In dealing with other people, there are invisible forces which manifest themselves as visible effects. It furthers one to cross the great water. My I-Ching App renders the judgment thus: The hexagram she casts is Inner Truth, Pigs and Fishes - the same hexagram which Tagomi casts after killing the two SD men, but which we only learn about as he is having his heart attack in Chapter 14, and making the crucial decision to spare Frank Frink’s life. In the final scene of the book, in the presence of the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, Juliana Frink asks the oracle itself why it wrote the book. The hexagrams that are cast in the book all predict the future or shape the behaviour of characters, and (if he’s to be believed) were actually cast by Dick in order to determine plot movement and character behaviour. Another character finds himself eerily transported into a surreal vision of San Francisco which may be the one in which Dick was actually writing the book - or at least one in which Japan had lost WWII - through a piece of jewelry crafted by the character who throws the identical hexagram. If that’s not meta enough, there are points in the plot where the I-Ching features as a doorway between worlds - two characters cast paired hexagrams, in different places at the same time, linked by a single changing line.
#Man in the high castle i ching series#
In a nice twist, the television series coming out on Amazon Prime in November 2015 renders The Grasshopper Lies Heavy as a film instead of a book, neatly transporting the parallel mirror effect to the medium in which the story is told. Central to the book is another book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is a novel written with the help of the I-Ching about an alternative to THAT alternative history in which Japan and Germany lost World War II. Dick with the help of the I-Ching about an alternative history in which Japan and Germany won World War II. The Man in the High Castle is a book written by Phillip K. Now, to break down the central meta-fiction we’re dealing with here: And third, he may have made that whole thing up in order to create a mind-bending metafiction. He says he used the book of changes as a creative guide, ceding decision making about many aspects of the narrative to the text of the hexagrams.
Second, it not only features the I-Ching, Dick claims that it was actually in part written by the I-Ching. Dick, who may not have been the greatest crafter of prose in the world, but imagined some of the most enduring science fiction tales in English literature. The Man in the High Castle manages to jam three of my favorite things into a single novel. SPOILER ALERT: If you’ve not read The Man in the High Castle, the following contains plot element spoilers.
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