The Man in the High Castle

Last month I found the time to watch the first three episodes of Amazon Studio's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) -- an alternate historical fiction that has the United States (and its allies) losing World War Two and the country divided into puppet states: the Greater Nazi Reich on the eastern seaboard and the Japanese Pacific States out west. (There is a middle area known as the Neutral Zone, where much of the drama takes place.) Both the novel and the series are set in 1962.

A couple of days ago, while looking for a book to res(e)t my eyes, I found a copy of Dick's novel at the Hornby Island Free Store. As is often the case when reading Dick, I enjoy the writing more for the quality of its prose than its story, which, though it shares events with the Amazon occupation, has a strikingly different narrative. For example, where the series begins with the double-agent Blake, the novel begins with a more complex (unadaptable?) character -- a curio dealer named Childan, who appears only briefly (and namelessly) in the adaptation.

Here is something that occurs to Childan early in the novel:

Yes, these new young people, of the rising generation, who did not remember the days before the war or even the war itself -- they were the hope of the world. Place difference did not have the significance for them.

It will end, Childan thought. Someday. The very idea of place. Not governed and governing, but people.

Readers of (science) fiction are fond of pointing out the prescience of its authors' texts, as in Thomas Pynchon's prediction of an internet (a dark net?) in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). However, with Dick it is not the internet that is predicted, but its consequences?