They shaped your reality and now your mind lives within their world - Rated 
This book exemplifies Dick's philosophical critique, the reality you are living in has been shaped for you and what you take for granted is nothing more than a fiction. If this is translated to the everyday world then a different reality emerges. It is in fact a prototype for imagining different outcomes to events and not surrendering to an effervescent powerlessness which runs as a substratum through western society.
The jolt of near economic collapse showed how flimsy realities are constructed and lived within by their occupants. The need to believe in a fiction is as important as existing within reality. This is the signpost Dick was trying to ressurect. For most a different form of reality impinges following bereavement or relationship collapse and then the emptiness of he universe floods into consciousness. Dick raised the questions about how societies create and sustain these illusions. This book provides a philosophical key to this alternate form of thinking. The 2nd world war was won by the Axis powers but in effect it wasn't, only people choose to believe it. Fictions exist all around the social world, it's just Dick chose one of the biggest lies to create the conceptual space to challenge all the other falsifications people need to hold onto in order to exist.
After Dick the world has never been the same.
Classic PKD, inner space sci fi - Rated
This is classic Philip K Dick, thematically all of K Dick's novels, both his mainstream novels and his science fiction deal with individuals menaced from without and struggling with existential angst, chronic self-doubt (even doubts about their sanity) within. There is a certain sense in which PKD is a prime example of an author who has one tale but he tells its well and often, there is also a respect in which they are all semi-autobiographical too.
In this novel the characters are menaced from without by the totalitarian victors of world war two, the Nazis and Japanese are now the twin rulers of the world, a kind of cold war is developing and America has been divided between them. The characters, whether they are part of the apparatus or oppression or its subjects, are portrayed as troubled not simply by the menacing super structures, secret police, political scheming, schisms and plots but also by doubts about themselves, culture clashes and all sorts of estrangement. The background to the portrayal of alternative history, ie the axis victory, is "alternative history" itself, a writer, the man in the high tower of the title, has produced a book concluding that the axis did not win the war. There is some strangeness, its unclear whether the world is in the grip of a collective delusion or its a fictive account, at least this was how I felt reading it.
The pace and style as great, with only one meandering tangent about antique broaches and catches, although this does not really detract from the narrative since it later takes on some significance in an beautifully rendered exchange between two brilliantly characterised individuals, a Japanese official and a forger, engaged in a kind of "do they know, that I know, that they know" process. Likewise the relationship between a woman in crisis and someone who she innocently meets and the incredible shock of the final outcome of their meeting is also played out to fine effect. These aspects of PKDs story telling are, in my opinion, his greatest assets, he makes marvellous studies of the everyday world and people in it and just how absurd this in itself can be. It is almost as though the story arch and themes are mere vehicles for this content, as they frequently where.
Infact in this instance the novel itself can be located within PKD mythos, it features characters whose behaviour is dictated by the I Ching or book of changes and its rumoured that one way of accounting for the twists and turns within the novel and weird finale was a consequence of PKD himself choosing to write as the I Ching was dictating when he consulted it himself. I have always found that K Dick's novels are very absorbing and thought provoking to read that I could easily believe K Dick himself becaming so absorbed while writing that features of the narrative, like the I Ching, crossed over into his life. One to muse.
I recommend this book to anyone, its much more nuanced than other alternative history or dystopia like Orwell's 1984, herein are the lives of the people who are "getting on with it", suffering more from their own trials and tribulations than being sucked into fatal mortal combat with the regime. While the regimes are not portrayed as anything less than oppressive (although the Japanese are portrayed in a more kindly light) and the psychologically impoverishing aspects of the barracks "socialism" of the Nazis, even for they themselves, are drawn out its not the main focus. Likewise it should appeal to any reader not just fans of PKD or science fiction.
The Man in the High Castle - Rated 
This is a most banal novel.
The writer has taken the format of those post-war films about the conflict, where the Germans are EVIL BADDIES, the Japanese are sadistic but wise and the Americans are nice warm goodies, and placed it in a future where the losers are the winners. It is facile, to say the least.
Stereotyping prevails. Absurdity rules alongside incongruity. There is no attempt in the story-telling to introduce logic, cause and effect. Most people seem to plan their lives and actions using that blown out sixties fad of ancient, Chinese origin, I Ching.
It is a stupid novel.
beautiful - Rated
This book took me a little while to get into, but once I was in I never wanted to leave this brilliantly created world
and the ending is just brilliant
Great concept, poorly executed - Rated 
Philip K Dick is has written some truly outstanding books and so I was expecting great things from this. Alas the concept is far better than the book itself. Pitching a scenario where the Allies lost the Second World War and America had been calved up between the Germans and the Japanese sounds truly fantastic. Unfortunately the scenarios are reduced to the every day meanderings of an array of one dimensional characters and ultimate the quest of Juliana Frink to meet the illusive "Man in the High Castle", the writer of the illusive "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" - which as a paradox is a novel depicting if the allies had won the war. Alas the book ultimately ends with a bit of an anti-climax.
Maybe the fact that the story is told in trivialities is the whole point. To the every day person on living in a Japanese occupied territory, decades after the event, maybe aside from getting used to a different culture, life wouldn't be that much different. Unfortunately for me it didn't make good reading, purely because I found it very difficult to emphasise with the characters.
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