Most popular novels mirror society and social issues, but in the case of science fiction the mirroring is often indirect, or even distorting. The Man in the High Castle is a good example to study this mirroring because it is, in effect, a double mirror. Technically, it is an alternate-history novel in which the Axis powers won World War II.

Franklin Roosevelt is assassinated in 1932, so that America never recovers from the Depression, and an isolationist administration gives the Axis time to invent the atomic bomb and win the war. In addition to this violent shift in political leadership, Hermann Goerring convinces Hitler that the Luftwaffe should bomb British radar stations instead of cities so that Germany wins the Battle of Britain. Actually, this was in fact what Goerring wanted to do, and in Dick's novel it happens, a reminder that history is mutable, that things...