Abstract
If historical fiction, as E. L. Doctorow suggests, often involves finding ways of witnessing and documenting traumatic events so that the “truth” behind them isn’t lost, sometimes it also involves asking “what if?” Doctorow himself points in this direction when he wonders what might have happened to the “truth” of the Holocaust if Hitler had won the Second World War. One answer to this particular “what-if” question is provided by Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962), which imagines the United States in the aftermath of the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and an Axis victory in the war: the United States becomes a Nazi protectorate like Vichy France, its territory limited to the East Coast and Midwest. The Western states, conquered by Japan in the aftermath of the destruction of its naval powers at Pearl Harbor, belong to the “The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” a plan actually drafted by Japan during the early 1940s and, in Dick’s alternative history, put into place after the war. Germany and Japan are now the world’s superpowers and, during the time of the novel, are engaged in a Cold War with each other. The Man in the High Tower, however, wouldn’t be a Philip K. Dick novel if it didn’t contain futuristic or science fiction elements. And so we discover that the Nazi Party has expanded its colonial empire by using advanced technology to transform the Mediterranean Sea into farmland while simultaneously cleansing the African continent of inhabitants and sending spaceships to colonize Mars.
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Notes
Octavia E. Butler, Lilith’s Brood (New York: Grand Central, 2002), 8.
Octavia E. Butler, Lilith’s Brood (New York: Grand Central, 2002), 8.
Laurent Bouzereau, ed., Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 39.
Isaac Asimov, Robot Visions (1990; rpt., New York: Roc, 1991), 435.
Mary Henderson, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (New York: Bantam, 1997), 153. The quote from Lucas can be found in Bouzereau, Star Wars, 267. Henderson reminds us that “when Obi-Wan realizes that the Death Star’s tractor beam must be neutralized if the Millennium Falcon is to complete its mission in the first Star Wars film, he tells Luke and Han, ‘I don’t think you boys can help. I must go alone.’ When Darth Vader becomes aware of Obi-Wan’s presence on the station, he tells Grand Moff Tarkin: ‘Escape is not his plan. I must face him alone’” (Henderson, Star Wars, 153; see also Bouzereau, Star Wars, 65, 70).
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 66–67, 72.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (1667; 2nd ed., Harlow, England: Longman, 2007), 368–69, 370–71.
John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 1.
On the origins and nature of English Luddism, see Brian J. Bailey, The Luddite Rebellion (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and
J. R. Dinwiddy, From Luddism to the First Reform Bill: Reform in England 1810–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Karel Čapek. R. U R. and the Insect Play, trans. P. Selver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 25.
Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65–107.
Wu Cheng-Tsu, ed. “Chink!”: A Documentary History of Anti-Chinese Prejudice in America (New York: World Publishing, 1972), 117. Indeed, although the original Star Wars trilogy seems, at first, to have an enlightened attitude toward race—one of the marks of the Empire’s illegitimacy is its discrimination against nonhuman species—the Orientalist depiction of the Trade Federation’s Neimoidians in the first film of the second trilogy, The Phantom Menace, draws on the latter-day, yellow peril imagery that was present in 1930s serials like Flash Gordon.
Isaac Asimov, In Memory yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954 (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 650.
Asimov, The Caves of Steel (1954; rpt., New York: Bantam, 1991), 32. Further citations appear in the text.
Asimov, The Naked Sun (1965; rpt., New York: Bantam, 1991), 269.
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© 2015 Cyrus R. K. Patell
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Patell, C.R.K. (2015). Speculative Fiction. In: Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137107770_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137107770_5
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