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  • The Man in the High Castle

  • By: Philip K. Dick
  • Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
  • Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars (1,328 ratings)
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The Man in the High Castle

By: Philip K. Dick
Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
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Summary

Now an Amazon Original series

Winner of the Hugo Award

"The single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick's career." --New York Times

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war - and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.

This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it, Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.

©1962 Philip K. Dick, © renewed 1990 by Laura Coelho, Christopher Dick, and Isa Hackett. (P)2014 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

What listeners say about The Man in the High Castle

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    1 out of 5 stars

Like listening to brightly coloured paint dry.

So, we have all seen the thrilling trailers for the Prime Series and we want to get a jump on it and listen to the book.Great marketing from Amazon as we will watch the series and get the book. Win win for them.

My advice is don't bother with the book. I've not seen the series but it can't be worse than the book. The trailers alone seem more interesting.

Other than the alternate history slant there is nothing else to this book, the characters are dull and undeveloped and there is barely a story line until the last 2 hours. The author just seems to be using the characters as a vehicle to describe his alternate world and it just makes the whole experience confusing and dull.

The best way I can describe it is like watching two grand-masters play chess. You are watching the chess pieces going about the board with no emotional attachment to them or no idea what on earth their significance is to the over all match. Until BAM! A grand master says 'Check' and you snap out of your lethargy and realise something has happened and you're wondering what it was and what it's significance is. You're then left watching the chase as the grand master goes to finish the match, but you still don't care about the pieces and you're still none the wise as to what the hell is going on.

The narration wasn't the best either, can't put my finger on it but for me it wasn't working.

All in all, the only reason the majority of us is reading this book is because of the series. Not because it is well written and interesting.

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46 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

If you've seen the Amazon version, read this also

'The Man In The High Castle' is probably Philip K. Dick's second best-known novel (after 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?', which inspired Blade Runner), and the inspiration of a lusciously-produced Amazon series, just about to go into its second season.

As with much of Dick's work, the premise is better than the execution: the Axis has won WWII and has divided up the United States, the Japanese occupying everything west of the Rockies, the Nazis the East Coast and most of the Midwest, with a notionally neutral buffer zone in between.

The novel is very different to the TV series, which takes the book as inspiration rather than following the rambling, ultimately unsatisfying plot and deals much better with character than does the book.

This audiobook, then, acts as an interesting companion volume to the TV series, or a quirky solo 'read'. The focus of the book is much less on the characters, and much more on the Chinese philosophy which links them all (Taoism), which adds dimension to what might otherwise be a rich but essentially political drama. As with every Dick novel, it loses energy, cohesion and sense as it moves towards anti-climax, so don't expect a big payoff.

Narration is decent, though female characters all sound alike and rather breathy and insubstantial (having said that, female characters rarely figure greatly in Dick's novels, so there is nothing much lost).

Not a bad buy, and if you've seen the Amazon series, definitely worth it. If you haven't seen the Amazon series, get yourself a Firestick now!!!

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28 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

THE most tedious book I've read

Despite a very promising idea, this was dry, dull and totally lacked any kind of interesting story. TV adaptations nearly always disappoint. I think it is impossible for the TV show to be worse than this. I shall certainly not be delving into any other of this guy's work.

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22 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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Couldn't get into it.

Having been recommended this by a friend who's then girlfriend was setting off to Canada to film the Amazon series I wanted to give this book a go. What I found was a confusingly difficult world to get into. I found the characters hard to follow and remember and struggled every time I went back into this story. I so wanted to like this but ultimately did not.

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21 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Could have been so much better.

The setting of the 'story' is very interesting and certainly what attracted me. However nothing happens in this book. Nothing. You think it is building to something then that part of the plot just finishes. It happens over and over again and the ending is the most disappointing thing about the book.

Also the narrator does some very poor voice work. The female character and the oriental characters are particularly bad.

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15 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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  • RT
  • 31-12-15

Not all women are stupid

Enjoying the story but the narrator reads all female characters like they're ditzes, even though they're not written that way. It's irritating and jars with the intelligent ideas the female characters often express.

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14 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Starts well but disappointing ending

The story had so much promise, how could it not with such a rich imaginative topic.

However, it ends so abruptly so as to ruin the run up to it, making all that happened before a non-event. Have I missed something?

The narrator does a good job of the voices but the decision to portray Julianna as a simpering weak voice fool made listening to her role difficult and not caring what happens to her.

Shame it missed the mark sadly, for me.

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12 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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Wasted Time

Do you ever read a book which rambles but then comes together in the last few chapters? Well this one just rambles.
I've read a few Dick books and enjoyed them, but felt that this one was just a wast of my time.

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8 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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Narrator awful

I made the mistake of purchasing this without sampling first, hoping to get through the original story before watching the Amazon TV dramatization. I've only managed to get about an hour in as I cannot stand the narrator. His attempt at voices is laughable, and most of them come out sounding like you little brother mocking someone. It's a real shame as the story has so far been intriguing, but I think I'm going to have to stick to the TV version.

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7 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

alternative history<br />

Interesting idea with some very compelling intrigue but felt it didn't quite get there.

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5 people found this helpful