edited by Jonathan Lethem
Whenever I finish my Hugo reading for the year, I complement it by also picking up the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't previously read. For the 2020 Hugos, I read the winner for 1958, The Big Time; I actually have already read all of the winners from 1959 to 1962, so for the 2021 Hugos, that brings me to the winner for 1963, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Dick is an author I'm not as familiar with as I'd like; basically, prior to reading this, I'd only read three things by him, all ones that got turned into movies! (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and "The Minority Report") Though I guess this got turned into a tv show, albeit one I never saw. (My dad was a fan.) Anyway, for many years now I've owned a Library of America box set of fourteen of his novels, and I was happy to have the motivation to dip in.
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Collection published: 2007 Novel originally published: 1962 Acquired: August 2014 Read: January 2022 |
Since reading this but before writing up this review, I've gone on to read five more Philip K. Dick novels, and by the standards of many of his later ones, The Man in the High Castle is positively subdued. About a world where the Axis won World War II, and set mostly in Japanese-occupied California, there's not much in the way of a sfnal elements beyond that. I can see why it captured the Hugo electorate (it was one of only two of his many novels to be a Hugo finalist): it's a triumph of worldbuilding. We get a real solid sense of what this new world is like and how it functions, on the most local of levels: people in highway diners, people in factory jobs, people eating dinner together. From this, we can infer and understand the big political stuff that underlies the story and drives it in the background. The whole idea of the Japanese being obsessed with American pop culture, and Americans supplying obsessive collectors with counterfeit American artifacts was quite fascinating.
Dick also demonstrates a real solidity of character; these are ordinary people, both admirable and despicable in their ordinariness, which drives them to do things they often don't understand. I particularly liked Juliana Frink.
The novel is also quite well put together thematically: it's all about people placing value in things based on the extent to which they perceive them to be true, even when they are not actually true. Things mean only what we believe them to mean. When a pair of counterfeiters try to make their own jewelry, no one likes it because it doesn't carry the aura of authenticity, even though it is much more authentic than the fakes they have been making. Does the counterfeit become real if we believe in it enough? This all reaches a thematic climax at the end: many of the characters have been reading a novel about an alternate timeline where the Axis lost World War II, and they have been inspired by it. What the ending makes clear is that this novel-within-a-novel is not "real," as it does not depict our world, the real world where the Axis lost; its author imagines a completely different, and wrong, alternative history. So the book that has been inspiring resistance is utterly fake! But everything else the novel has told is would indicate this doesn't matter, because everyone in the novel believes it is real.
As I said above, I read this in an LOA edition. Editor Jonatham Lethem does a good job on notes throughout the whole volume, but in particular the end notes for this novel are very useful in explaining what German figures were real historical persons, and what their real roles were.
I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus
other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik by Philip K. Dick
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