Speculative Fiction

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.