A Look Inside The World of The Man In The High Castle by Phillip K. Dick
Alternate history makes excellent fiction and creates a world in which certain events can change the course of history and can make for a very interesting story, which explains why the genre has had massive success over the years and continues to do so. One of the most famous alternate history novels of all time is “The Man In The High Castle” by Phillip K. Dick, the same mastermind behind such works as “A Scanner Darkly”, “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep” (aka Blade Runner), “Minority Report” and “Total Recall”. Today, The Man In The High Castle is a famous Emmy-Award-winning series on Amazon Prime with its fourth and final season set to premiere later this November. It’s a really interesting series. I love it. It’s very…immersive. You really feel for these characters and everything they go through.
Set in alternate 1962, in which the Axis Powers of Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan win the Second World War. Not only did they beat the Allies but they also take over the entire world! The story tells the perspective of multiple people living in a defeated United States, but we don’t care about them, what we care about is the scenario here!
Dick’s perspective of this world is as dark as it is disturbing and it provides a state-of-the-art look at what the world could have been in the United States, Britain, and Russia lost the war. In Dick’s world, everything would have changed, Literally EVERYTHING!
The scenario begins in 1963, wherein in 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is assassinated, just before he has the chance to become a strong president or implement his policies. The next two presidents, John Garner and later John Bricker, are very weak and destabilized the United States. Without a central leader in the Depression, the United States falls into a hole, while Nazi Germany and Japan grew extremely powerful. The US bows to the whim of the Axis Powers, staying isolationist and out of European affairs. Since their economy is weak, the Americans are unable to resupply the British and the Russians in their against Germany. The Nazis quickly can conquer both The USSR and Britain by 1941.
The Japanese take this opportunity to attack the US at Pearl Harbor, only this time, it’s slightly larger and America’s Pacific fleet is wiped out in a single day and soon Japan invades Hawaii. In the next few years, the two countries invade America. From both sides. With Japan conquering the West Coast, while the Nazis annex the land east of the Mississippi. By 1947, all opponents of the Axis Powers, including the USA, surrendered. In the following decades, the world becomes much different as the Axis face relatively no opposition.
Japan expands its empire to Oceania, Australia, and New Zealand, mainland China, India, Southeast Asia, and western South America, where they are cutting down portions of the Amazon Rainforest for human settlement and set up a white puppet government on the West Coast called the “Pacific States Of America”. Japan also manages to culturally change the West Coast, making it infused with both American and Japanese cultures. Mass migration of Japanese citizens occurs, changing the demographics of the States. However, even though the Japanese controlled the West Coast, they are comparatively light rulers to their German counterparts. Surprisingly, even though they are still an empire, Japan is liberalized in the 20 years since the war. As in our timeline, how Americans prize Native American artifacts and culture, the Japanese become obsessed with Pre-war Americana.
Most of the story is set in the Pacific States of America, a Japanese puppet state on the West Coast. The exact nature of Japanese domination is never discussed, and there is just one reference to the extent of the PSA’s territory:
If he failed to get justification there, he would make his way to one of the Import-Export Trade Missions which operated out of Tokyo, and which had offices throughout California, Oregon, Washington, and the parts of Nevada included in the Pacific States of America. But if he failed successfully to plead there… Plans roamed his mind as he lay in bed gazing up at the ancient light fixture in the ceiling. He could for instance slip across into the Rocky Mountain States.
The Pacific States of America is mentioned only three times in the book (and referenced another 15 times as “PSA”). The quote above is as precise as its geography gets. The book mentions a separate entity for the South (the former Confederate States of America). This would make sense from a divide-and-conquer point of view, but little if any mention is made as to the actual status of the South within (or outside) the “new” US. The world outside North America is described with an even broader brush, but the few elements we hear paint a terrifying picture of the effect of a worldwide Axis victory.
In Europe, however, the story is much darker and more brutal than in our timeline. The Nazis shape the entire continent and landscape in their image, reshaping the world around them with advancements in science and horrifying policies. Because of the finest in German engineering, technology has progressed farther than in our timeline.
The Greater German Reich encompasses most of Europe and Russia halfway to Siberia, Central Asia, Iran, and Arabia, as well as most of Africa. Also: Greenland, Newfoundland and Labrador, and northern South America. Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, and Norway are occupied, and not (yet) absorbed into the Reich proper. Canada and Mexico remain free and independent, apparently. Italy rules a vast empire in southern Europe and northern and eastern Africa, now contiguous thanks to the draining of the Mediterranean. And the Germans have also already colonized the Moon and have begun manned exploration on Mars. That is actually really cool.
And I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet: To gain more land, the Nazis decide to drain the Mediterranean Sea, this project was called “Atlantropa”. It turned the world’s largest desert, the Sahara, into fertile farmland, uniting Europe and Africa into one continent. Lake Chad (God rest its soul) expanded into a vast inland sea along with Lake Mweru, which is further south. Herman Sörgel’s proposal to turn vast swathes of the Mediterranean Sea into livable dry land by installing five hydroelectric dams (the main one across the Strait of Gibraltar), is a very, very bad idea for a great MANY reasons.
Here’s why:
The Atlantropa project envisioned damming Gibraltar to lower the Med by 200 meters. Anything more than 20 meters would transform the Bosphorus into a gigantic waterfall, cutting off (in clockwise order) Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, and Georgia from the Mediterranean. The immediate and devastating effect would be a war between the proponents of the scheme and Russia. The scheme would be very short-lived.
Geologically speaking, not much will happen. The Med is 1500 meters deep on average, wiping off 200 of those meters is not really that important. The water volume of the Med is tiny compared to the ocean, so the increase in sea levels elsewhere will be modest. The environmental and economic changes would be incredibly negative. We can actually see the results of a much smaller sea drying up when we take a look at what happened to the Aral Sea during the 70s, 80s & 90s.
Draining the Mediterranean — far from simply creating vast new areas of land for people to colonize — would actually create a massive desert with the hottest temperatures ever recorded on the planet, reaching as high as 178 degrees Fahrenheit. It could be seen as an extension of the Sahara Desert. Even though the water from the sea is gone, the salt that used to be in the water would remain on the land and in thick built-up layers. The new land would become a salty, dry, and fiercely hot desert and would be incredibly hostile to any form of life or settlement. There would be enormous canyons plummeting as deep as 5,000 meters below sea level. The temperatures could reach an unbearable 80 degrees Celsius. Also, it would devastate coastal economies right around the entire sea.
It would cause climate change on a scale never seen before in recorded history. Removing 200 meters of water over the entire surface of the Mediterranean sea (2.51 million square meters, counting 500 million cubic meters, roughly 500* 10⁹ kg) will sensibly alter the momentum of inertia of the planet and will consequently affect its rotation, slightly changing the day and the rotation axis. It would also divert the Gulf Stream, sending temperatures plummeting in most of Europe, causing crops to fail and tens of thousands of people will starve to death.
The entire coastline would shift by dozens if not hundreds of miles. It would also affect current geopolitical circumstances by making it far easier for refugees to get to Europe. Large areas of Southern Europe and Turkey would themselves be turned into vast areas of desert, with areas of Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Albania, Greece, and Turkey being the most affected. The water from the former Mediterranean would be diverted into the world’s oceans and raise sea levels by 10 meters. Cities such as Sacramento, Amsterdam, New Orleans, Copenhagen, and Shanghai would all be underwater. Fortunately, when Sorgel died in 1952, all hope for the project pretty much died with him. Today, the Atlantropa project lives on in science fiction.
However, these advancements in technology and science come at a terrible price. With nobody to question the Nazi policies, a Mega-Holocaust occurs after Germany conquers Russia, Poland, and Eastern Europe.
Hitler’s plan of “Lebensraum” actually goes into effect. The only comparison this can be is between the Native Americans and the Europeans. Slavic peoples, in Dick’s scenario, are murdered into extinction. Millions and millions of people were wiped out in a genocide.
Russian culture and the Eastern Orthodox religion are non-existent. Poland, Russia, and the Slavic lands are destroyed and replaced by German colonists. Hitler’s Aryan race grows and expands into the ruins of Russia and what was once Moscow. Any few Slavic survivors are sent to live in Native American stall reservations out in Siberia and North America. The Mega-Holocaust extends into Africa as the Nazis committed genocide against native Africans. They also bring back African slavery into Europe and the United States. Which, OH BOY!, leads us to Nazi-occupied America!
After the United States fell, it was reduced to the east of the Mississippi, where a Nazi-puppet government replaced American democracy, with the nuking of Washington D.C. on December 11th, 1945, as seen on the live-action series. The destruction of the US capital resulted in the death of US President John Bricker, the whole of Bricker’s Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all the Supreme Court Justices, and the majority of the members of Congress. With the US government all but wiped out, the Nazis and the Japanese faced unorganized resistance from the US military and by 1947 the remnants of the US government surrendered to the invaders, and North America was subsequently partitioned between the Japanese Empire and Nazi Germany. This implemented Nazi policies in the US. From the context, the Holocaust came to the United States, wiping out anyone deemed unworthy by Nazi standards.
What used to be the United States is now split into 3 nations: the Japanese-controlled “Pacific States”, the Nazi-controlled “United States”, and “The Neutral Zone”, it’s basically a buffer zone between the two superpowers. Americans don’t know life before the war and those that do, are either too brainwashed or find it too hard to imagine a world without Axis domination. Young Americans in Dick’s novel accept the status quo and just grow up, not knowing the culture of pre-War America. They think that an Allied victory would lead to a Communist victory
Oh yeah, and Canada? Canada just remained….well, Canada. They literally didn’t even change at all. It’s just Canada. I guess the Canadians were too nice to be invaded by the Nazis.
Really, Mr. Dick? Really?