Who Really Wrote Philip K. Dick’s Best Novel?
A 3,000-Year-Old Algorithm, ‘The Man in the High Castle,’ and the Knobby Question That Won’t Go Away
While Eddie Haskell was busy putting the shine on Mrs. Cleaver, Philip K. Dick was trying to scuff the shine off suburban America. All through the 1950s, Dick scribbled both short stories and long. While he penned plenty of sci-fi during the period, he craved recognition as a mainstream literary novelist and wrote several novels set in the San Francisco Bay Area, full of unhappy people leading discontented lives.
I read one of these about a decade ago. I don’t recall thinking it was any good; others apparently agreed. Dick’s literary agent couldn’t get anywhere with the stories and returned all of his sad, unsold manuscripts in 1963 in one big, pitiful parcel. While one of these was eventually published during Dick’s lifetime—Confessions of a Crap Artist—his disappointment as a literary novelist dogged him the rest of his days.
Which is a bit odd.
Amazingly, the same year his fragile hopes dropped with the thud of that package on his doorstep, Dick won sci-fi’s highest accolade, the Hugo, for his alternative history, The Man in the High Castle, published the prior year. After a decade of feverish writing and precious little fame—he’d actually decided to quit writing—he finally attracted the attention he desired, just not in the genre he wanted.
Fate is fickle, something any character in The Man in the High Castle could tell you.
Questionable Authenticity
In Dick’s telling, the Allies lose World War II and the Axis powers occupy America in an uneasy alliance showing signs of strain. Japan controls the Pacific States with a measured hand, while Germany takes everything from the Rockies to the Atlantic, ruling with predictable brutality. The neutral Rocky Mountain States provide a buffer between the two competing world powers.
The novel follows several characters through this perilous landscape as their paths intersect and sometimes collide, particularly along three narrative strands.
The first is geopolitical. The Nazi chancellor has died and various factions jockey for control in Berlin. One group, led by Goebbels, is pushing for Operation Dandelion—an unprovoked nuclear strike against Japan. Rudolf Wegener, a German intelligence officer, learns of the plan and resolves to warn the Japanese. He assumes the identity of a Swedish businessman named Baynes and rockets to San Francisco, where the trade minister Nobusuke Tagomi has arranged a meeting with a retired Japanese general.
Before Baynes’s arrival, Tagomi receives a coded cable from Tokyo about his visitor: “Skim milk in his diet.” It’s an allusive cipher pointing to a song lyric: “Things are seldom what they seem/Skim milk masquerades as cream.” What could it mean? Tagomi consults the I Ching, the ancient book of Chinese divination, and confirms his suspicion: Baynes is a spy. But he can’t determine what kind or for whom.
After several setbacks and delays, the meeting finally occurs. Baynes explains the plan but also reveals another quandary: the only faction in Berlin opposing the strike is the SS, the most vicious arm of the Nazi state. To stop the annihilation of millions, the Japanese would have to ally themselves with the architects of the Holocaust. “That man should have to act in such moral ambiguity,” Tagomi reflects. “There is no Way in this; all is muddled.”
Bad news for Tagomi; it gets more muddled from there. Baynes’s mission is less covert than required. The German government has dispatched assassins. When they burst through the door, the mild Tagomi grabs an antique Colt .44 he keeps on his desk and kills them both, an act that saves Baynes but shatters Tagomi’s sense of himself.
Afterward, Baynes examines the bodies. They’re not German nationals but American citizens from San José, carrying Japanese-made pistols. Nothing connects them to Berlin. And Tagomi’s Colt .44—presumably a “perfectly preserved” Civil War relic—is the same model that has already turned up as counterfeit.
As for the second strand, Frank Frink is a self-doubting Jew trying to hide his ancestry. He loses his factory job manufacturing counterfeit American antiques (like Tagomi’s pistol) for Japanese collectors. Sick of the whole enterprise, he and his friend Ed McCarthy strike out on their own, making handcrafted, original, contemporary jewelry.
McCarthy brings the work to Robert Childan, an antiques dealer catering to wealthy Japanese collectors, who has just discovered that much of his own inventory is bogus. Childan is skeptical. He’s in the business of selling the past, not the future; and besides, Frink and McCarthy’s jewelry lacks a certain refinement. He takes some pieces on consignment—no risk to him—and then shows a pin from the collection to Paul and Betty Kasoura, a young Japanese couple he hopes to impress.
Paul studies the pin and identifies what he calls wu, something no counterfeit can possess: a mysterious quality of spiritual presence. “To have no historicity, and also no artistic, esthetic worth, and yet to partake of some ethereal value—that is a marvel,” he says.
The third strand of the narrative belongs to Frank’s ex-wife, Juliana Frink, living in the neutral Rocky Mountain States. She meets an Italian truck driver named Joe Cinnadella, and the pair bonds over an outlawed novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, written by a reclusive author named Hawthorne Abendsen, whom everyone calls the man in the high castle. The book, a work of alternative history, imagines a world where the Allies won the war.
Juliana and Joe travel to find its author. But like many of the collectors’ items Childan sells in his shop, Joe is counterfeit. He’s Swiss, not Italian, and he’s carrying a tiny radio transmitter to stay in contact with Berlin. He’s been sent to assassinate Abendsen and picked Juliana as his unwitting cover. When she realizes what’s happening, Juliana wants no part of the plan; instead, she finds a way to escape and visit Abendsen alone.
What’s Real? Who Can Tell?
The first two strands converge in Tagomi. After the shooting, he’s psychologically wrecked. A harmless bureaucrat who has committed violence he can’t process, he wanders into Childan’s shop and ends up buying a piece of Frink’s jewelry. Sitting on a park bench, he meditates on the piece. Its mysterious authenticity—the only genuine thing in his world at that moment—provides him a form of solace and surprise about the nature of the world.
Early in the novel, Frank’s former boss Wyndam-Matson—the man running the factory making counterfeit collectibles—pulls out two cigarette lighters to impress his girlfriend. One supposedly filled Franklin Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated (that’s part of the reason the Allies lost the war). The other lighter? Not so much. Can she sense any difference, whether one possesses a feel of historicity the other lacks? She can’t. Who could?
“It’s all a big racket; they’re playing it on themselves,” he tells her. “A gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.” He points to his head. “In the mind, not the gun.” Contrast that to Frink’s jewelry. Paul Kasoura holds Frink’s unelegant piece and finds wu, something self-evidently, transcendently real in it. And Tagomi, meditating on Frink’s jewelry, finds a mysterious source of perspective. Fakes can’t do that.
The Books Within the Book
Juliana’s strand arrives somewhere else entirely. She finally reaches Abendsen’s house and opens the novel’s final question. Two books run through the novel. We’ve already met both, the I Ching and The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
Dick collapses them into each other. When Juliana finally reaches Abendsen’s house, she presses him about how The Grasshopper was written. Just as Tagomi used the I Ching to help him navigate the situation with Baynes, Abendsen used it to write his novel. Abendsen’s wife, Caroline, explains how: “One by one Hawth made the choices. Thousands of them. By means of the lines. Historic period. Subject. Characters. Plot. It took years.”
Juliana pushes: “I wonder why the oracle would write a novel. Did you ever think of asking it that?”
Neither Hawthorne nor Caroline says anything at first, but then Abendsen responds. “If I ask it why it wrote Grasshopper, I’ll wind up turning my share over to it,” he says. “The question implies I did nothing but the typing, and that’s neither true nor decent.”
I find the line as provocative as it is prescient. Abendsen is a novelist defending his authorship against the system he used to write. He prompted it, he shaped the results, he spent years doing so, and yet the question nettles: If the I Ching provided the direction, who really wrote the book? In the strange economy of the novel, the issue gets even murkier when Juliana discovers (or at least she thinks) that the I Ching says Abendsen’s novel is true and the world the characters seem to inhabit is the forgery.
Dick’s ‘Lasting Contribution’
People praised The Man in the High Castle from day one. “It’s all here—extrapolation, suspense, action, art, philosophy, plot, [and] character,” raved Avram Davidson, reviewing the novel for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Dick’s 1963 Hugo cemented his reputation in the genre, and the book’s reputation has only soared since. In her introduction to the Folio Society edition of the book, Ursula K. Le Guin called it “the first big, lasting contribution science fiction made to American literature.”
Dick wrote more than 40 novels and well over 100 short stories, and while none other contains this mix of alternative history and political machinations, The Man in the High Castle obsesses over themes he continued to circle the rest of his career: how can anyone be certain what is real, and by what test could they tell?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968, the basis of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner) asks whether synthetic humans can truly feel. Ubik (1969) drops its characters into a world where existence itself proves questionable. Then, in A Scanner Darkly (1977), the divide between law enforcement and lawbreaker slips, until the protagonist can no longer distinguish the observer from the observed.
That preoccupation with shaky realities and unstable selves has become one of the standard ways we talk about our own world. In a culture dripping with alternative facts, conspiracy theories, scams, and worse, it’s not surprising that Reason editor Nick Gillespie says “we’re all living in one or more of [Dick’s] stories.” Public life, he says, feels like “Dick novels all the way down.”
Dick died in 1982, just before the release of Blade Runner. In 2007, he became the first sci-fi writer included in the Library of America. Films based on his work—Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau—have become a distinct subgenre of Hollywood science fiction, and it keeps going; in 2015, Amazon adapted The Man in the High Castle into an acclaimed streaming series.
But there’s another reason the novel might feel particularly relevant now, and it has to do with the question Abendsen ducked: Dick didn’t just write about the I Ching; he used it himself.
The Oracle and the Algorithm
“I wrote The Man in the High Castle with the I Ching,” he told one interviewer. “Every time my people would cast a hexagram, I actually cast it for them and let them proceed on the basis of the advice given.” The I Ching’s answer shaped the story. Juliana visited Abendsen because, when Dick used the I Ching, that’s what it said she should do.
At the time, Dick felt his career was over and he was unhappily helping out in his wife’s jewelry business (everything is fodder for the writer). He started working on the novel to avoid the drudgery. “I had no pre-conception of how the book would develop,” he said in another interview, “and I used the I Ching to plot the book.”
Dick was, like Abendsen, prompting an external system and curating the results. It’s hard to miss the parallel to a writer working with a large language model, like Claude or ChatGPT. You prompt the system; it generates a response; you massage the result. But then who’s the author, Abendsen/Dick or the I Ching?1
He might have hated it, but it’s a good thing Dick’s literary novels failed. If he’d gotten what he wanted—respectability, mainstream success, realistic fiction about miserable Bay Area couples—we wouldn’t have The Man in the High Castle, not to mention so many subsequent books that possess the potential to help us puzzle through our present anxieties about what’s real, what’s fake, and how to weigh the difference.
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Dick expressed frustration that the I Ching gave him a sketchy ending for The Man in the High Castle and said he never used it again. “I don’t use the I Ching any more, because the I Ching told me more lies than anybody I’ve ever known,” he said. “The I Ching has a personality that is very devious and very treacherous: it feeds you just what you want to hear.” I’ve put LLMs to a hundred helpful uses, but that sounds familiar, no?
Dick even anticipated something like the modern chatbot a couple years after The Man in the High Castle. In The Penultimate Truth (1964) the speechwriter Joseph Adams employs his “rhetorizer” to transform rough text prompts into elegant prose; except, it doesn’t work well and ultimately proves more problematic than that. I’m going off what others have said; I haven’t read it yet. But one line should give us all pause. When Joe’s wife tells him to write his speech without the rhetorizer, he thinks: “I don’t think I could do it, in my own words, without this machine; I’m hooked on it, now.”