The Man in the High Castle

By: Philip K. Dick

Narrated by: Jeff Cummings

Now an Amazon Original series

Winner of the Hugo Award

"The single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick's career." --New York Times

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war - and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.

This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it, Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.

©1962 Philip K. Dick, © renewed 1990 by Laura Coelho, Christopher Dick, and Isa Hackett. (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Many loose ends.

Story seemed unfinished. A lot of loose ends left at the end. Maybe I just didn't get it.

good performance, highly unsatisfying ending

The story has a fantastic premise, examining what might happen if the Allies lost WWII. However, Dick meanders about philosophically, and leaves all his plot lines unresolved.

The ending just stopped....

Was slow to start.... then it really started getting interesting then then... there was no more book. and the surprise ending, just made me thing I could have listened to a better book.

A bit of a bizarre ramble

Interesting premise. Feels like it is a series of episodes - fragments of a bigger work. If you are looking for more insight into the tv series you will be disappointed.

Really good

It was tough understanding which character was talking sometimes but overall it was a great story

Not so good...

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

The book premise is intriguing but the story is a little bit watered, it spends too much time beating around the bushes and when it actually gets to the main plot line is ends.

What other book might you compare The Man in the High Castle to and why?

There are other alternative history books that I've liked better, comes to mind "Fatherland" by Robert Harris. PKD has always had a place in my heart as I am a huge fan of Blade Runner (the movie) but I always feared, and now I know, that though his ideas were good his writing performance would not be so great.

What aspect of Jeff Cummings’s performance would you have changed?

As with all audiobooks men doing women voices are hard to hear, this is an aspect I dislike of audiobooks, also the foreign accents were not so good.

Do you think The Man in the High Castle needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

I think the book is fine, but just that, it did not blow my mind nor I would love to read a sequel.

Unique

Not one of those rare perfect stories but definitely should be read (or audioed ).

Pkd

Great performance by Cummings... awesome story... love pkd's style always a good read ... you just want to keep reading and be in the world of this alternate universe...

hard to follow

the story jumps around from viewpoint to viewpoint and isn't very clear. It seems as though there are 4 or 5 main characters and that their lives mix together (which they do) but there's only really one story that would be considered the focal point and you don't get to that until a few chapters in and it makes no sense.

Book before TV

As with movies, I wanted to get through this before I watched the Amazon series. I have often been a fan of the "What if" scenarios, and the "what if we lost WWII" is a good example. I think Philip K. Dick has presented a good scenario here, with Japan and Germany dividing up America after their winning WWII. There is a big focus on The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel within a novel, that tells our fictional characters of an alternate history (to them) of the allies winning the war. There's some cross country travel, rocket planes and a the plans to go to Mars before we here in real life went to the moon. Perhaps getting a bit ahead of technology, but what the heck, it's just a novel, right? Worth reading, or listening on audiobook as I did. Time to watch the Amazon version now.