The Man in the High Castle

I've become fascinated with Uchronia or alternate history fiction, not least because I've written three novels in the genre and am working on a fourth, see: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2018/12/roswell-redeemed-is-here.html and: http://hpanwo-bb.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-obscurati-chronicles-sample-second.html. In the Roswell trilogy the point of divergence is very precise, the 8th of July 1947, for The Obscurati Chronicles it is around 1919. For The Man in a High Castle TV series it is the outcome of World War II. In the story's setting the Axis powers won the war and continued their territorial expansion across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans into North America. This production, shown exclusively on Amazon Prime, is based on a book by Philip K Dick and clearly has a high budget. It still only has a B-movie cast and the only actor I recognized was Rufus Sewell, whom regular readers will know starred in Gone to Seed, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2014/01/gone-to-seed.html. Their performances were good, and they portray the suffering and tension of their roles very well. However, despite the intrigue of the scenario, the overall atmosphere of the series is rather kitsch. The story begins in 1962, more than a decade and a half after the end of World War II, but despite this fact, the German and Japanese states still behave as if they are in a wartime situation. They have huge militaries and draconian domestic law enforcement militias. Hitlerian Brownshirts regularly patrol the streets of New York City and in San Francisco the Japanese occupiers have a vast network of spies and huge prisons full of torture chambers and gassing lounges. No satisfactory explanation is provided for this except the presence of resistance guerrillas who are still very active, well organized, well funded and highly motivated despite the fact that the Axis victory is so obviously overwhelming. Not only that, but the societies that have arisen as a result are fairly stable. Carl Benjamin makes this point in his Starship Troopers review, see background links below. In the German territory especially there is a satisfactory infrastructure, a substantial middle class, clean streets and a low crime rate. The Brownshirts seem to have no other purpose than to strut around looking menacing for the hell of it. Technology has advanced more rapidly and is around a decade ahead of our universe. Despite it only being the early sixties there is colour television, sophisticated electronics and a supersonic passenger jet in service similar to Concorde. There is clearly a healthy level of civil rights where officials are accountable, people are allowed to call in sick for work and drinkers feel safe to talk openly in pubs about who they think is the best man to replace Adolf Hitler, who by now is elderly. The endurance of fascism in such a society does not make sense.

Many of the characters are total cliches. Sewell plays an "obergruppenführer" with a classic leather trench-coat, a decorated peaked cap and armbands; and he calmly supervises torture sessions with a stern hatchet face expression. The occupying Germans have such hackneyed "Vee heff vays of maykink you talk!" accents that the series comes across like an unfunny version of 'Allo 'Allo!. In line with that form the chief Japanese secret policeman has greasy black hair; and he wears a dark suit and steel-rimmed round glasses. He feigns a gracious manner, bowing respectfully just before he puts a prisoner to death. These Hollywood tropes sometimes go to even more extremes that are somewhat disturbing. In one scene a character is chatting to a policeman and particles begin falling from the sky which look like snowflakes, but it turns out they are not, and when the character asks the policeman what they are he replies casually that it is just ash from the local execution centre where the state exterminates disabled and mentally ill people before cremating their bodies. He is nonchalantly eating his packed lunch at the time. This refers to a real historical atrocity, Aktion T4; a project in Nazi Germany that ran from 1938 to 1941 in which people in sanatoria who were deemed "incurably sick" were given what the regime called a Gnadentod which basically means "mercy killing". Over three hundred thousand people were murdered, mostly children, on official orders from the governmental "Committee for the Scientific Registering of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses". However this was organized in the strictest of secrecy because the state knew that public opinion would be totally against it. In fact the true scale of the extermination was only revealed in confidential documents discovered after World War II. The policeman in the Amazon series is an inhuman aberration, a monster from the imagination of leftwing propagandists who assume that in a fascist society all people... well, at least white people... magically turn into evil psychopaths. The fact is that in fascist societies the state always presents a humane and benevolent face to the general public while carrying out its dirty deeds behind their backs involving a select clique of corrupt individuals or organizations. I think it was at that scene that I decided I would stop watching the series until I had read the book it is based on. I was generally unimpressed with it; but to be fair, I've only watched the first two episodes. Sometimes TV programmes grow on me, like Porters, see: http://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2019/07/porters-series-2.html. Bad TV series often come from excellent books and vice versa, so we'll soon see if The Man in a High Castle is the rule or exception. Philip K Dick was an extraordinary character and I've interviewed Anthony Peake, a "Dickhead" who has written an entire book about the author and his awareness of the paranormal, see: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2016/12/programme-215-podcast-anthony-peake.html. After I've read Dick's novel I might come back to the Amazon series... Then again, I might a few more episodes now, just in case it gets better. If it does I will let you know.

See here for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/07/downs-syndrome-termination-agenda.html.

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/09/georgia-guidestones-2014.html.

And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2018/11/starship-troopers-sargons-review.html.