The Man in the High Castle · Alternate history
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy
Hawthorne Abendsen
A banned novel, inside a novel about a world the Axis won, in which the Allies won instead — though not the way they won in ours.
The title is from Ecclesiastes — the grasshopper shall be a burden — which is already a joke about what a book of this kind is asked to carry.
Dick’s outer novel is an Axis victory. Inside it, Abendsen’s book is an Allied victory. Readers of The Man in the High Castle keep wanting the inner book to be our history, a window back to the real. It is not. In Abendsen’s version Roosevelt lives, Rex Tugwell succeeds him, Pearl Harbor is evacuated, and the world that follows is still not this one. The Allies win a different war. The point is not consolation. The point is that history does not have a true copy filed somewhere; it has drafts.
Then Dick does the thing only he would do. Juliana finds Abendsen and asks the oracle why it wrote the book. The hexagram is Inner Truth. The banned novel is, in some sense that is not empirical, more accurate than the world the characters are standing in. A fictional book is used to accuse reality of being the fiction.
The High Castle itself is a rumour, like the book. Abendsen has moved out.
On the readability rating. Characters summarise plots, quote short stretches, argue about outcomes. We are never given a chapter of Abendsen. The inner novel exists as conversation, which is how most dangerous books actually travel.
In-world history
Written by Hawthorne Abendsen, rumoured to live in a fortified house in the Rockies — the High Castle of the title. The book is illegal in the Nazi-controlled United States and merely disapproved of in the Japanese Pacific States, where it is widely read. Abendsen, when found, is living in an ordinary suburban house. He says the I Ching wrote the book.
Why it matters
The inner book is not a wish-fulfilment. It is a third history, close enough to ours to be mistaken for it and different enough to prove that "what really happened" is not a unique object. Dick lets the I Ching claim co-authorship.
Appearances
- The Man in the High Castle (1962) — Philip K. Dick Read, discussed, banned, and finally explained by its own author
Connected volumes
- Related to The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism · Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Related to The History of the Siege of Lisbon · The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Catalogue record
- Category
- Alternate history
- World
- The Man in the High Castle
- Imagined by
- Philip K. Dick
- First appearance
- The Man in the High Castle, 1962
- Readability
- Described
Sources
- Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (Putnam, 1962). The inner novel is described throughout; Abendsen discusses its composition in the final chapter.
- Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (Harmony, 1989), on Dick's use of the I Ching as both method and subject.
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-01