Man in the High Castle: Book vs TV show (why the book is better)
This book is such a nice piece of scifi writing along with being a good insight into the 1960s along with its depiction of international relations
The Novel
The novel was written in the 1960s, and Philip K Dick was impressed by ancient China and ancient Japan.
The Nazis in the book are a metaphor for modernism. They are a metaphor for the ugliness of modern, scientific values and ideas, while the Japanese are traditional, appreciate Americana culture and consult Taoist values. On the radio they talk about the evils of genocide and the need for the Japanese captured world to find its humanity again.
The Nazis were murderous geniuses, who colonised Venus and Mars, but made Africa's population be zero. In Nazi Germany everything is made of 100s of different types of plastics from the space ships to the runways. In Japan and its co-prosperity sphere, things still use traditional wood, canvas and brickwork.
In his book, the Nazis bring back the Confederacy and get the Southerners to fight wars in the Caribbean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_the_Golden_Circle
The book is good, much better than the TV show. The TV show doesn’t understand the material or the writer it is working with. I didn't really like the show. I saw no point to it other than the aesthetics of seeing what a Nazi America would look like.
The book is good, but not accurate for the history. Alternative histories often don’t understand how real history works.
How Japan is depicted
Japan is depicted so nicely in the TV show as compared to Nazi Germany. Because the book did it the same way.
I know that Japan was genocidal. I study how ideas alter history, focusing on 1914 to 1991, and island nations like Britain or Japan can have a very sophisticated culture while being absolutely barbaric as well, a society that engages in deep oppression outside of it, but aggressively values freedom within the islands.
The book was written in 1962, and back then Japan was seen as more the enemy defeated as instead of another evil stopped.
In modern day Asia, Nazism as an aesthetic is quite popular while Japanese Rising Sun symbols are hated. While in the Western West we don't mind Japanese culture as much, even if it is the weird Weebs.
The TV show didn't think much about the geopolitics of it or the IR of it. I guess they had no Peter Zeihan to tell them about the power of navigable rivers.
Technology in the book
In the book, it is open ended. Nothing changes, except the key characters walk into our reality, but that is at the very end.
In the book it is implied that the Nazis have a much harder time in holding onto the USA. They have a puppet United States in the North and a Confederacy in the South.
Japan has no energy problem and it is implied that Nazi Germany is a big user of nuclear power, however it is in a deep economic crisis because unlike the Japanese, they killed too many people.
Japan's real problem is South America like Brazil where they had to burn down the entire Amazon rainforest in order to win the war there.
They for example drained the Med Ocean for farmland. They have a lot of neutral nations like Sweden. Nazi Germany also has a power struggle inside its borders. Hitler is in the madhouse. Martin Bormann has just died. Four big Nazis are fighting for power. In that society people are aware that mad men are leading society.
Funnily enough in the book, the Nazis are more like in Wolfenstein minus the ancient magic part.
Why I didn’t like the TV show
I didn't like the TV show. They reexplained factors that were not realistic.
In the book there is no underground resistance of plucky Americans. In the book it is members of the Nazi system and members of the Japanese system who start opposing the state and undermining it. In the book it is implied that some Nazi officials are Jewish who underwent surgery, and slowly but surely are replacing the Hitler era Nazi officials.
Japan is in a sort of Cold War, but officially they are still allies and the Nazis are building landing pads and rocket pads in California. There is also the theme of American culture becoming popular in Japan such as baseball. For example the Grasshopper Lies Heavy book is not banned in Japan and the population finds it fascinating.
The Central States of America are much larger with Texas included.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_Plausible_World_Map.png
The politics of the actual states in the book were much more interesting and depicted much more realistically.