The Man in the High Castle

A masterpiece of the science-fiction genre, and the most famous novel by paranoid genius Philip K. Dick, THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962) won a Hugo Award for its imagination of a parallel reality America 20 years after the Allies lost World War II. Dick envisions an America split in half between Japanese and German overlords, with the Nazis ruling the East and the Japanese controlling the West. In this alternate world, San Francisco has become a strange colonial city, where Americans seek to please the Japanese upper class, and learn to live by the philosophy of the I-Ching. Meanwhile, in one of Dick's notorious convolutions, a banned book titled "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" circulates in the literary underworld, a book that proposes a world where the Axis lost the war.