How PKD's Alternate History Questions Reality

In revisiting The Man in the High Castle, I stumbled on the idea that alternate history as a genre is not merely about rewriting history for the sake of speculation. Although we are interested in PKD's wild imagination, his novel actually wants us to turn inward and question the Real. Instead, I think alternate history is about finding yourself already written into History. This is because, whether we are conscious of it or not, History ordains us with its power and our entire reality is shaped not even by the political forces that be, but the very nature of a flux in History. People are not passive victims of the flow of time and a slew of events; instead, we are active agents who experience, live in and through, and coexist with, the stamping rhythm of the march of History. Hegel often noted the way that we cannot know something until it is over: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”

The idea behind this novel isn't just a dystopia, nor merely making an alternate timeline where Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan win World War II to occupy America. That might actually be someone's utopia, however grotesque that may seem. And I don't think someone as great as PKD would just want to make a flat interpretation about history: "The Allies were the only Good Guys!" Especially when America firebombed Dresden, or dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. The point of writing history is not to play a game of: just who killed the most? As if the fundamental nature of morality would be predicated on absurdly tallying up a death toll. Not to mention that we often mire ourselves in hypocrisy when we ask the morally barren question, 'Who fired the first shot?' This is not something Philip K Dick asks; instead, he wants us to question further: 'What is power to truth? Are we still under power's regime?'

This novel is really about how the average person can always carry the fire of truth even when they seem powerless. And that even the smallest person, the most sidelined everyman, can topple the most horrifying regimes in history. A resistance movement in an Axis-controlled America, much like the one in France during German occupation, would not die in one day, nor would it be able to overthrow the ebb of fascism right away. There would be not only an ideological battle between fascism and democracy, but also a metaphysical war over truth. Let’s pretend we are in the darkest imaginable world for anyone; you would not have to be a communist under fascism, or the other way round. You would just have to be powerless in a world governed by power. I think PKD uses the totalitarian regimes as a common ground, as a trope everyone in 1962 would understand as a stifling scenario, an intellectual prison. The ultimate enemy is not even the Nazis; it is the enemy within yourself that allows you to be governed by whatever system of power. It may as well have been a world taken over by the Soviets, or even an aggressive, imperialist America that won the Cold War.

Take away the artificial skin of totalitarian regimes, the swastikas, the hammers and sickles, the star-spangled banners, the uniforms, the propaganda, the armies, the bureaucracy. What remains beneath? The systems of human relations, the vagaries of power. PKD wants us to escape the metaphysical prison created by the modern world: imperialism, war, famine, poverty, genocide, injustice, abuse. He wants us to imagine a world in which we see ourselves, not as a passive victim of history, but an agent who can challenge authority wherever it may be. This novel does not act as artifice to create a new man, nor try to engineer the soul; instead, it asks the reader to challenge not only the political order and the state of things, but the very foundations of an increasingly manufactured reality. Read, resist, refuse. Write yourself into History when History tries to write you. History is not something that merely happens; you are inextricably bound up with it. You exist in the flux of it.

Flag of Nazi America, part of the Greater Nazi Reich