking chemistry lab.

That, to me, cuts to the heart of why this story has been a successful dystopia for so many years. Can you imagine how humiliating and not-worth-living it would be to live in a world where not only are you treated like a lower level of human for the crime of not being German or Japanese, but on top of that, the world just fought a bloody war that ended with such a train of thought being legitimized and enshrined by those who society considers the most progressive and intelligent among them?

On a more specific note related to this theme, the scenes that always stand out to me, because of my own personal experience, are Childan's interactions with Tagomi and the rest of his Japanese customers. Especially the way that Childan is constantly fretting about properly getting his way through the labyrinthine unspoken rules of Japanese etiquette, and the way in which Tagomi and others get away with psychologically slapping him in the face while simultaneously being as polite as cats about it.

Having lived in Japan myself, I have to say...even in OTL, this is something that happens. I love Japan and its people to death, but even to this day, some of them can be incredibly smug and condescendingly racist, and they often do so in the subtlest, most taciturnly polite way. When I was living there, I got into heated verbal spats on more than one occasion when I called people out on their racist microaggressions.

But that's just it: I live in a world, where, culturally, I have enough pride in myself to not care so much what people think if I don't conform 100% to their byzantine idea of civility, and act differently from the majority. Childan does not: because his culture was conquered, he had a constant idea of self-loathing that really made him feel worthless to the core next to the Japanese overlords. If I were in his position, I would've gotten pissed and blown up at those people minutes into the conversation, but because they had power over him and were writing the cultural rulebook, he had to lie down and take it.

And then I start second-guessing myself: I'm grateful that I'm not put in a position of cultural self-loathing like that, but what about the self-loathing that Japanese and Germans were forced to endure? What about the ways in which Germans had the evils of Nazism rubbed in their wounds, instilling a psychological guilt that continues to this day? What about Japan being demilitarized, occupied, and being called a "nation of children" by MacArthur (and yes, MacArthur's point was more nuanced than those paraphrased words would imply, but still)?

I'm a big believer in the idea that diverse cultures all over the world each have something good to offer. In that regard, capitalism and communism were definitely the lesser of two evils in comparison to Nazism and imperialism. But it's still not 100% great, either.

Well put, except I think capitalism was more successful than communism in the end.
 
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