DICK, Philip K. Man in the High Castle. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1962.
8vo. Original black cloth, titles to upper board and spine in red, top edge stained yellow others untrimmed, in the original pictorial dust jacket (price-clipped); pp. 239, [1 (blank)]; jacket lightly tanned and creased, with some small internal repair, otherwise an excellent copy.
First edition, first printing with the printer’s code D36 on page 239, of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian masterpiece.
In The Man in the High Castle, Dick imagines an alternate history in which Japan and Nazi Germany have won the Second World War and divided the defeated USA into spheres of influence. Set in 1962, fifteen years after the Axis victory in 1947, the novel follows the lives of various characters living under Japanese or Nazi rule in a partitioned America. At the centre of the story is the “Man in the High Castle”, the enigmatic author of a novel-within-the-novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a banned and subversive work that envisions an alternate reality where the Allies won the war.
Philip K. Dick famously used the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text, to shape the structure, themes, and plot of The Man in the High Castle – a method mirrored by the characters in the novel, who themselves consult the I Ching to guide their decisions and make sense of their fractured world.
Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel 1963, The Man in the High Castle was loosely adapted as a serial drama in 2015-19.
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