SF and Alternative History: The Man in the High Castle

 Alternative History:

 If we imagine history (crudely) as a series of event-nodes narrated in a sequence, and further imagine that certain nodal points in that sequence are causally decisive for entire segments of the sequence, then alternative history is a way of (i) identifying a specific event-node that was decisive for an entire segment, then (ii) imagining it as different from (the opposite of) what happened, and then (iii) to hypothesize an entire sequence emanating from that causal alternative.

The question is: why? Why should one imagine history as taking a course other than what it did? Beyond fantasy, nostalgia, is there any other set of reasons or consequences that might be said to justify the speculative exercise?

 In this novel, Dick picks on the outcome of the Second World War: the two nations that lost, are her imagined as having won. Thus America is partially colonized by Japan. That gives Dick an opportunity to explore the issue of what objects represent as metonymic value in terms of historical associations: i.e. the fetishization of history through its surviving artefacts, in this case, the Japanese collecting Americana, and the manner in which this fetish gets aestheticized.

 There are many possible scenarios consequent on the hypothesis that Germany and Japan won the war: list some of them. Where would you place the sequence invented by Dick in that set of possibilities?

 Why do you suppose are the Japanese treated so differently from the Germans?

 What elements of satire do you detect in the novel? and of guilt (at what the USA did to Japan)?

 Self-reflexivity

 The novel becomes self-reflexive in including among its characters, a writer who is working on a book in which the course of world events takes an alternative course (on e in which Germany and Japan lose the war). That is, Dick's fiction includes a fiction in which history as departure is the history from which Dick's fiction is itself the departure!

 What does this obvious irony accomplish in respect of the issue of whether what actually does happen is pure chance (i.e. random) or somehow a singular inevitablity from within the plural possibilities that is the speculative world of alternative history (purposive)?

 What implications do you find for the idea of teleology in this reverse image of alternative histories (i.e. the idea that history is purposive or goal-oriented, not random)?

 Why is there a plot to kill Abendsen?

 Orientalism

 Dick is thus able to treat a form of reverse Orientalism, in which the (colonizing) Japanese as Oriental, while treating the (colonized) American as the defeated, cans till (or therefore) treat American artefacts as collectibles. This ironic, satirical (Tagomi's gift of a Mickey Mouse watch), and yet serious reflections and arguments about the aestheticization of objects is also being treated.

 What is the significance of Frink moving out of the fake souvenir business into the art-object business? What is the ethical (as against the economic) issue involved? How does it arise out of the aesthetic as a category of value attached to objects?

 What is ironic about fake souvenirs (e.g. some of Childan's guns)? What is the irony in Paul's endorsement of the new art-objects, and of his apology to Childan in Chapter 11?

 What is the significance of Tagomi killing with the gun? and Tagomi talking to one of the art-objects given him by Childan?

 The I Ching

 What is the system of beliefs and practices underlying the I Ching?

 Do the different uses to which it is put in the novel reveal a significant focus to Dick's refraction of what we might think of the I Ching?

 How would you assess the significance of how Dick ends the novel?