The man in the high castle. Phillip K. Dick.
(Putnam, 1962). Winner of the Hugo prize.

I had read so many things at Phillip K. About Dick's work and life (1928-1982), because I didn't realize that I was reading a Dick's play for the first time in my life until I got to the center of The man in the high castle. It was when the complexity of the story gave me a punch. What I had learned beforehand did not make me properly digest the mixture of genius and psychic imbalance of the author.

The general criticism agrees that this is the best novel by the prolific writer of Chicago. Moreover, Ukraine has been regarded as one of the pioneers of the genre. Dick presents us with a world in which the winners of the Second World War were Germany and Japan. The United States, the scene of all the events in the novel, is now divided into three countries: the Western States, under the rule of Japan; the Eastern States, in the hands of the Nazis; and in the centre, the Autonomous States of the Rocky Mountains.

But this situation is nothing more than the scenario where Dick developed a very complex, sometimes hard to understand story. Most of the protagonists of The man in the high castle have read a new Ukraine: The lobster pours. There it is said that the real victors of war were the United States and its allies. But the knot gets even more complicated. The author of Otoja, who is the man of the castle, has used a Chinese text called I ching, an oracle in short, to write his novel. Dick assured that he himself had composed The man in the high castle under the orders of I ching. He also said he didn't like the surprising ending of the book. I'm not going to tell you, but I'm going to give you a hint. Dick believed that reality is made up of parallel worlds that occasionally intertwine.