The Man in the High Castle - Sci-Fi

What does Brown (2001) identify as the central themes and concerns of the novel? What elements conform to the wider generic features of SF? 

According to Brown (2001) Phillip K. Dick’s conformed to the science fiction genre because “he used the popular leitmotifs of SF – alien worlds, precognition, ray-guns – but employed them to his own agenda”(p.6). Brown (2001) also goes to say that “Dick used SF to explore his obsession with metaphysics, the nature of perceived reality, good and evil, and the abuse of power. This shows that Dick was obsessed with the idea that the universe was only apparently real, an illusion behind which the truth might dwell” (p. 7).

A dominant theme in Dick’s work is that of changing the reader’s perception of reality. As Brown (2001) finds, Juliana Frink, a character in the book ‘The Man in the High Castle’, “makes a discovery that changes her perception of reality…as she learns how Grasshopper came to be written” (pp. 11-12).

While the High Castle book draws on themes of Nazism/Facism, Dick was heavily influenced by the ‘I Ching’, the ancient Chinese book of divination in which the philosophy of Tao offers a means of examining the universe through the principals of interconnectedness, which opposed with Western ideas of the universe functioning on the basis of cause and effect (Brown, 2001). Mountfort (2006) states that, “Dick regarded the I Ching itself as having in a sense written High Castle” (p. 5).

The element of the novel that conforms to the wider generic features of science fiction is the novel’s “…glimpse of another world, a reality we are invited to compare with our own” (Brown, 2001, p. 12). The High Castle book is set in a sub-genre of science fiction that is known as Alternative World. Dick explores a world of what if scenarios, while adding his own twist. “What if the Allies had lost the war? How might the march of titanic circumstance effect the ordinary citizen?” (Brown, 2001, p. 11).

References

Dick, P. K. (2001; 1962). The Man in the High Castle. London: Penguin.

Brown, E. (2001). Introduction. In Dick, P. K., The Man in the High Castle (p. v-xii). London: Penguin.

Mountfort, P. (2006). Oracle-text/Cybertext in Dick, P. L., The Man in the High Castle. Conference Paper, Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Joint Conference, Atlanta, 2006.