Alternate History: A quick guide

 https://youtu.be/V-2sA1uROe4?si=FBpywVp94Bkynx3T

I talk about the history of the alternate history genre and the different set-ups for how history diverges from our timeline that are commonly used.

The Man in the High Castle Season I, episode 4, 5 and 6

 

https://youtu.be/Yy2i6pK-Rto?si=JoY9FTKR6gZgWHwC

I talk about episodes 4 through 6 for Season I of The Man in the High Castle.

The Man In The High Castle, season 1, episodes 1,2,3 review

 https://youtu.be/3E0lnnN9rVw?si=I78asIQlkAuDlQYn

Watching The Man In the High Castle Season 1, episodes 1 to 3. I give my impressions and my thoughts on the 3 episodes. Part of Philip K Dick Month 2025!

The Man in the High Castle By Philip K Dick

 The Man in the High Castle 

By Philip K Dick

A quick note before I start: I am not going to include the author's information because I’ve already written a look at the life of Mr. Dick and I will include the link to that at the bottom of this review. So let’s turn our attention to the novel in question, shall we?  Also, there will be some spoilers below. 

The Man in the High Castle was first published in 1962 and was something of an experiment for Mr. Dick.  You see, many of the characters in the book, when they are troubled or facing a momentous decision, turn to a rather ancient book, the I Ching.  The I Ching is a Chinese divination manual written between 1000 and 750 BC in the Western Zhou period. When you intend to use the book, you frame the question in your mind and throw yarrow stalks or coins, and these produce sets of random numbers which correspond to passages in the book. The characters then try to interpret the passages to figure out what they should do next.  Mr. Dick, never a man to embrace halfway measures, wrote the book by actually consulting the I Ching and writing the result into the story, which would decide the character's actions. I don’t know if anyone else has done anything like this, but it’s a hell of a literary experiment. 

The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history in which the Axis won World War II.  This happened because Roosevelt was assassinated and his successors did not continue his policies, leaving America still mired in the Great Depression and under-armed when World War II kicked off.  This US pursued a strict policy of neutrality, which meant that, without Land Lease, the UK and the USSR were isolated from each other and defeated. The Axis then turned on the US, with Washington D.C. being atom bombed so badly that it’s still cordoned off and no one is allowed near it. 

Following their victory, Imperial Japan and the Nazis divided the world between themselves. This includes dividing the United States, which has been divided into four governments.  The first of these is referred to as just the South, which is the Confederacy turned up to 11.  It is easily the most pro-Axis government and seems to operate with the most freedom. The remaining parts of the US, east of the Mississippi are occupied by the Germans and is basically a puppet state. The Western Seaboard is a Japanese protectorate called the Pacific States of America. In between the PSA and the German section of the US is the nominally independent Rocky Mountain States, which serve as a buffer zone of sorts.  The book takes place in the PSA and the Rocky Mountain States, and we never see east of the Mississippi. 

The main action of the book is the struggles of characters such as American businessman Robert Childan, who makes his living selling American art and historical artifacts to the Japanese, who have developed a passion for owning past works of American culture.  things like Mickey Mouse watches and Civil War pistols are equally valued and sought after. This of course has led to a thriving counterfeit industry, which until recently employed our second character Frank Fink, a secret Jew hiding in the PSA from the Nazis.  Frank’s divorced wife, Juliana, moved to Colorado, where she teaches Judo.  

Frank and Robert’s stories are heavily intertwined. Frank decides to quit his job making fakes and instead go into business with a coworker to make jewelry.  While he’s very nervous about this, he does seem to feel it’s cleaner work. Robert agrees to sell the jewelry when he finds out the sheer depth and breadth of the counterfeiting industry and realizes that, sooner or later, the Japanese are going to figure it out. This would bring the whole scheme crashing down, so he’d better start diversifying his stock right away.  Robert at first doesn’t think much of Frank’s work, but when a Japanese client identifies a piece as having a lot of emotional/spiritual weight, Robert comes to see it as a piece of real American craftsmanship and comes to be appreciative of the value of the jewelry, working to sell and spread it around. 

Meanwhile, Juliana gets pulled into a plot to track down a writer who has written an alternative history work, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.  In this book, the Axis lost World War II, but I was thrilled to see that it wasn’t our history but an entirely different speculative history.  In this timeline, Roosevelt survived but didn’t run for a third term.  Instead, a left-wing advisor of Roosevelt ran for and became President in 1940, continuing Roosevelt’s policies and winning the war. However, the Soviet Union didn’t survive the war, leading to a victorious British Empire dominating Europe and becoming hostile to the US. 

The book is banned in Nazi-dominated nations, but the Japanese and neutral nations allow it to be printed and it is a best-seller. This leads to the writer being marked for death by the Nazis. Juliana realizes that she has been pulled into an assassination plot and decides to try to thwart it. She also finds out that the writer, much like Mr. Dick, constantly used the I Ching to write the book, so The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is in a sense the novel that the I Ching wrote. 

There are also Japanese and German characters. One, Nobusuke Tagomi, is a highly placed trade official who helps run the PSA, and another is a gentleman traveling under the name of Baynes.  Mr. Baynes is coming with a warning for the Japanese Empire:  the new leader of the Nazi Empire, Goebbels, is getting ready for a surprise attack on Japan, planning to hit the Home Islands with enough atomic bombs to render it a burning wasteland.  A coup is being planned to stop this, but it’s up in the air if it will succeed without Japanese aid. 

This storyline gets the least amount of focus despite having the most consequences, which I found interesting. Most modern books would have focused on the possibility of World War III ending civilization on Earth, but instead, the focus of the book is on the American characters and the rather smaller stakes they’re playing for. However, we’re shown those stakes are incredibly important to them:  Robert and Frank’s success or failure is going to mean either living a decent life or ending up in the gutter, while Juliana is literally playing life or death stakes, just on a smaller scale. 

Another interesting thing is, whether he meant to or not, Mr. Dick gives us a good look at the effects of colonialism on the colonized people. Robert fully accepts the superiority of Japanese culture and the Japanese people over his own.  He echoes the Japanese government line that it was a good thing that the US lost the war, as well as the spiritual superiority of the Japanese people over whites. At the same time, he resents this and struggles to try and understand what the Japanese people he deals with actually want from him. He takes part in looting his own culture for profit, as many colonized cultures had their art and culture looted by their colonizers, but considers Japanese art to be superior. He wants to be treated like an equal, but cannot think of himself as an equal in his own mind. 

Mr. Dick does a fantastic job here in showing that colonialism isn’t just something that happens on a national or cultural level, but also on an individual one.  He also shows through this that colonialism isn’t just a physical phenomenon, it’s a mental, emotional, and even spiritual one.  This is further shown by the American characters who have abandoned the traditional beliefs of their people like Christianity, instead turning to Asian spiritualism like the I-Ching.  

Frank is another example of this.  He is being hunted for being Jewish even though he has abandoned all Jewish beliefs and practices.  He doesn’t pray to the God of Abraham, Moses, and David, he turns to the I-Ching.  Robert doesn’t turn to a Church or a Synagogue, he turns to the I-Ching. The spiritual traditions of the West have been abandoned, and the spiritual traditions of the US conquerors have been adopted. This is something that has often happened in colonized nations in our history, as they abandon their native traditions and adopt parts of the colonizing nations that conquered them.  

One thing I didn’t like, though, is that most of the plots aren’t really brought to a good conclusion.  We don’t know if Robert and Frank’s business will succeed or not. We don’t know if World War III is successfully prevented. The only plot brought to a satisfying conclusion is  Juliana’s, as, after warning the writer of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, she announces that the book is the truth, that Japan and Germany did lose the war, and simply heads out into the night. So I’m left thinking that, for Mr. Dick, Juliana’s enlightenment is what matters here. 

This book is an interesting read: it starts slow, but the build-up ends up pulling you along. My frustration here is that only one out of three plotlines gives a satisfying ending for me.  Also, if I’m going to be honest, Mr. Tagomi is written with some really odd speech patterns, and sometimes I had to stop to figure out just what the hell he was saying.  That tended to jar me out of the story. So I’m going to be giving Man in the High Castle a B.  It’s a very interesting experiment of a book, but I don’t think I would be thrilled to see more books written in this style.

I hope you enjoyed this review, this was voted for by my ever-wise patrons.  If you would like a vote on upcoming content consider joining their ranks for a dollar a month here:  https://www.patreon.com/c/frigidreads

Read about Philp K Dick here: https://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2019/02/philip-k-dick.html 

Watch the companion video https://youtu.be/sE_yCWG68fY?si=mv0OMB6tJAqU7a3f

Fanfiction: A quick defense

 https://youtu.be/FFkZQOIl-PE?si=Kz5XatHvUTIRvIED

A quick discussion of what is fan fiction and how wide spread it is in our society and why that's not a bad thing. 

Fathom Vol II: Into the Deep by Michael Turner and JT Krul

 Fathom Vol II: Into the Deep

by Michael Turner and JT Krul

        Fathom is the creation of Michael Turner.  Born in Tennessee in 1971, Michael moved to San Diego after graduating from the International Performing Arts Academy, where Marc Silvestri, one of the founders of Image Comics, discovered him at a comic convention in 1992.  Mr. Turner was one of the creators of Witchblade, one of Image Comics' most successful characters,  and in 1998 he published Fathom with Top Cow Comics, an imprint of Image.  Sadly, two years later he would be diagnosed with bone cancer, which he would battle on and off for the rest of his life.  This is a personal opinion that has nothing to back it up, but in my experience with friends and family who have had bouts of that damn thing, I wouldn’t be surprised if his experience with cancer pushed him into creating Aspen MLT in 2002.  This led to a year-long legal battle that forced some rewrites, but afterward, he continued to write Fathom and work for DC and Marvel as an artist.  Unfortunately, his cancer returned and killed him in 2008 at the too-young age of 37.

After publishing Volume I, he released Volume II with Top Cow Comics.  This was a problem because when he left Image to form Aspen,  He took the rights to Fathom with him, but Top Cow wasn’t going to grant the rights to use their characters in his stories, so he had to rewrite it a bit.  It’s this rewritten version that I am reviewing today, I am told that there isn’t much of a difference though.  So let’s dive in.

Vol I: The World Below, is the story of a young woman named Aspen Matthews, her finding the truth of her origins, and the resulting fallout.  This involved her finding out she was a member of a human offshoot race named the Blue that lived under the sea, and getting involved in a shooting war between the United States of America and Japan. There’s also a little issue of a rogue Blue terrorist trying to shatter our civilization and seize control of the Blue using Aspen’s power. So all in all it is a rather trying time for our main character, who honestly just wants to be left alone to study the wonders of the ocean.  

Volume II opens with a time skip, with a mini-series called Dawn of War that covers the lead-up to these events.  To sum up the mini-series, the US took some Blue soldiers captive and started doing medical experiments to figure out the differences between Blue soldiers and American troops. There was a rescue attempt, and it turns out the leader of those soldiers was a member of a third race called the Black, which lives down in the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean. They promptly kidnapped Aspen, and this is where Volume II opens, with the US led by Admiral Mayweather at war with an underwater civilization who for some reason thinks hiding from everyone is still an option. 

We don’t get a lot of information about the Black other than they live in the deepest, darkest depths. It is also revealed that one of them is Aspen’s biological father, who seduced Aspen’s Mother, who was a married high-ranking Blue.  So already I’m not a fan and, after a brief conversation, neither is Aspen.  Then the Black disappears from the rest of the story as Aspen leaves, and the people who kidnapped her in the first place just…shrug.   I found this kind of confusing.  Why are the Black even a part of this storyline if all they do is demand Aspen do things and then just watch her leave and never show up for the rest of the storyline? 

The rest of the story focuses on the war between the US Navy, led by Admiral Mayweather, and the Blue, who are suffering from hidebound leaders who refuse to adapt to new circumstances.  The Blue are led by a council of elders, who insist the best course is to simply hide harder from the humans-- who know where they are and have a bunch of reverse-engineered technology from that rogue Blue operative I mentioned earlier. So this of course leads to the US Navy invading, bombarding at least two Blue cities and trying to destroy the Blue capital with a nuclear bomb.  So, you know, we’re the bad guys in this story, folks. 

During all of this, Aspen, is struggling to come to terms with just who she is and is hunting for her adoptive human father, Captain Matthews of the US Navy (retired).  He also happens to be the only person who actually did any parenting and shockingly hasn’t been making any demands of her. He is being held prisoner by Admiral Mayweather as bait, so the Admiral, who was somewhat of a gray character in the first Volume, is undeniably a full villain here.  Aspen rescues her father with the help of Chance, an naval ace pilot with a heart of gold, and forces at least a short-term end in the war by sinking the US invasion force.  She then just leaves, which I thought was unwise, but given the emotional turmoil she’s suffering is fairly realistic. 

All in all, I honestly thought Volume I was better. While we get answers to a lot of questions in Volume II,  there are also some rather big plot holes.  Like, what happened to the war between Japan and the US?  It just seems to have…stopped.  Are we allies again?  The Japanese were also aware of the existence of the Blue, so what are they doing during all of this?  There’s no answer to this, as Japan seems to have fallen off the edge of the world as far as the story is concerned.  

Also, it seems like the war is a secret?  There doesn’t seem to be any reporting on it, nor do civilians in the story seem to have any idea of what is going on.  This leads me to ask how Admiral Mayweather is getting the authorization to do this.  He’s deploying thousands of sailors, including an aircraft carrier while producing massive submarines and amphibious fighter aircraft that function both in the air and underwater.  That’s a lot of resources, and people pay a lot of attention to where the US aircraft carriers are. At no point though does it seem like the Admiral has to explain himself to anyone.  You would think the Senate would want to know what’s going on since this has to be eating up a huge chunk of the Naval budget. If nothing else, an Admiral starting a war by himself without authorization from the President?  That would get people shot in the real world! 

There are other interesting parts that I did enjoy, however.  When the story focused on the internal issues and politics of the Blue, I found myself intrigued and, like the characters, annoyed at the council.  I mean, a member of your civilization just openly used some super tech to try and burn a hole in the ocean!  At that point, I would have made open contact, just to make it clear that we weren’t hostile and were as much of a victim of aggression as the surface world. Instead, the ruling council decided to turtle up and hide harder, which likely led to Admiral Mayweather deciding they must be a threat. 

Now I didn’t give Volume I a grade in my video, but if I had it would have been a strong C+: better than average, interesting, but with a lot of room for improvement.  Volume II has many of the same problems of Volume I with the plot moving too fast, the characters needing more time and space to be fleshed out, and also it adds new problems as plot holes mount up. That said, the Blue are an interesting take on underwater humanity, and I do like the characters of Aspen and Chance.  However, I have to grade Volume II at a C-.  This could have been done better.  

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You can watch the companion video here: https://youtu.be/Vf9BJk4kj4Y available 3:15pm on 01/24/25