Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle

This is one of the sci-fi writer’s greatest works. Set in an alternate reality 1960s America that imagines what would have happened if Japan and Nazi Germany had won World War II, we see San Francisco as a curious outpost for the Japanese as they are in control of the Western United States. Somewhere in Wyoming a man in a high castle blasphemously wonders what would have happened if Churchill and the Americans would have won and writes a best-seller cult novel that imagines all the possibilities. What is amazing about Dick’s work is that even in the crazy world, that he creates, where citizens religiously consult the I Ching as a sort of horoscope, everything seems so plausible and so close to our own world. This is great science fiction.