Antiques, Nazis, and the Illusion of Reality: Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle

This semester at BYU-Idaho has been kind to me. My teachers are awesome. The classes are interesting, and for the first time in my college career (which, admittedly, is not that much) I have had free time to read for myself.

I've been reading voraciously.

In the past three weeks or so I've knoc

ked back six novels, some poetry here and there, and numerous short stories. I love every moment of it.

Next on the reading list is Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. It's basically about this: America lost WWII. The country is now part of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The back cover describes it as "harrowing" and "breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas." Sounds good to me. Oh yeah. And it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

First off, Philip K. Dick was little crazy, but self-admittedly so. Click here to read a brief

illustrated history of Dick's stranger musings, drawn by the legendary comic artist R. Crumb.

Here is a cool 10 minute BBC documentary on him.

Secondly, the man was absolutely brilliant. Don't let the stigmatic "science fiction" tag fool you. This is serious stuff. In my opinion, the profound is best expressed through the banal. In the words of my brother, "...it's less pretentious and more sincere." I agree.

With 36 novels and 121 short stories (the majority were published in cheap sci-fi mags), Dick was overlooked in his lifetime and wrote in poverty. Like many of the brilliant, his contribution to the arts was only appreciated after his death.

Just check out this fancy The Library of America edition of his works. You only get in that if

you're dead and hot stuff.

A quotable quote regarding the dude:

"[He] has chosen to handle ... material too nutty to accept, too admonitory to forget, too haunting to abandon."

—Washington Post

Hot diggity. Let's get reading. I'll be tracking my progress and questions here.

Happy trails.